The White Sox went 2-4 in their six-game road trip to Minneapolis and New York, with three of those losses of the walk-off variety. The good thing getting walked off three times is that your team had a realistic shot at winning those games. The bad thing about getting walked off three times is getting walked off three times.
In all three of those games, Tony La Russa refused to open the ninth inning of a tie game on the road with his closer on the mound. In fact, he moved increasingly further away from doing so over the course of the six games, even though he wasn’t rewarded for his decision the first two times.
May 18: La Russa sticks with Aaron Bummer even though Bummer lost a two-run lead in the eighth inning. He gives up a leadoff single, after which Liam Hendriks enters and can only record two of the three outs needed to get to extra innings.
May 21: Although Hendriks is warm, La Russa sticks with Evan Marshall, whose eighth inning ended with a screaming liner that turned into a lucky double play. Marshall gives up three straight singles to lose the game.
May 23: Bummer works around a leadoff single in the eighth with the help of Yasmani Grandal, who cuts down an attempt to steal third. After throwing 17 pitches in the bottom of the eighth, he faces four batters, or three batters if you don’t count the intentional walk. He fell behind all of them, and only retired one of them, leaving the bases loaded with one out for Hendriks, who walks Aaron Judge on five pitches to end the game.
It’d be one thing if Hendriks had dealt with a regular workload, but he hadn’t pitched since Wednesday, or a day after the first tie situation described above. He’d faced a total of seven batters over the previous nine days. He had the time and space to stretch out if La Russa wanted to.
There’s an open question as to whether Hendriks would have been any more successful, because he hasn’t exactly been lights-out this year. I have a recurring genre of tweet where I note the date next to my continued ambivalence about Hendriks’ abilities.
The label of “any good” is relative, of course. Even in a lesser form he’d be qualified to pitch in crucial situations for most teams, because “28 strikeouts to three walks over 18 innings” pretty much guarantees adequacy.
But closing is essentially a pass/fail job, especially when said closer is the centerpiece of an entire offseason, and there happen to be a couple of odd developments clouding the situation to a surprising extent.
SITUATIONS
There’s the matter that the standard measuring stick for closers — the quintessential three-out, ninth-inning save situation — hasn’t really applied to Hendriks, even though we’re approaching the end of the second month of his stay. Last year, it only took a week before Alex Colomé encountered a cluster of three ninth-inning saves over the course of five days. Likewise, Colomé pitched three consecutive ninth innings from April 14-16 in 2019, all scoreless.
We’re 45 games into the season, and Hendriks has had precious few normal saves for the White Sox. Of his nine saves, only three of them have been the ninth inning of a game with a lead of three runs or fewer, with only two such opportunities in the month of May. He’s also saved three doubleheader games in the seventh inning, which always feels a little like cheating, and three games where he entered in the eighth and pitched the ninth.
Even if you count his two blown saves where he gave up homers in the ninth inning, that’s still not a whole lot of typical closer action where fans can determine their comfort level in whether Hendriks has got this.
AESTHETICS
If Hendriks is struggling, it’s not because he’s suddenly aging like a bottle of Perth Pink (“This is not a wine for drinking, this is a wine for laying down and avoiding”). Hendriks racked up a staggering 161 strikeouts against 24 walks over 110 innings during his last two seasons in Oakland. Extrapolate his current totals over the course of the same workload, and you’d get 171 strikeouts and 18 walks. That part of his game seemingly hasn’t slipped.
But there seems to be a difference in how it’s playing in actual game situations. The most glaring example is the home run total (four, after just one last year). There’s also the issue where Hendriks has struggled to get a strikeout when he’s needed one:
- 2020: 24 appearances, two with zero strikeouts
- 2021: 19 appearances, five with zero strikeouts
It might be a little unfair to give Hendriks’ single-batter appearance on Sunday the same weight as a full inning elsewhere, but he had already doubled his previous total of K-less games, so I don’t think it’s disingenuous to add the latest game, even if it took a different shape.
Whether it’s four or five, it’s still weird, because the typical markers of struggles aren’t evident. His fastball velocity is actually up a little bit, it has the exact same swing-and-miss percentage (30.1 percent), and Statcast loves just about everything he’s doing.
If you’re looking for signs of fastball slippage, you can find it a few more obscure columns:
- Putaway pitch percentage: 30.9% in 2020; 17.7% in 2021
- Extension: 7.0 feet in 2020; 6.7 feet in 2021
They’re not columns I would look at if Hendriks weren’t scuffling a little, or if Hendriks hadn’t mentioned extension himself, so I’m not entirely comfortable identifying those factors and closing the case.
But if I had to guess on this limited sample of evidence, it seems like Hendriks’ fastball is merely an excellent pitch, as opposed to baseball’s most devastating offering. Either that, or hitters are a little bit more attuned to it at the moment that he’s throwing it more than ever, so the results per pitch are diminishing. And it’s probably not great that he’s going several days between appearances at the time he’s trying to figure it all out.
There’s some evidence for this, in that Hendriks’ easiest inning of the season was his nine-pitch, two strikeout save against Minnesota where breaking balls outnumbered fastballs. He’d also pitched unsuccessfully the day before, so he had some knowledge of what hadn’t worked.
SO, HOW CAN WE KNOW FASTER?
LamarJohnson noted in his post on Shop Talk Sunday night that Hendriks’ usage is not wildly outside what the other top teams are doing with their closers. And while Hendriks only has nine saves, he leads the American League with 16 games finished.
I’m guessing the lack of standard save situations is due in large part to a random distribution of scores gone awry, but it’s also possible that the White Sox offense’s imbalance against righties and lefties might generate a lot of big leads and narrow deficits, especially if other relievers are already leaking narrow leads earlier in the game.
If I were Tony La Russa — and I don’t wish that, not for a second — I might not wait for that cluster of normal save situations to arrive, because it’s a great way to make the highest-paid offseason addition completely irrelevant. That doesn’t mean to call on Hendriks in the eighth inning with the White Sox up five, but I’d probably use him more in tie games, especially ninth innings on the road. Sure, you’d ideally want his strikeout stuff fresh for a 10th inning with a runner on second, but the three walk-offs show that the 10th inning is purely theoretical until it actually arrives. The White Sox are 1-4 in games tied at seven innings, and also in games tied after eight.
When Hendriks isn’t used in games he could actually sway because they’re not perfectly tailored for his job description, his impact remains more on the theoretical side as well. The whole reason the White Sox signed him is because he wasn’t a typical closer. The lack of typical situations shouldn’t be what sidelines him.
(Photo by Quinn Harris / USA TODAY Sports)
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