Major League Baseball

Chicago White Sox banking on hair-raising bullpen trio to rule playoffs

Updated Oct. 1, 2021 1:15 p.m. ET

By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer

On July 31, 2016, the Cleveland Indians pulled off a big trade.

They sent four prospects, every one of them bound for the big leagues, to the New York Yankees for closer Andrew Miller. The Indians planned to team him up with their incumbent closer, Cody Allen, to build a super bullpen, down the stretch and into the future. Miller was under contract for two more seasons. "He’s the perfect guy to have, and we got him," Allen said at the time.

On July 30, 2021, the Chicago White Sox pulled off a big trade.

They sent two young players, big-leaguers both, to the crosstown Cubs for closer Craig Kimbrel. The White Sox plan to team him up with their incumbent closer, Liam Hendriks, and rookie relief ace Michael Kopech to build a super bullpen, down the stretch and into the future. Kimbrel’s contract includes a team option for another season. "Getting Craig, it’s a huge plus," Hendriks said.

The strategy worked wonderfully for Cleveland. It worked as long as it possibly could’ve — all the way to Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. Now the White Sox, cruising toward an AL Central title as they meet the Yankees on Thursday in the Field of Dreams Game (6 p.m. ET on FOX), can only hope for the same.

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The situations are not exact facsimiles; Miller had much more experience pitching in non-save situations than Kimbrel does today. But that Cleveland team reveals itself to be a relevant comparison across the board: Like this year’s White Sox, the Indians possessed plenty of talented hitters but none having a standout season. This was pre-breakout for Francisco Lindor and José Ramírez.

In Chicago, the best hitter this season, by OPS+, has been Yasmani Grandal, the injured catcher who is hitting .188 with a lot of walks and a lot of power. Otherwise, the White Sox's lineup is full of position players having above average but unspectacular seasons: José Abreu, Tim Anderson, Yoán Moncada, Andrew Vaughn, Brian Goodwin. Even Nick Madrigal, the hefty price paid for Kimbrel, fit right into that group before his injury. And now there's César Hernández, Madrigal’s deadline-day replacement.

There is hope for more: Eloy Jiménez just returned from a torn pectoral and looks like he is in top form, swinging for the fences. Luis Robert, perhaps the most talented of the group, even more recently returned from injury. Grandal is on track to soon join them on the active roster.

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The rotation has had the opposite injury luck as the lineup. Chicago’s planned five-man rotation has started 107 of 114 games this season. Only the Red Sox have had better starting pitching luck. By FanGraphs’ measure of Wins Above Replacement, no team has had more starting pitching success than the White Sox.

It’s worth noting that, eight weeks from the playoffs, the White Sox are the only team with their division locked up. This is unusual. By this time in 2019, three divisions were already decided, and a fourth was close to it. In 2018, two were. In 2017, three.

That's fortunate for what the White Sox are attempting: balancing a re-introduction of their injured contributors with a sorting-out of their bullpen hierarchy.

The latter task might not be easy. Because there is one key difference between the Miller and Kimbrel acquisitions: Miller hadn’t been a career-long closer at the time of the trade. He hadn’t even been a season-long closer, ceding the role to Aroldis Chapman for some of the year before the Yankees traded him to the Cubs preceding the 2016 deadline.

In his career, Kimbrel has finished 82% of the 626 games in which he has appeared. Through his first four games with the White Sox, he finished 25% — and one of his lower-leverage appearances ended in near-disaster, when he surrendered a three-run home run to a Cub, Andrew Romine, who had not hit an MLB home run in four years. The team’s offensive force made up for that flub.

The Athletic’s James Fegan noticed that Hendriks and Kimbrel have been walking together from the dugout to the bullpen in the middle innings. Typically, a closer completes that walk alone, well after the rest of his relief mates have settled into the bullpen. Clearly, the White Sox are tiptoeing the line of carrying two closers, perhaps betting that Hendriks’ well-known welcoming personality will smooth any developing tensions.

That might be right. Soon after the acquisition, Hendriks told reporters that he has "no ego" whatsoever and no need to pitch at any specific moment. He noted that Kimbrel immediately became the team member with the most service time, an all-important measure to major leaguers. And he pointed out that time will tell which closer White Sox manager Tony La Russa decides on. La Russa, back on the job at 76, can be an inscrutable decision-maker, but in this case, he will have to make a choice.

Hendriks also skipped past the 2016 Indians and compared the 2021 White Sox to the 2015 Royals, who boasted Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis and Greg Holland at the back of their bullpen. That comparison, too, is valid. Rookie right-hander Kopech has been nearly as good as Hendriks or Kimbrel.

Hendriks has taken to calling the three of them The Ponytail Gang. There are shirts and everything.

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"We’ve got some guys out there," Hendriks said. "It gives you the ability to shorten the game a little bit."

The White Sox's season, too, is shortened. Everyone else’s stretch run is their postseason trial run. Can they use this time to get it right for October? It will start with sorting out the ideal end to a close game.

Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He most recently covered the Dodgers for three seasons for The Athletic. Previously, he spent five years covering the Angels and Dodgers for the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times. More previously, he covered his alma mater, USC, for ESPNLosAngeles.com. The son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in the Southern California suburbs. Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.