Instead the White Sox were annihilated 10-3 by the team closest to them in the AL Central standings on a stream of defensive miscues, while making the tomato can lefty they flipped to the Twins last season look like a major leaguer and letting one of the worst major league regulars in baseball go ballistic for good measure.

Sometime in the eighth inning, Hawk Harrelson let out a long snort, or blew a raspberry or just made the ultimate sonic representation of disgust, right into his microphone. It was appropriate, since it came right after Justin Morneau hit a bases clearing double, which had come right after garbage-time reliever Deunte Heath walked a run in, which came right after Heath slowplayed a sacrifice bunt into a hit, which came a little after a ball dropped right over the head of a panicked and mournful Alexei Ramirez and at the feet of loping Alejandro De Aza to lead off the inning.

Before that, there was Aaron Hicks, owner of a .137/.239/.216 slash line coming in, homering twice off Hector Santiago and saving the hardest ball Adam Dunn has hit this month from leaving the yard. Aaron Hicks is better than Adam Dunn now. It used to be close.

But I wouldn’t want to focus any blame on Hector Santiago for more than a passing moment. The man was one out away from a quality start, after all, and taught the Minnesota people about the wonder of pitchers who get strikeouts. If nothing else, Santiago is a true starter now, since cleaning up the mess of  his bases loaded, nobody out-jam in the third inning was a job for a fireman. Surely there’s a roster spot available for Tom Gordon.

Instead, after inducing a harmless flyout not deep enough to score a run, a challenging potential double play ball was hit to the right man–Alexei Ramirez. Instead, he booted it and the inning exploded on the strength of a two-run Trevor Plouffe double.

10 runs is quite the collaboration of pitching and defense breakdowns, but it’s not like it was an impossible task. The White Sox were handed Pedro Hernandez as an opposing starter, who was one half of last year’s trade package for Francisco Liriano  that was lovingly described as “air.” Yet fresh off a demolition at the hands of Boston in his previous start and facing the decent cadre of lefty-mashers the Sox were able to cobble together, Hernandez weathered a rough first inning, delivered the Twins into the sixth with a three-run lead and didn’t allow Dayan Viciedo nor Casper Wells to safely reach base. 

RV on sox miscues:”Eventually you get to that point where you don’t pay attention to what’s going on, we’ll find somebody else to do it.”

— Mark Gonzales (@MDGonzales) May 14, 2013

Robin’s enthusiasm–or fierce irritation–is heartwarming for a fan base that feels wrong by this team’s incompetence, but it’s likely that his tolerance for this play hasn’t been the issue.

Team Record: 15-21

Box Score

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Or maybe I wouldn’t be. Maybe I’d be concerned.

Dylan Axelrod has the worst xFIP of any qualified starter in baseball. To get it out of the way, xFIP is basically an ERA estimation tool based on a pitchers’ strikeouts, walks and flyball rate. There’s the rub that you have to be good enough to remain a qualified starter to remain on the qualified starter list. And there’s also the rub that xFIP is just one metric and look no farther than the magic of Jesse Crain for an example of someone rendering xFIP meaningless over a long stretch of time.

But the worst is notable. Worst requires some extreme conditions. xFIP is a metric that typically yields pretty conservative results and Axelrod’s 5.43 is not very conservative. That’s projecting him to be a very below-average pitcher. It’s worse than old friend, fellow strikeout abstainer and recent emblem of the failure of the Toronto Blue Jays Mark Buehrle’s xFIP. And Mark is not doing so well.

The reason for the poor rating is strikeouts. Axelrod has struck out 16 of the 148 batters he’s faced, which gives him only the second-worst rate for qualified starters. His last start on May 4 against the Royals, essentially his magnum opus, saw him go deeper into a game than he’s ever been (7.2 IP) without allowing any runs after yielding two in the first inning. However, he also went without a strikeout. He threw 113 pitches and only got five swing-and-misses.

Now, Dylan Axelrod was never Dwight Gooden in terms of strikeouts, but he had a pretty useful slider that he liked to throw nearly 40% of the time. It was a good practice, since it was his one, strong plus-pitch and  batters swung-and-missed at it 20.4% of the time last season. That’s down to 8.8% this season in a sample that’s already half as large, with indication that he’s lost four inches of vertical break on it.

That’s just not a good development at all for a guy who didn’t have many reliable tools to begin with. Axelrod’s control has remained solid this year, but there’s little in his contact profile that suggests he’s in for much besides a world of hurt if he can’t get back to spinning those breakers like he used to. Of course, the Angels are coming to town, so he may have some time left before he really needs to fix his issues.

But if John Danks’ return will inevitably force out a successful starter that the team believes has the least opportunity to be successful going forward, smart money is on the guy whose out-pitch is on the fritz.

