Rienzo Falls Victim to Luck, Himself, Tanaka
/Andre Rienzo has had worse starts than the outing he put together in Sunday's 7-1 loss to the Yankees, but the numbers might not necessarily show it.
Coming into the game 4-0 and having seen quite a bit of good luck through six starts, Rienzo made a few mistakes and got BABIP'd to death while the White Sox's offense struggled to get anything going against Masahiro Tanaka.
Of the seven hits Rienzo allowed in his five innings of work, the first five were singles and he wound up with a .467 BABIP against. He didn't help his own cause in other regards as two of the five Yankees' runs scored against him came thanks to his own undoing — a throwing error off the bat of Brian Roberts that kept the second inning going and a wild pitch following a Derek Jeter triple in the fourth. His advanced numbers weren't off the chart and he did strike out seven against two walks, but the luck he saw often through his first six starts was not with him.
The Yankees did most of their damage in the aforementioned second inning. Yangervis Solarte and Ichiro Suzuki began the inning with singles sandwiched around an Alfonso Soriano fly out, and after a walk to Roberts, Brett Gardner poked a single into right to score the pair. After Rienzo's error, Jeter singled home the third run of the inning before a Jacoby Ellsbury sac fly ended the damaging frame.
From that point on it was all Tanaka, who threw a season-high 118 pitches in 6.2 innings. The lone tally against him came in the sixth when a Conor Gillaspie single brought home Tyler Flowers, who led off the inning with a double.
It was not the finest afternoon for Paul Konerko, who hit into two rally-killing double plays and finished the game 0-for-3. The first came after an Alexei Ramirez leadoff single in the fifth and the second — while hardly his fault — came in the the seventh with two on and nobody out when he hit a liner to short that allowed Jeter to double Adam Dunn off of second base.
Sunday also marked two White Sox debuts. The first was by recently promoted reliever Javy Guerra, who came in for Rienzo in the sixth and pitched two innings. His first inning was rather shaky, as he allowed two hits, including an RBI single by Jeter, and hit a batter, but allowed just the lone tally and struck out three with zero walks. (He did hit two batters, however).
The other debut was the Scott Carroll Out Of The Bullpen Experience. The lone blip against Carroll in his two innings out of the 'pen was an solo blast by Roberts in the eighth and a walk to Mark Teixeira in the ninth.
Either way, it was a nice day off for the White Sox's not-so-fresh bullpen parts on a day when the offense wasn't primed to do much anyway.
Team Record: 25-27
Next Game: Monday at 1:10 p.m. CT vs. Cleveland on CSN
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