Joe Kelly starts one game, and everything changes.
On Friday morning, the White Sox were toast. Done. Dead. It was over. They’d lost ten of fourteen, they were hardly .500, and their playoff odds were near a season low.
Enter Joe Kelly.
On the heels of our hero’s two-run start Friday night, the White Sox have won three of four, taking a series from the Twins. Simultaneously, by the power of vibes, the Guardians have stumbled, leaving the Sox within two games of playoff position. Momentum has turned, and it’s on the side of the guys wearing black and white.
Skeptics will say that this wasn’t about Joe Kelly and was instead about Tony La Russa going to Arizona on Wednesday for health reasons, but, um, really? You’re going to imply that a 77-year-old man’s health scare is somehow good? Wow. Bet you love the novel coronavirus.
Haters will say that this wasn’t about Joe Kelly because Joe Kelly allowed those two runs in one inning of work, and again, really? The length of a start contributes to how good it is? Sorry you live in the age of few complete games, old man.
We do have a problem, we the Joe Kelly supporters. Our guy has great stats everywhere that matters (besides walk rate) and one bad stat that everyone looks at (ERA). He’s been so good that despite his terrible walk rate, his FIP and xERA are utterly solid. Ever hear of being “effectively wild?” The haters have not.
Where this comes back to hurt is that White Sox fans, being idiots who chose to be White Sox fans when they easily could’ve just defaulted to the Gary Railcats, think Joe Kelly’s ERA matters more than 1) his FIP 2) his xERA 3) his playoff experience and 4) his vibes. So what do we do, when the White Sox pull this off and Joe Kelly is striking out the side in the sixth inning after entering with runners on in Game 2 of the AL Wild Card Series?
The answer is to ask what Christ would do. And Christ would probably have a way easier time pulling up their Twitter receipts and demanding repentance than I will. Hope He helps me out.
In other news, Rob Manfred may be messing with PitchCom or enabling others to do so when Joe Kelly is using it. Joe Kelly’s had issues with the device multiple times now. Sounds like hacking to me.
No, That Wasn’t About Florida State
There’s a funny thing going on where people are looking at Florida State nearly blowing a game LSU by all pregame rights should have won and saying, breathlessly, “FSU is back.”
No.
What we do know is that for at least Brian Kelly’s first year, LSU’s going to be struggling to make a bowl game, potentially making this the second postseason without them in three years, something that hasn’t gone down since right before Nick Saban took over in 2000. This is fun. LSU was such a likeable power so recently. Then, they hired one of the most disliked people in an often disgust-deserving field (Urban Meyer is a football coach, for Pete’s sake). Now, we laugh when they lose. It’ll probably work out fine—LSU’s always been good at recruiting, Brian Kelly’s generally won football games—but it’s fun that it’s not going to work out this year.
On the FSU side, they might have a great season. As the ACC hammered home again and again this weekend, it is a shitshow, and while Clemson should be good once they turn the page on DJ Uiagalelei, their best days are concretely behind them. The Dabo Swinney era was definitely worth it for them—they won two titles, their 2018 team was historically great, nobody squealed loud enough about their PED usage for it to become the story—but they are locked into a slow decline into perpetual 7-5 seasons. You know who doesn’t want conference realignment? Clemson. Because if they’re a big enough brand to get drafted into the SEC, they’re going to get crushed, and if they aren’t and the ACC doesn’t retain its pseudo-power conference status, they’re going to look like Nevada in the Mountain West in the aughts.
Anyway, sorry, FSU: Might have a great season. Not “back,” though. Save that for Texas on Saturday until the third play.
Longhorns Dominate, Hope Briefly Abounds
It’s kind of funny that Texas and Alabama kick at 11:00 AM on Saturday, because what that means is that a lot of TV’s aren’t going to flip over to Fox in time to watch it become a two-score game.
Honestly, I wish Texas was playing Alabama a year later, and if not a year later at least a week. Louisiana-Monroe just looked too bad for anyone to get as excited as we want them to be. I mean, it’s out there, and I’d be hoping too if the school had embraced me instead of running off a great basketball coach, but Texas is too big an underdog for there to be the anticipation here that we’d desired.
I am curious about what Alabama fans will be like in Austin. My impression of them is that this has all gotten a little boring but that those still engaged retain a mean-spirited, vengeful streak from back when everyone remembered how they aren’t historically all that great and a lot of their claimed national championships are bullshit and what’s happening right now isn’t even a product of the institution as much as it’s a product of Nick Saban. When LSU fans came to Austin, it was a riotous weekend. Maybe this weekend will be riotous. I think it’s just going to be sad and nasty. Will probably do food delivery instead of rideshare on Saturday if I drive.
