May 16, 2013; Anaheim, CA, USA; Chicago White Sox first baseman Adam Dunn (32) hits a double against the Los Angeles Angels during the fourth inning at Angel Stadium of Anaheim. Mandatory Credit: Kelvin Kuo-USA TODAY Sports

Dayan Viciedo walking just isn’t quite the red alert it used to be, but it should be. With the Sox having already rallied and tied the game 4-4 in the eighth inning, Angels reliever Michael Kohn lost all ability to locate his pitches, but to a degree no one could truly understand until he was 2-0 to Jeff Keppinger with the bases loaded and unable to throw fastball below anyone shoulders.

As the ball four buzzed up and in and confirmed Keppinger’s first walk of the season and certainly his most memorable moment in a White Sox uniform, boos rained down on an Angels team that had found an inventive way to blow a two-run lead to the worst offense in the American League, and lose 5-4 to a White Sox team that may just be on a winning streak.

The Angels had done plenty in the eighth inning already to help the Sox to this point. Back-to-back leadoff singles from Alejandro De Aza and Alexei Ramirez turned into runners in scoring position when Mike Trout airmailed a throw allegedly targeted for third. And the pain of a bad Alex Rios strikeout was blunted by the wipeout breaking pitch he failed to check up on skipping 15 feet away and plating De Aza, to bring the Sox within a run, 4-3. With Ramirez at third base, Mike Scioscia drew in the infield against Adam Dunn, only to have him hammer a game-tying single past Howie Kendrick at second base.

The eighth inning rally saved starter Jose Quintana from another ill-deserved loss, after his defense let him down again in a crucial bottom of the sixth inning.

On occasion, Jose Quintana can get into a rut where he sticks to trying to bust right-handers in on their hands. It’s his best skill, but the repercussions to not getting far enough in, especially after multiple trips inside, can be dire. Quintana’s third attempt to bust Howie Kendrick inside in the sixth inning failed as his slider flattened out and was crushed into the left-center field gap. Since it’s Angels stadium, the ball didn’t travel quite as far as the contact sound might have foretold, and was still in reach of a staggering and backpedaling Dayan Viciedo.

Instead, the ball skirted off of Viciedo’s glove, almost as if he had never opened it, rolling off and allowing two runs to score to wreck the back end of Quintana’s night–it was counted as a double–and stake the Angels bullpen to a 4-2 lead.

That was only the second of the three lead changes on the night. An opposite field two-run blast by Albert Pujols in the fourth one-upped the glorious, towering solo shot to left field by Alex Rios in the top half of the inning. But Pujols’ blast only gave the Angels a lead because De Aza was doubled off first on a caught line drive the batter before Rios nailed an inner-half Jerome Williams fastball. It was all an improvement over the first three innings, where Williams had been perfect.

For all the grief the White Sox deservedly get for the defensive execution, Alex Rios has abandoned the two-seamer he used throw out of center field for a more straight-line approach from the corner. In the third inning, he gathered an Erick Aybar single and rifled it home in one motion, and the low bullet skidded barely above the grass and into Flowers glove right as Chris Iannetta’s foot collided with it. Conversely, in the fifth inning, Jeff Keppinger tapped the soft grounder a drawn-in Angels infield was looking for to gun down Conor Gillaspie running home on contact, but Erick Aybar fumbled the transfer to the point where it was floating two feet over his head as the tying run crossed to make it 2-2.

Addison Reed, pitching in front of a multitude of hometown friends and family, worked a perfect ninth for the save.

Team Record: 18-21

Box Score

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Apr 11, 2013; Washington, DC, USA; Chicago White Sox second baseman Jeff Keppinger (7) hits an RBI single during the fourth inning against the Washington Nationals at Nationals Park. Mandatory Credit: Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports

It’s not much fun to watch Robin Ventura helplessly resigned to his seat in the dugout while his conceptions of sound, fundamental baseball are bastardized before him.

Nor is it fun to watch him blow through the “coach of a bad team” playlist and skip ahead to “team meeting” and “ominously hint at lineup changes” before the midpoint of May. It doesn’t suit anything we’ve heard about his style very well and it highlights how sometimes there’s very little a manager can do to alter performance through intervention.

Here we have the same manager who made more of a show of focusing on the fundamentals than anyone and reaped the rewards last year being party to the most amateurish looking outfit in the league via the same process. Worst yet, even if he could demonstrate control over this defense, he still can’t fix the White Sox.

Hitters who are drifting beyond help

So, Jeff Keppinger is unplayable. It really slipped under the fence for a while since a sputtering hitter who ‘s based his career on barely-above weak contact is harder to pick out than, say, what Adam Dunn was doing in 2011, or what Brent Morel was doing last season.

Yet it’s worst than both. No one’s touching a .183/.180/.198 batting line. Beyond the rapid deterioration in Keppinger’s batting eye and contact rate or the mystifying inability to draw a walk, what could have been more troubling that this moment from Sunday?

It’s a hitter’s count, Keppinger gets a fastball elevated on the inner half from a lefty, squares it up and BLAMMO

…or not.

