4 Things I Learned From Watching the White Sox and Royals
This is the time of year when I avoid my beloved Yankees, shun the Indians, eschew the Cubs (though this week’s Cubs-Brewers series was must watch), ignore the Red Sox, and avert my gaze from the Astros. Instead, this is the time of year when I search out games between the MLB basement-dwellers like the Orioles, Reds, Padres, White Sox and Royals. The typical mlb.tv rankings are flipped because of the impending inundation of wall to wall coverage of the playoff teams.
This is the time for soaking in half-empty stadiums, scouting for next year’s fantasy draft, and getting one last look at a bunch of managers that are about to get fired. It is in this spirit that I watched entirely too much of last night’s White Sox-Royals game in Kansas City. Here are four quick observations from that game:
Daniel Palka!
Daniel Palka is about as close as you can get to a generic major leaguer. He’s a corner outfielder on a middling and entirely uninteresting (since Michael Kopech got hurt and Eloy Jimenez was kept in AAA) Chicago team. Palka is a 26-year-old rookie…. with 22 home runs! Where did that come from!? I know we’re in an age of multiple 30 home run hitting shortstops but if you gave me 21 guesses of how many homers Palka has hit this season, I wouldn’t get it right.
I don’t know if Palka is part of the next great White Sox team or if he’s a flash in the pan but 22 homers as a rookie are a pleasant surprise. The .238 average and .288 OBP aren’t exactly lighting the world on fire, but I think this is a name we all need to know.
Hawk Harrelson has destroyed an entire generation of announcers
I normally avoid the White Sox broadcast like the plague so that I don’t have to sit through the stylings of the (somehow) revered Hawk Harrelson. Harrleson is just awful, as we’ve written about before, but I figured that since he’s retiring at season’s end, I should at least give him a listen before he goes. Huge mistake.
Hawk wasn’t even in the booth! Apparently, a la Vin Scully, Hawk doesn’t travel for road games anymore, but that doesn’t mean that his influence stays in the Windy City. The White Sox’s other announcers, who I won’t bother to look up, seemed to be going out of their way to imitate Hawk. They were homers, sure. I typically don’t mind that part, but to an aggravating extent, referred to players in such a chummy way that it bordered on parody. For some reason, these guys spent like a half inning making fun of the Orioles for being terrible. Where do the announcers of the 57-89 Chicago White Sox get off making fun of any other team for being bad?
It’s sad and terrible that White Sox fans have been fooled into thinking that Hawk was anything but completely unwatchable for these last few decades. It’s even worse that Hawk has poisoned an entire future generation of new announcers who will continue to verbally abuse innocent baseball fans. Looks like next year I’ll still be watching the other broadcast of Sox games.
Whit Merrifield has 34 steals
He’s only been caught 8 times. Nine of his 34 have come against the White Sox, which sort of seems like cheating. Anyway, interesting note. He’s still fast.
Alex Gordon is hitting .239
The White Sox announcers made it seem like Gordon was hitting like .215 for most of the season, then changed his approach and is now up to around .240. That, it turns out, is entirely untrue.
After starting slow, Gordon was hitting .250 at the end of April, got his average above .300 after a 4-5 day in early May, and stayed right around .280 for the first half of that month. In the 100 games since then, the average has floated its way, like a feather on the wind, down, down, down, down to it’s current .239. He’s spent most of the last 3 months in the .240s and has definitely not been raising his average thanks to some mystery adjustment.
Two takeaways here. First, the White Sox announcers continue to prove again and again that they are horrendous. Second, re-signing Gordon for sentimental reasons was just not a good move for the Royals. He’s got 2 WAR this season, which isn’t spectacular, but it’s still 1.9 more wins than he put up last season.
-Max Frankel
