Chicago White Sox: Frank Thomas is absolutely right about the bullpen
After the meltdown in the final game of their series against the Seattle Mariners, the Chicago White Sox had a 3-4 record. It was a tough road trip to begin a season but they would have liked to have a little bit better of a record. Instead, they came home with that record looking to write the ship. After that game, Frank Thomas and Ozzie Guillen had some interesting things to say in the postgame. They believe that the bullpen doesn’t deserve the blame for the losses.
The Chicago White Sox are built on all units of the team doing their job well.
All four losses are credited to guys in the bullpen. That makes it easier to blame them. The only one that might deserve total blame is Matt Foster for the Seattle meltdown but even the manager Tony La Russa admitted that it was a coaching error. The defense also wasn’t spectacular in that game as well.
Frank Thomas (and Ozzie) are spot on when they say that they don’t deserve the blame for those losses. The defense needs to be better and the starters need to go deeper into games to set them up for success. If they don’t do that, the bullpen is going to need to be used way more than it should. Giving the opponent extra outs because of bad defense always puts a lot of stress on a pitcher.
There is also the offensive side of things. The games that they won had a lot of great offense but they didn’t do more than scrape a few runs together in losses. That doesn’t help the bullpen either. They certainly need to be better in one-run games but early in the season, it would be good to see the White Sox mash the ball more consistently. Even with some of the struggles, they still have one of the best offenses statistically. It would be better if they start to consistently hit with runners in scoring position.
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Well, in last night’s game against the Kansas City Royals, they saw a lot of this come to life except to the extreme. Lance Lynn gave the bullpen plenty of rest as he went out there and threw nine innings of shutout baseball. That preserves them a lot, especially heading into an off-day. The offense also scored six runs which really helped boost a lot of people’s confidence. Frank Thomas was onto something, maybe they heard that message.