One last Texas/Alabama thing, and it ties back to Clemson as well: Jahleel Billingsley, a tight end who transferred this offseason from Alabama to Texas, is evidently serving a six-game suspension for something Steve Sarkisian said occurred at Alabama.
We don’t know what the suspension is for, but Sarkisian said it came from the NCAA, and that and the six-game penalty imply this was for a positive drug test for a recreational drug. It’s possible it was cannabis, and that the NCAA’s updated cannabis rules aren’t applying here (they reduced the penalty from half a season to one quarter of a season this offseason). It doesn’t seem possible that it was PED usage, because the Clemson guys all got suspended for both the rest of the 2018-19 season and all of 2019-20. Anyway, I just learned about the NCAA’s drug policy and thought you might be interested. Still don’t know how often they test for what, but we do know that only something like fifteen players on the 2018-19 Clemson team were tested, and three of those (all of whom had relatively high body fat percentages) tested positive.
Agiye Hall will play Saturday.
Erik Jones!
Erik Jones won the Southern 500, which is kind of like Rocco Mediate taking Tiger to the wire at the 2008 U.S. Open. It’s not on that level, but it’s a major race, it’s one of the hardest races to win (evidently NASCAR made it the opening playoff race because it’s so likely a powerhouse team wins it), and Jones—a guy who got a bit of a raw deal from Joe Gibbs Racing—was not expected to win it. Yet win it he did.
It was a bit of an ugly race for the sanctioning body. One of the consequences of building the cars yourselves, as a series, is that you hold responsibility for them working, and random failures at least appear to be more on you than they used to be (when everything was built by the teams themselves). Kevin Harvick raised this point after his car, uh, exploded into flames, which is fair. If my car exploded into flames, I would also be upset with the manufacturer. I don’t know if this was 100% on NASCAR or if Stewart-Haas/Ford had a role in it (ditto with Martin Truex Jr. and Kyle Busch’s issues), but not a great look. Still, that doesn’t seem to be the big story! Erik Jones getting the #43 car back to victory lane—a big step forward for the team, which was mostly bought out last year but retains the Richard Petty name—is the big story. Good stuff all around. Good for Petty, good for Jones, good for NASCAR, bad for Harvick who’s kind of a tool….good stuff all around.
In IndyCar, Scott McLaughlin is likable. Has this little sense of wonder about him, like a toddler discovering bubbles. The bit with him riding the truck was great. In Formula 1, the idea that every team is really dumb for the same reasons that the Habsburgs had so many infant mortalities is picking up steam. You need some competition.
Burn and Be Burnley
Burnley both burned and was burned on Friday, with West Brom nemesis Jay Rodriguez netting a penalty but declining to celebrate aside from dutifully giving Connor Roberts a piggy-back ride when Roberts jumped on his back. (Is there more of a West Brom/Rodriguez story than just that he went back to Burnley? I don’t understand the reasoning behind the degree of anger.) Later, Ashley Barnes and Halil Dervişoğlu each had good chances to make it a 2-0 lead. But they didn’t, and Burnley was roundly outplayed, and eventually that came back to bite Burnley when a 98th-minute goal made for a 1-1 draw that was entirely earned and maybe a little good luck but felt like a collapse/bad luck. Soccer’s weird.
The lads are fifth in the table heading into a little reprieve these next few days so the Champions League can play (funny that they make the Championship take a break for that), and they’re third among the big five. They’re on a 75-point pace, which is a little shy of surefire playoff appearance territory and very shy of avoiding the playoff and just getting promoted. Would prefer them to have three more points right now. Maybe they can get ahead of pace these next two games—home against Norwich, away against Preston North End (that’s a Lancashire derby right there).
Aro Muric left with injury again, so that’s no good. Hope he’s alright. It would be pretty messed up if I didn’t hope that. But I do hope that. So nothing messed up here.
Sens Stuff
The Sens signed Erik Brännström to a one-year deal yesterday, with the two sides opting against an extension for the restricted free agent. That leaves Alex Formenton as the last RFA unsigned for Ottawa, and we really have no idea what the status is with him or Drake Batherson, and that’s tough but also is the way it goes when there’s something more significant than sports going on.
In other news, Jake Sanderson is fully healthy, per the Associated Press this morning.
**
Viewing schedule:
7:40 PM EDT: Reds @ Cubs (MLB TV, second screen)
The late-season series we’ve all been anticipating.
9:40 PM EDT: White Sox @ Mariners (MLB TV)
Give Joe Kelly another surprise start, Manager Castro (#MiguelNotFidel).
Oh shit his name is Miguel Cairo. Never mind. But do give Joe Kelly another surprise start, please.
