White Sox Minor League Update: July 29, 2021

Dash homer six times but lose on a 2-4-suspended night on the farm

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Every Knights pitcher struggled and there wasn’t a whole lot happening at the plate as Charlotte dropped doubleheader game one to the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp on Thursday. Tanner Banks got the start and allowed one run over 2 ⅓ innings. Lane Ramsey, who cruised through Kannapolis, Winston-Salem, and Birmingham with ease, had his second straight poor outing as a Knight and two of three overall as he allowed a two-run home run to Devin Hairston. Kodi Medeiros and Connor Sadzeck also gave up a couple of dongs to seal this one. As a silver lining—copper lining maybe—between them all they walked two and struck out 10.

Mikie Mahtook hit his 15th homer of the year, scoring Jake Burger, who went hitless in the game but did walk. The rehabbing Jake Lamb had a pair of hits, including one that scored Marco Hernández after his third-inning triple. Nate Nolan was responsible for the final Charlotte run, a sac fly in the fourth to score Mahtook. Blake Rutherford also hit a double, his 17th. Micker Adolfo went hitless with two strikeouts.

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John Parke’s AAA debut went about as well as he could have hoped for and Yermín Mercedes hit a baseball very hard, leading the Knights to a doubleheader split; Mercedes is batting .321/.368/.667 with seven home runs in 21 games since his demotion from the Sox. Zach Remillard also went yard for the ninth time with the Knights, tenth overall. Laz Rivera repented immediately for his run-scoring error in the top of the third by getting hit by a pitch with the bases loaded in the bottom of the third.

That error led to the only two runs that scored off Parke over five innings, both unearned. He hit one Jumbo Shrimp with a pitch, walked one, and struck out three. Hunter Schryver and Bennett Sousa both took care of business, Sousa one pitch away from an immaculate inning as he struck out the side in the seventh (a doubleheader ninth).

Luis Robert played in neither game—a scheduled off-day, according to FutureSox’s Jeff Cohen.

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The Barons just couldn’t put anything together offensively, scraping up two runs on just six hits as they fell to the Trash City Rocket Pandas 3-2. Those two runs came in the third; Joel Booker led off with a double and scored when Romy González singled him in, and later catcher Xavier Fernández homered. Tyler Neslony was the only Baron to reach base twice, both singles, and the team was the victim of three double plays. Opposing pitcher Jhonathan Diaz tossed a complete game on just 93 pitches.

Kade McClure had a pretty good start, burned by a first-inning two-run dong and letting in a third and damning run on a two-out double in the second, but he went six full innings and struck out seven, walking one. Alec Hansen and Luis Ledo, two guys with tremendous stuff and no control of it, threw back-to-back perfect innings, both striking out two.

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Alex Destino hit three of six Dash home runs, starter Johan Dominguez threw five shutout innings, and the Dash fell 9-8 to the Grasshoppers in a bullpen meltdown (this may seem familiar). While the Dash scored six runs in the final four innings, they allowed nine, two scoring in the ninth for a walk-off (hop-off?) Grasshoppers win. Wilber Perez gave up the first two; Sal Biasi added four more, including two home runs in five batters; Trey Jeans allowed his first four batters to reach, all with two outs, scoring one; and finally, Ryan Williamson entered in the ninth, allowed a double, then gave up the walk-off bomb to Chase Murray. Everyone other than Dominguez and Jeans has an ERA of 6.46 or above, with Jeans at 5.93. Overall, the bullpen has a 5.45 ERA in 358 ⅓ innings, only beating out Asheville (5.87) for the step above the cellar.

Destino has been recovering nicely from a June slump and entered today batting .286/.398/.571 in 20 games in July. He nearly doubled his dinger output for the month just tonight—he’s now at eight in July and 15 on the season. He also singled, but whatever, you know? Yoelqui Céspedes, Lenyn Sosa, and Evan Skoug all mashed a single tater each; Céspedes and Sosa both went 2-for-5 with two strikeouts. The rest of the lineup outside of the top three and Skoug did very little.

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The Cannon Ballers gave up many more runs than they scored, dropping them to 24-51 on the season. If you though the Dash bullpen ERA was bad, avert your eyes: Kannapolis is dead last in team pitching in the 12-team Low-A East league by over half a run, a collective 6.08 ERA (Fredericksburg is #11 with 5.42). That tradition continued today: starter Chase Solesky allowed four runs in four innings and Kevin Folman’s leadoff hit batsman scored two outs later on a home run, hanging him with the loss. Ty Madrigal was the bullpen MVP today, with two scoreless innings. Garvin Alston gave up four runs and Tyson Messer allowed one, both of them with ERAs of very high.

José Rodriguez, Bryan Ramos, a wild pitch, and Luis Mieses all combined in the first to put the Ballers up 2-0 early, which was obviously not to be. Richard García is a fairly recent arrival from the ACL Sox, where the 22-year-old catcher was 4-for-7 with two home runs in three games. He hit his first full-season dong tonight, a two-run shot in the second inning. It would have scored three, but Caberea Weaver was thrown out at home trying to score from second on Lency Delgado’s single. Delgado himself was later thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double in the sixth. James Beard threw a guy out at home in turn.

The ACL Sox game was suspended after five innings on a 106-degree day due to “power.” They lead 1-0.

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The DSL Sox have surged above .500 with a 6-4 win in seven innings over the DSL Orioles. In what should not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever looked at a DSL box score, the team only had three RBIS, stole four bases, walked eight times, struck out 13 times, and made two errors (with EIGHT errors and seven wild pitches between the two teams). This is baseball in its absolute purest, rawest form. They scored two in the first on Luis Pineda’s two-out single, two more in the second after a single, fielding error, groundout, missed catch error, and throwing error. Their final two came in the fifth, which went single-wild pitch-walk-double steal-error-K-K-walk-wild pitch-error-pop fly.

It was a pretty solid day on the mound for the team, wild pitches notwithstanding. Jorge Ferrer, in his third season with the DSL Sox, picked up his first win of 2021 with five innings of two-run, one-earned-run ball. Daniel Gonzalez allowed an unearned run, Miguel Toribio walked three in ⅔ inning but escaped with just one run scoring, and Carlos Hinestroza finished it up with one scoreless inning. The 18-year-old righty has allowed one run over 10 ⅓ professional innings, walking one and striking out eight.