In between Game 1 and Game 2 of the White Sox’s doubleheader sweep of Boston, the White Sox tried to sneak Lance Lynn on the 10-day injured list with a strained right trapezius.
Or that’s just how the timing made it look. The White Sox announced it with a press release, a replacement (Zack Burdi) and everything, so there wasn’t anything conspiratorial about it. A prolonged Lynn absence is just something that the White Sox would probably not want you to think about.
After the second game, Tony La Russa downplayed the severity of the injury.
“We really believe that he’ll miss one start, which will be Wednesday. He’s got this thing in his — I don’t know how to describe it — his neck, his shoulder or something,” La Russa said on the Zoom call. “They can work on it, they can get him 100 percent free and clear. If this was August, September, he would’ve taken the ball, but this isn’t.”
On one hand, that’s true. It doesn’t make sense to push Lynn now if it could potentially lead to an absence in games where they need him more. They acquired him in order to take postseason starts with confidence, after all.
The rub is that the concept of the White Sox as a postseason team requires Lynn to be the workhorse they intended on acquiring. Maybe they don’t need him to make 33 starts and throw 210 innings, but neither number can be slashed too much without repercussions eventually being felt. The Sox don’t yet have anybody to fill those shoes, especially with Dallas Keuchel looking a little dicey after 50 pitches in each of his first three outings. Plus, the Sox have already just about used up their annual allotment of blown late-inning leads in April, so they’re not particularly well suited to run deficits in other areas.
The hope is that it’s truly precautionary, and that the off days on Thursday and the following Monday made his absence easier to bridge than most other parts of the calendar, so they may as well use the luxury. The more starts he misses, the more somebody like Dane Dunning could have done the same job. Dunning, by the way, has allowed just one run and 12 baserunners over 15 innings while striking out 16 for the Rangers this year. He’s on schedule to square off against Dylan Cease on Friday.
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Michael Kopech could eventually be one of those options. He’s still in the process of stretching out to handle more than three innings, and the Sox will have to keep an idea of a responsible workload in mind after he missed the entirety of the last two years. Still, he’s knocking down just about every challenge presented to him thus far.
The latest one was a short-notice start against the Red Sox in the back half of the doubleheader. He was informed during the fifth inning of the first game that he’d be opening the second, and he responded by retiring the first nine he faced before running into a little trouble into the fourth. Perhaps it’s the kind of trouble a seasoned Kopech would briefly absorb and recover from while throwing a quality start down the line, but La Russa decided to call it after three-plus innings and 41 pitches on Sunday, given that Kopech had thrown 33 just three days before.
Kopech wobbled a bit in his previous outing against Cleveland, but after watching him rebound against the Red Sox, he’s allowed the occasional slip-up.
La Russa likened Kopech to Adam Wainwright, who broke in with immediate success as a multi-inning reliever for the Cardinals as a rookie in 2006 before transitioning to the rotation for good in 2007. In Wainwright’s case, La Russa’s trust manifested itself in save situations at the end of the ’06 season, not starts. If Kopech ends up recording the final out of the World Series like Wainwright did, all’s well that ends well, but it’s harder to see better candidates for taking starts this season.
Either way, La Russa said Kopech’s workload on Sunday keeps him out of the mix until Friday. La Russa said it could be a bullpen game depending on the workload between now and then, or a dip into the supply at Schaumburg. La Russa said that option “would be fun if we have to do it.” His voice doesn’t suggest that, but his voice seldom does.
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April 19, 2021 at 08:03PM
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White Sox need Lance Lynn's injured list visit to be a short one - Sox Machine
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