A rainout-turned-doubleheader this week meant the Dash played four fewer innings of baseball than they normally do, going 2-4 on the week and languishing in the cellar with a four-game staircase to climb out. Their run differential is -109 and they have exactly the Pythagorean W-L you would expect at 33-53; they have the worst record of any team in either High-A East division. Clearly, things are bleak.
However, despite several moving parts, players lost and gained, they actually haven’t been that bad lately. Admittedly, the starting pitching is about as meh as it’s been all year, even more so now that their number one through number three starters—Taylor Varnell, Johan Dominguez, and Davis Martin—have recently been promoted to Birmingham, and the bullpen has also not been good, but the offense has been markedly better and now these games are being lost mostly because of pitching instead of hitting.
Position players
The most exciting prospect on this team is still Yoelkis Céspedes, but he’s been in and out of the lineup over this last week, seemingly dealing with an injury. He DHed for the first 21 games he played this season due to lingering shoulder soreness and has largely been in the outfield since then, but he was removed from the game on August 5 after singling as part of a 3-for-3 day and has been playing about every other day since then.
In his first game back, he played center and went 1-for-2 before exiting; two days later he played again and had a full four at-bats as DH (and went 2-for-4 with two doubles, even getting himself thrown out trying to stretch one into a triple). Luckily, he seems to be mostly back to normal at this point, playing nine full innings in center field on August 11 and going 0-for-2 with three walks and two swiped bags. He currently has an eight-game hitting streak where he is 10-for-28 with five doubles and one home run, and his season line is .282/.357/.485 in 41 games. 21 of his 46 hits have gone for extra bases.
Normally, this would be the spot where shortstop Lenyn Sosa would be featured, but Sosa was one of those moving parts and is now with the Barons, where he went 0-for-3 with a HBP in his debut on August 10. With the Dash, Sosa hit .290/.321/.443 in 82 games, with 19 doubles, one triple, and 10 home runs; he walked 14 times and struck out 77.
With Sosa’s promotion, the Dash have received their new Sosa—otherwise known as José Rodriguez—from the Cannon Ballers. Prior to the 2021 season, Rodriguez had only played rookie ball, spending 2018 with the DSL (.291/.318/.401) and 2019 with the Arizona club (.293/.328/.505). The infield defense is shaky, but the talent is real. In 78 games with Kannapolis, he batted .283/.328/.452 with nine home runs, 22 doubles, and four triples; he walked 21 times against 57 strikeouts, and he’s also 20-for-25 on stolen base attempts.
Only 20 years old until next March, Rodriguez has a lot of work to do but a lot of time to do it. He debuted at High-A playing shortstop and batting second on August 10, where he went 0-for-4 with four strikeouts and one sac fly. Apparently a fast learner, he went 3-for-5 with his first Dash home run, a grand slam, the next day. Welcome to the league!
Another player who was recently moved is Luis Mieses, who is now in his second week of play back with the Dash after spending the middle of the season with the Cannon Ballers. His second stint with the team is going much better than the first, and he is 12-for-35 since his return, fitting five doubles and a home run into nine games. He’s already managed to play each outfield position, and was the hero of a six-run ninth inning comeback to defeat the Asheville Tourists on August 5 with a two-run double.
Caberea Weaver, the seventh-round draft pick from 2018, was also just promoted from Kannapolis, where he was batting .209/.305/.340 with 29 walks and 98 strikeouts in 69 games. The outfielder went 1-for-4 in his Dash debut on August 10 and did not play on August 11.
Alex Destino’s torrid .313/.412/.663 July has turned into a fairly tepid August in which he’s 5-for-28 so far, including 2-for-his-last-19; after hitting home runs in the first two games of the month, he is extra-base-hitless since then. He got a few days off this week that will try to refresh him for the rest of the season.
Like Destino, Luis Curbelo had something of a resurgent July, batting .261/.306/.478 in the month with five doubles and five home runs. Also like Destino, though, he hasn’t had a similarly good start to August, going 7-for-35 in nine games. He does a four-game extra-base hit streak, with six in his last six games.
Jagger Rusconi and Lázaro Leal are both seeing increased playing time due to the personnel changes, Rusconi manning mostly second base and Leal alternating between left field and first base. Both are benefitting from the regularity, or at least so their numbers would suggest: Rusconi, a 25-year-old signed as a free agent in May, had a five-game hit streak in which he was 6-for-19 with two doubles, a triple, and a home run broken on August 11, and Leal, 24 and in his second professional season, went 7-for-17 on the week with a double and a home run. Samir Dueñez has been spotting Leal at first base with a pretty good chunk of playing time there, but technically he is on a rehab assignment from the Barons and should be back with them before too long.
