The Chicago White Sox will open Game 2 of the American League Division Series with Anthony Kay, a left-hander who is not going to pitch very long and is not supposed to.
It is the 33rd time Chicago has used an opener this season and the third time this postseason. The White Sox are 3-0 in October and have not trailed once.
How Game 2 is structured
Kay gets the ball first on Monday at Progressive Field. Sean Burke is expected to throw most of the innings behind him, per manager Will Venable.
Kay made 33 appearances this season, 31 of them starts, and went 10-9 with a 4.44 ERA. He became the first White Sox left-hander with double-digit wins since Carlos Rodon in 2021. In the postseason he won Wild Card Game 1 with two-thirds of a scoreless inning and threw an inning and a third in Saturday’s 3-0 Game 1 win.
Burke went 11-7 with a 3.34 ERA and handled the bulk work in Wild Card Game 2 against Houston, going four innings with four hits, three earned runs and eight strikeouts.
Venable pointed to the calendar as the reason this works. “The way it’s set up here with the two off days in between these first three games gives us a chance to go ahead,” he said.
That is the key. Two off days in the first three games means the bullpen resets constantly, which is the only way a rotation-free postseason survives.
Game 1 was already a bullpen game and it was a shutout
Chicago held Cleveland to three hits on Saturday without anybody going five innings. Hagen Smith opened for 2.2 scoreless. Then Grant Taylor came in and recorded a four-inning save with six strikeouts, including three in the ninth.
A four-inning save in a playoff game is an unusual box score line, and it worked.
Munetaka Murakami’s two-run homer in the fourth off rookie Parker Messick provided the margin, and Colson Montgomery added an RBI double in the seventh.
The numbers behind the streak
Chicago has not trailed at any point through 27 innings this postseason and has led at the end of 24 of them, the most through the first three games of a postseason run in franchise history.
Remember what this franchise was. Three consecutive 100-loss seasons preceded this team. The White Sox finished 84-78 and entered the playoffs as the No. 6 seed, then swept the Houston Astros.
Cleveland is doing it the normal way
The Guardians start Gavin Williams in Game 2. He went 14-8 with a 3.76 ERA and 248 strikeouts, second in all of baseball, while holding opponents to a .213 average.
Cleveland won the AL Central at 85-77 and is the No. 2 seed, with home games in the first two and a fifth if necessary. The Guardians started rookie All-Star Messick in Game 1 and got beaten by a team that did not use a starter at all.
Our take
Everybody is going to call this gimmicky until it stops working. It has not stopped working.
The White Sox do not have a front-line postseason starter, so they stopped pretending they did and built something else. Nine relievers with specific jobs and two off days is a real plan, not an admission of weakness, and Cleveland has to score before the parade of arms starts to find out whether it breaks.
Williams is the better individual pitcher on Monday. Chicago has the better plan for the series.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.