On Saturday morning, the White Sox took batting practice with a wall of protective screens pulled up adjacent to the pitching mound.
Since they began this practice during last week’s road trip, the idea has been to emphasize driving the ball in the air for a group of hitters that, according to FanGraphs, entered the weekend with the highest ground-ball rate in the majors. In a 5-4 walk-off win over the Red Sox, the scuffling White Sox offense provided proof of concept, blasting a season-high four solo home runs.
Elvis Andrus’ two-out single in the bottom of the ninth? Let’s say it would have clipped off the top of the screen.
Yasmani Grandral eeking a deep fly over the left field wall in the second inning proved to be all White Sox hitters could muster off Red Sox starter James Paxton. But after knee soreness ended Paxton’s day after four innings, Jake Burger, Luis Robert Jr. and Andrew Vaughn provided more prodigious blasts off reliever Josh Winckowski. Of the three homers Winckowski allowed across the fifth and sixth, Robert’s 380-foot missile down the left-field line — his team-leading 19th of the season — was by far the most gentle.
The victory put off the possibility of the White Sox (33-45) dropping their fifth series in a row until Sunday and kept them from matching a season-high 14 games under .500. It also made a winner out of Kendall Graveman (3-3) after a hard luck blown save, sealed by a two-out game-tying bloop RBI single from Justin Turner in the top of the ninth.
Now that they’re driving the ball in the air again, the next season-long focus for White Sox hitters to act upon is taking more pitches and getting on-base. They entered Saturday with the lowest on-base percentage in baseball, and relatedly, 15 of their last 16 home runs have been of the solo variety. Sox hitters were limited to one walk on Saturday, but were able to get starter Lance Lynn off the hook for a loss after 5 2/3 innings with three runs allowed.
Hitting .348/.400/.659 against him entering Saturday’s start, left-handed hitters have bedeviled Lynn all year and been the driving force in a 6.40 ERA that would be by far his career-worst if it held all season. In keeping with that, the Red Sox stacked five left-handed hitters in their order Saturday, but found a version of Lynn who had deployed a series of adaptations while striking out a career-high 16 batters last week in Seattle.
The newest element is a “gyro” slider, designed to give Lynn a sharper downward moving breaking ball to pair with his four-seam fastball that needs to ride at the top of the strike zone to retire left-handers.
“It’s just something that kind of can get him into that down-and-in quadrant more on those lefties, and also can go back door and get underneath bats as well,” said pitching coach Ethan Katz of Lynn’s new slider. “He’s been burned with lefties with the mistake pitch that stays right there for him and either doesn’t ride when it needs to or cuts back into their bat path.”
Allowing Red Sox lefties to go 5-for-13 with a walk, Lynn’s vulnerability to opposite-handed hitters persisted. But he once again deployed a wider menagerie of off-speed offerings, and was an out away from sealing up six innings of one-run ball. But two-time All-Star Rafael Devers reached base against Lynn in all three encounters, including a one-out walk before a plate-splitting cutter to lefty first baseman Triston Casas served as that one mistake pitch.
But unlike Devers’ crucial two-run blast on Friday night, the White Sox offense did enough to make one mistake pitch — or even two — survivable.