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As the confluence of Gavin Floyd’s surgery and John Danks’ continued rehab pushed Santiago into the opportunity to gleefully whip his fastball by people for multiple trips through the lineup, I couldn’t help but notice what a particularly advantageous situation Hector had worked himself into, at least in terms of public perception. He’s put himself in a position where it’s hard for him to do any wrong, or do anything but clear expectations. Consequently, that would make him the opposite of Gavin Floyd, which is also a mighty unfortunate denouement for Floyd’s White Sox career.

There can be no real, grounded performance expectations for Santiago. His path to his current stature is just too bizarre to track its next bend. 2011 began as Santiago’s third year stuck in High-A Winst0n-Salem. An unexpected velocity jump during the beginning of that year and an even more unexpected cup of coffee with the Sox in the middle put him on the radar for the first time. Yet even then, this attention was marked with curiosity over whether Santiago stick around as a major leaguer at all.

He was able to emerge from his failed stint as the closer–something that typically turns fans against players permanently–of the 2012 team both because the experiment was mercifully ended quickly and because it was too much of a reach to be blamed on Santiago anyway. Even Hector’s existence as a streaky long reliever was an unqualified success given that it was a three-level jump from the previous season

Those beginnings are not just humble-seeming because Santiago lacked prospect status, but also the unremarkable manner in which he was acquired. As a 30th round draft pick, he was neither traded, nor given a huge or even a recognizable bonus that would ever give fans the notion of being owed, or deserving some return in their investment in Santiago.

For example, even though no reasonable person expects Nestor Molina to come up some day head up the rotation anymore, he’ll remained burdened by expectations he should be worth the cost of Sergio Santos–or at least what Sergio Santos is remembered as being–even though it has nothing to do with him as a player. Gavin Floyd had double duty, shouldering the moniker of being a former fourth overall draft pick as well as the trade return of Freddy Garcia, or even the next generation of White Sox starters as the core of the 2005 group slowly dissipated. Even the last year of salary ($9.5M) on Floyd’s exceedingly team-friendly deal earned him extra scrutiny.

While Santiago already belongs in the conversation of “Greatest 30th round draft picks of all-time,” that Floyd character really never caught a break.

Yes, everything good that Hector does on the mound is basically found money for an organization that needs to start spotting balled-up $20 bills in its couch badly. His rise, and continued progression to a strikeout-crazed starter, carries no promises with it. If anything, given his pedigree and minor league scouting reports, Hector Santiago should blatantly not be able to cut through major league lineups the way he did Tuesday night. To buy-in to his ability, it’s not a matter of trusting his resume anymore because he’s gone beyond that, it’s just a question of “Do you believe in Hector Santiago?”

Underdogs and “next big things” are exciting, so the temptation to answer ‘yes’ is already enormous, but some of the pull for fans to support has to be about Hector himself. Conflating player personalities with performance is a poor practice, but even if the public was as vigilant about avoiding that as they should be, there aren’t many players who have gotten out ahead of the news cycle in establishing their public image like Santiago has.

Almost every player can boast sizable charitable involvement. Gavin Floyd once gave a man new prosthetic legs in an episode that never really got lasting attention, possibly due to Floyd’s personal nature, but Santiago’s work in Newtown dropped him in the middle of a national story and made him the subject of long, loving ESPN profile.

Moreover, tons of players have Twitter accounts, but most keep a distinct distance from the followers and fans that would otherwise leap upon an opportunity to have a direct line of communication with them. Santiago’s account is different. Very different. It can’t even be said that he has an account like a normal person, because that’s just as inaccurate, if not moreso.

For the longest time, Matt Adams and I have debated whether or not Santiago’s account was possibly even fake. He follows more people than he has followers, and follows seemingly everyone that asks him, to the point where Twitter blocked him from following any more, and his timeline is a constant stream of his unguarded conversations with fans.

How such interaction can be sustainable or remain as friendly as Santiago’s profile rises as well as the stakes of his performances, but for now it makes him as knowable as any member of the team. We’re all rooting for laundry, but it’s hard to resist rooting for someone who has friendly interactions with you on the internet. It’s likely Santiago realizes that, as he’s put “here for the fans” in his bio, but that would presuppose that his motivations are easily understood.

Not that it’s Hector’s fault or anything, but it’s all a perfect storm to rush Gavin Floyd out of White Sox memories without proper reverence. Here departs a good but unknowable pitcher who imparted the difficulties of pitching to us all by periodically displaying the gulf between talent and process, and desired results. In his stead comes a youngster who has advanced light years over the course of two-plus seasons, never has inspired the drudgery of a contract or trade value discussion and will laugh at your Twitter jokes from time to time.

I see where the appeal comes from.

Follow James Fegan on Twitter @JRFegan