“Everybody tried to be a hero, and when we are like that, we don't have good days.”
Eloy Jiménez wasn’t his typically happy-go-lucky self Saturday, with no reason to be after the White Sox managed just six hits in 14 innings of baseball and were swept away in a doubleheader by the St. Louis Cardinals, a team that hadn’t played in more than two weeks.
The White Sox were the ones who looked like they needed to knock the rust off, and they spun into Sunday’s series-finale with a 10-11 record following two of the ugliest games they’ve played in this short but already third-of-the-way-over season.
“It's a little bit frustrating to come today and have this day,” Jiménez said. “But bad days (happen) for good teams.”
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With a record below .500, it’s fair to wonder just how good a team these White Sox are. They set incredibly high expectations for themselves after an energizing offseason, spending all of their time both before and after baseball’s months-long layoff talking about ending the franchise’s more than decade-long postseason drought.
An expanded playoff field should help them come even closer to meeting those expectations, but it’s been anything but a smooth road through the season’s first 21 games. The White Sox have shown what they’re capable of, scorching the Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Royals for big run totals some days, while delivering puzzling performances like Saturday’s on others.
The structure of this most unusual season doesn’t help solve any of that confusion inside and outside the fan base, and the players warned of the effects of having every game soaked in meaning before the season even started. From the jump, it was obvious that even modest winning or losing streaks had the ability to tug the whole campaign in one direction or another.
The White Sox have experienced both the positive moments and the negative ones, and therefore everyone playing and watching is experiencing whiplash trying to figure out where this team stands and how it can still make the postseason.
“I don’t remember ever really watching scoreboards so closely as a team through the first couple of weeks in the season,” Adam Engel said earlier this month. “It’s like, we come in off the field and we want to see what’s going on around the league or we’re announcing what scores are postgame for different teams. You control what you can control and you want to win as many games as you can, but we’re all keeping our eyes on the scoreboard and I’m sure it’s like that league-wide.”
Looking at the standings a third of the way through the season and seeing a sub-.500 record — even though they haven’t played a month’s worth of baseball — might not be helping these White Sox. And it applies to individuals, too. Certainly there are key cogs of this team that aren’t performing as they were expected to or as they’re accustomed to. And there’s not much time to get back to normal.
“In a normal season, there's usually 162 games. Now it's 60. So I think the pressure is on for guys to perform because the window's so small,” Tim Anderson said Sunday morning. “In a normal season, you play every day, so you're going to have days like that. You have to give some days to get better days.
“Yesterday wasn't a good day, and we were able to wash it away and put it away. So now we move on, now we continue. We can't get that back, so we've just got to continue to move forward and keep going and worry about what's ahead of us and not behind us.”
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Wherever that pressure’s coming from, it’s not good and it needs to go away. Folks will demand a sense of urgency with fewer than 40 games remaining in this two-month pennant race, but trying to send the team from under .500 to the top of the AL Central standings — or whatever playoff position ends up being as October approaches — in one day, with one swing of the bat or one pitching performance, isn’t going to work, according to the skipper.
“It would be like a hitter who's 0-for-10,” manager Rick Renteria said Sunday. “You go to the plate, they look up on the board and you're hitting .188. They're going, 'Jeez, man, I wish they wouldn't (show) that. But I'm not going to get 10 hits in one at-bat. I've got to really focus on this at-bat.'
“And you chip away. And when you understand that baseball is a game played daily and you have to just chip away daily, it ultimately brings you back, hopefully, to the successes that you want to see.
“Our expectation is that when it's all said and done that we're going to be in a good place. Right now it's a little tough for people to deal with. … I can't speak to the end because we're not at the end yet, we're still fighting to get to that point. But hopefully, the expectation is, all these guys will be shining as they should and everything will look brighter on the other side of it.
“When an individual starts to recognize certain limitations that they might be placing on themselves because of 'pressure' or 'urgency' and they see it and they face it, they have a way now of making a change in the way they think, how they approach things.”
And that’s the hope for these White Sox — the expectation, if you will — that things will change. It’s not necessarily that there needs to be a complete overhaul because the White Sox aren’t the Pittsburgh Pirates, with four wins to their name and already facing a relatively meaningless remainder of the regular season. The White Sox need to simply find some consistency. They can’t keep ping-ponging between extreme highs and extreme lows and expect to be where they thought they’d be when the season started.
The solution, so says the team, is to stop trying to be a hero, to stop trying to fix everything in one fell swoop.
“I think guys just need to let go of the numbers and stop worrying about the things that are going around and just really worry about — we're just playing a game. We're just playing baseball,” Anderson said. “When we were kids, you weren't worrying about nothing else, we were just going out and playing. And you weren't worried about numbers or anything else, you were just worried about going out and having fun with your teammates.
“I think that's where we've got to get back to it and not look into so much of what (is being written about the team) and so much into what other guys are saying. I think we just control what we can control in the locker room, and I think that will take care of itself.”
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