Courtesy of TexasLeaguers.com, that may not have been the hardest Keppinger has hit a ball all season, but damn if it’s not a contender.

Keppinger’s nine home runs last season was a career-high, so he’s not expected to be crushing dingers into the stratosphere, but his utter lack of any pop whatsoever is just another massive trouble sign for another guy who has managed to time out completely losing all ability to be a major league hitter upon his debut season on the South Side.

Thanks to Keppinger–and also Tyler Greene–questions about the quality of Gordon Beckham’s adjustments, or the degree of Conor Gillaspie’s ongoing regression become irrelevant. If the Sox have any notion of trying to keep the ship afloat, they can’t play this guy until they’re disavowed of said notion. The standards for starting in the infield are posting an OPS over .400 and throwing the ball to first base, or at least it should be

It’s all been enough to hide from people that Alexei Ramirez is hitting just as poorly as last season.

Dunn’s adjustment

Speaking of guys who started depreciating the moment they went South of Roosevelt Rd., Adam Dunn was supposed to have spent Sunday installing an adjustment to move his hands up according to Buster Olney. Here’s what he looked like at the end of April.

Now, Monday night

The gist of it is that Dunn was already holding his hands so close to his head that it’s hard to imagine how there could be much improvement, let alone spot it in crude game film.

Adam Dunn spent his entire career on the margins of acceptability in terms of strikeout rate. Since coming to Chicago, he’s been solidly 5% or more above that previous career average the entire time.

The only time at which Dunn seemed capable of compensating for this development is when he start punishing the few balls he could make contact with at a vastly higher rate for the first three months of last year. Since that was never sustainable, he appears to be cooked, and with Paul Konerko piling up garish reviews (Olney called him “overmatched” on Sunday) in addition to one of the worst starts of his career, Robin Ventura is trying to switch around the complimentary pieces of a lineup that has a rotted-out core.

Tyler Flowers

The beauty of the Flowers’ situation is that until the White Sox get legitimately curious about what Josh Phegley is doing in his third year of Tripla-A, there’s really no other plan of action but to play him until the grass dies and the infield dirt blows away.. Hector Gimenez is around almost specificaly because he cannot challenge him, Flowers took a while to get going last season–albeit more due to sporadic play, and until a certain hitting coach convinces him to snap out of his newly found, misplaced aggression at the plate, we’re not really seeing what he can do anyway. A.J. Pierzynski has an OBP under .300 and strained his oblique again, if you’re curious.

It’s not a full picture, but here are three lineup black holes that Robin Ventura has pretty much no recourse to solve, unless being able to slide in Casper Wells against lefties and hope that he and Dayan Viciedo can provide middle of the order production counts as a brilliant counter-move. It’s crafty and inspired, but still might not have the horses to be successful, which is a line that could be use to sum up many good managers.

Follow James Fegan on Twitter @JRFegan

As of late, Jose Quintana, though not a train wreck, hasn’t been so great. His strikeout rate has normalized, and his walk rate has been bouncing around quite a bit. His game logs as far as swinging strikes, zone percentages and all that fun stuff is a mess. I don’t know what to make of it. Part of it is because I’m not that smart, but part of it is just the noise that comprises of a big league baseball season. I no longer have Gavin Floyd to go palms up to and say, “I don’t know what we’re gonna get tonight,” so perhaps I’m just trying too hard to find a replacement. I’m not sure what Quintana we’re going to get today, but the Angels lineup isn’t scary. The 11 hits they provided yesterday were unfortunate, and also spread throughout the team with everybody except for Josh Hamilton (0-5, boy, he sure is broken, isn’t he?) contributing.

Today’s Lineup:

1. De Aza – LF
2. Ramirez – SS
3. Rios – RF
4. Konerko – DH
5. Dunn – 1B
6. Viciedo – LF
7. Keppinger – 3B
8. Flowers – C
9. Greene — 2B

Keppinger is dropped back down into the 8th spot as he isn’t living up to his billing as a high contact guy. His 11% strikeout rate if he continues at this rate will represent the highest of his career. His previous high being a 9.6% rate in 344 plate appearances with the Astros in 2009, a year that he produced a .256/.320/.387 line. He currently carries the unique batting line of .191/.188/.209. Not every day you see a guy with an OBP lower than his batting average. If you want to feel better about Keppinger, chew on this: that 11.1% strikeout rate is the lowest among White Sox batters with at least 20 plate appearances. Pretty neat, huh?

Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Lineup:

1. Alberto Callaspo – 3B
2. Mike Trout – CF
3. Albert Pujols – DH
4. Mark Trumbo – LF
5. Josh Hamilton – RF
6. Howie Kendrick – 2B
7. Brendan Harris – SS
8. Chris Iannetta – C
9. Luis Jimenez – 1B

Where to Watch
Today’s White Sox game can be seen on WGN for the Chicago area and Fox Sports West in Los Angeles. The game will be televised on MLB Network for select markets. 6:10 Central start time.