Tony La Russa was not on the hill. He does not throw pitches. He does not play defense.
But the White Sox manager got the blame because his team looked like an ugly loss on Wednesday to end their series with the Seattle Mariners.
The White Sox allowed seven runs in a nightmare bottom of the sixth innings, a 4-1 lead that jumped to an 8-4 deficit that held on as the final score, leading the South Siders to a 3-pointer. -4 record on their season opening road. travel.
“I did a really bad job managing the innings,” La Russa said. “It really hurt our chances of winning.”
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The innings began with starting pitcher Dallas Keuchel issuing a lead wall, and it quickly jumped into a sticky jam when a pop-up between Nick Madrigal and Adam Eaton fell into the right field, and Eaton committed a throw error when she returned to the interior Danny misses. Mendick on second base. That put two runners in the standings and ended Keuchel’s day.
But it was Matt Foster who played the unfortunate lead role when things unraveled from there. The reliever faces eight victims and gives up five of their hits and walks another one. Five of the Mariners’ seven runs in the frame are on Foster’s page, just three days after he was the coach of Jared Walsh who beat the White Sox Sunday night.
While the Mariners continued to reach the base, the White Sox bullpen remained silent, and La Russa’s decision to do so led the captain to call his job “bad” after the game.
““That’s the clearest example of why I’m upset about myself,” La Russa said. He faced too many victims. It’s bad management. … pushed him too far. Stupid, bad, no excuse.
“We were really set up to go up the last four innings of the game, we covered all the innings. I did not do what I had to do, and we paid the price with all the extra runs.
“I do not enjoy saying it, but enjoy it less if I do not take responsibility.”
The story of the game was told in the disastrous framework for the White Sox. But the same things that bothered them during the first week of the campaign were all present on Wednesday.
Keuchel only got 15 outs. No White Sox starter got more than 16 in a single outing, and Lucas Giolito scored 5.1 overs in each of his two starts. Keuchel has been through twice just nine innings.
Although La Russa fans assured that the team’s defensive game was nothing to worry about, it was impossible to ignore the misplays as they piled up. The White Sox made seven mistakes during the season, not to mention other moments that were not discussed as E-someone in the scorecard, but still contributed to the negative field aesthetic. Eaton’s throwing error was accompanied earlier in Wednesday’s game by the interference of a catcher on Yasmani Grandal.
Situations, or a lack thereof, posed great threats to the White Sox. Not every game was the 0-for-11 with runners in the points standings they threw up in Anaheim on Sunday. They scored 12 runs in the second game of that series, then 16 over the first two in Seattle. But they stranded nine runners Wednesday, and could not quite make money on the dozens of hikes issued by Mariners throwers. After the sixth crash, the White Sox loaded the base with no one, only for Zack Collins to jump out and Luis Robert to end a double play.
And then there’s the bullpen. Foster has been in the eye of the storm a few times now, but Aaron Bummer, Evan Marshall, Codi Heuer and Liam Hendriks – the popular backs of the South Side Auxiliary – have had their own battle in a week of action. Bummer’s dream of going 90-0 with a late lead is officially dead. The White Sox have beaten three times already.
The White Sox return to the South Side on Thursday for the home game against the Kansas City Royals. And while a 3-4 trip is not the worst thing that could have happened, fans were not at all happy with the start of a season with the expectations of the World Series.
La Russa promised that the bad feelings from Wednesday will not be carried over to Thursday and beyond.
“You do not want to waste tomorrow because you can not leave today,” he said. “You learn. Sometimes you learn more from issues than you do from the things that work.
” Part of what you do is accept responsibility. This is what I do. But I’m not going to take it over until tomorrow. The only thing worse than costing a club a chance to win once is to do it twice. “
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