Behind the plate, Evan Skoug and Gunnar Troutwine are still splitting time, with Skoug getting a little less, perhaps due to lingering injury issues from his recent IL stint. Troutwine had a hot bat to start the season with, but it hasn’t quite made it to August yet; he has two hits in five games on the month, one a home run, plus five walks. Skoug has only played in four games in August and has one hit total between them, although he’s walked three times.
Duke Ellis, light-hitting outfield speedster, dealt with an injury near the end of July and is 1-for-6 with three walks since coming back (no stolen bases, but his 23 on the season are still good for fourth in the league). Brandon Bossard is still around, playing some second and third base off the bench; luckily, the Dash have not yet encountered a situation in which he has been called upon to pitch, with his last appearance on the mound for the Cannon Ballers in mid-July. AJ Gill, a utilityman, is still on the roster but not playing much at all. Tyler Osik sounds like he’s out for the season with an injury, cutting short a frustrating year for the 1B/C prospect.
Pitchers
Varnell was promoted to Birmingham on 7/20, Martin on 8/8, and Dominguez on 8/10. This has left the Dash without most of a starting rotation, and so far they have not found effective stopgap measures. The last time a Dash starting pitcher went more than four innings was Dominguez on August 4 going five; no pitcher currently with the team has thrown more than four innings in a start.
Dan Metzdorf, former fifth-rounder, has gone four innings in four straight starts, giving up at least two runs and walking at least two in all of them, striking out about a batter per inning. Kaleb Roper, from the 29th round of the same draft (2019), has also struggled; he has given up multiple runs in each of his 11 outings, including one relief appearance. Chase Solesky—21st rounder from 2019—is a new addition from Kannapolis and allowed seven runs (five earned) in his first start with the team on August 6. Another is Kevin Folman, who has both started and relieved in four games since his promotion to the Dash; two of those outings were scoreless, but in his August 11 start, he allowed seven runs in two innings.
It’s not entirely clear who will get the next shot in the rotation; that’ll be a question the Dash and the Sox will have to address. There are a mix of new and old arms in the pen at the moment. Yoelvin Silven is one of the new ones; the 22-year-old righty had a 6.68 ERA in 31 innings with Kannapolis, but in his first game with the Dash on August 11, at least, he threw two scoreless innings. McKinley Moore is another; at 6’6” and possessing Velocity, he has a ton of potential, but so far with the Dash that potential has manifested as six runs in seven innings, four walks and 11 strikeouts.
Sammy Peralta was promoted on August 5 after being one of the Cannon Ballers’ most reliable relievers, with 15 earned runs in 34.2 innings (3.89 ERA, 12 walks, 49 strikeouts). In his first two outings with the Dash, he’s struck out four and allowed one unearned run over three innings. Jordan Mikel is the last recent promotion; he threw 27.1 decent-if-walk-heavy innings for the Cannon Ballers, mostly acting as a closer, finishing 12 games (with one save to show for it; it’s the Cannon Ballers). He appeared for the Dash for the first time on August 11 in the ninth inning and allowed a two-run home run. Welcome… to the league.
Over the last week, the Dash bullpen has thrown the fourth-most innings of any bullpen in the league, a direct result of the rotation woes. Relievers are 2-2 in that time and have allowed 32 earned runs in 51 innings, walking 29 and striking out 67. Collectively over the week, their WHIP is 1.647. Nobody has stood out too much in a positive way; the new arms are all still too new to judge, and the older arms are doing what the older arms have been doing.
Edgar Navarro and Declan Cronin each put together two consecutive scoreless outings, the only relievers to do so this week. Stretching back beyond just the last week, Brian Glowicki has allowed one earned run over his last six innings spanning five appearances, walking three and striking out an underlined and capitalized 15 (15!!). He’s one of the most promising guys in the pen based purely on that strikeout rate—he’s at 16.2 K/9 over 25 innings—but he’s also allowed 14 runs and is 26 years old, so there’s really only so much he can prove in Winston-Salem.
A final note: on August 7, the White Sox released Victor Diaz, who hadn’t thrown a professional pitch since July 2017 due to some unspecified injury. Diaz was the fourth player in the Chris Sale trade in 2016. With Luis Basabe now in the Giants farm system, that means that Michael Kopech and Yoán Moncada are the only two remaining, an outcome that should not be too surprising.
Photo credit: Sean Williams/FutureSox
Want to know right away when we publish a new article? Type your email address in the box on the right-side bar (or at the bottom on a mobile device) and click create subscription. Our list is completely spam free and you can opt out at any time. Also, consider supporting FutureSox on Patreon! You can get early access to special articles and Patreon-only posts, in addition to more benefits.
Shop our exclusive merchandise! Show your support with FutureSox apparel.