CLEVELAND – I have never yelled at a cloud. I have also never commanded any of the neighborhood kids to get off my lawn. However, I’m an old head with old-school sensibilities built over 39 years of covering Major League Baseball.
Now that doesn’t mean that I loathe newer things. I love the pitch clock, the universal DH, and especially the extra-inning placement runner rule, the so-called Manfred Man.
However, the one thing I do hate about modern baseball is the use of openers along with bullpen games. If a team doesn’t have five starting pitchers to fill out a rotation, then it is hard to take them seriously.
And to think a team would revert to a bullpen game to begin a postseason series is baseball sacrilege. If anyone should never commit baseball sacrilege, it’s Pope Leo XIV’s favorite team.
White Sox have near-perfect bullpen game
Yet give the Chicago White Sox credit, albeit begrudgingly. Manager Will Venable ran a bullpen game to perfection on Saturday afternoon at Progressive Field.
Five pitchers combined on a three-hit shutout to lead the White Sox to a 3-0 victory over the Cleveland Guardians in the opener of a best-of-five American League Division Series. The White Sox continued their 2026 magic carpet ride after losing at least 101 games in each of the previous three seasons.
Opener Hagen Smith pitched 2 2/3 innings; Bryan Hudson retired the only batter he faced to end the third inning; Jordan Hicks retired two batters in the fourth; and Anthony Kay got four outs before Grant Taylor struck out six in four innings for the save.
“You go out, and you have a rough plan, and then the players have to go out and execute, and then we were able to do that today,” Venable said. “I think it never goes exactly how you want it to go because that's baseball, and the Guardians are a good team and going to put the ball in play. They're going to take their walks, and they have a dynamic offense. So really important that you have guys pick each other up in these situations, which we saw today.”
The Guardians left the bases loaded in the third and fourth, then had just two baserunners over the final five innings.
“Every single one of (the White Sox’s pitchers) threw outstanding,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “They were pumping the strike zone. They were getting ahead. They kept us from getting a leadoff guy on. I thought this game was about their pitching.”
Murakami provides enough cushion
And Munetaka Murakami. The White Sox rookie first baseman from Japan walloped a two-run home run down the right-field line off Parker Messick in the fourth inning to open the scoring. The 440-foot blast was Murakami’s first postseason home run after he went deep 35 times in 127 regular-season games.
“If you score one run, I have so much confidence that we can win the game, which is really good,” Murakami said through a translator.
Colson Montgomery doubled in an insurance run with a bloop along the left-field line in the seventh inning, and Taylor held the lead while making the longest outing of his 98-game career in the major leagues. Taylor had no problem making a 54-pitch appearance and even tried to avoid Venable when he came into the dugout after pitching the eighth inning.
“I know that when I come in the dugout, and Will doesn't tell me that I'm done immediately, that there's a possibility I’ll go back out,” Taylor said. “So, I had my whole setup in the tunnel. I just beelined for it. I wasn't going to let him tell me he changed his mind.”
The wave of the future?
In a perfect world, the White Sox would use a traditional postseason starting rotation. Yet they are down to one true starter in right-hander Sean Burke because of injuries, workload concerns, and ineffectiveness in their rotation. The White Sox also won Game 1 on Tuesday in a bullpen game to complete their two-game sweep of the Houston Astros in an AL Wild Card Series.
Taylor is just 24, so he is more open-minded to bullpen games and openers than veteran baseball people. Yet Taylor isn’t yet ready to say that traditional starting pitchers will become extinct anytime soon.
“In the near future, some other teams will try to copy what we’re doing if they find that valuable,” Taylor said. “I think for the most part, it'll stay relatively normal to how it's been -- starting pitchers might throw a little bit fewer innings and then you kind of throw some more guys in the middle, but I think it's what's worked for us and we're going to rely on it.”
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