Cease can't find groove in rough outing

CHICAGO – The 10th start of Dylan Cease’s White Sox career turned out to be his worst.

Cease allowed eight runs on 10 hits in two-plus innings during Minnesota’s 10-5 victory Thursday afternoon at Guaranteed Rate Field, completing the Twins’ three-game sweep. Raw stuff certainly wasn’t the issue for Cease, who topped out at 100.1 mph with his fastball and had 10 swinging strikes, per Statcast.

• Box score

But the problem of one big inning plaguing each of Cease’s trips to the mound morphed into parts of three innings in which he was consistently hit.

“Obviously, it wasn't great results,” Cease said. “At the end of the day, they got the hits and they beat me.”

“His velo was really good, his breaking ball was good. It was one of those days,” White Sox catcher James McCann said. “We’ll get back to the drawing board and keep working, keep fighting. There is nothing to do except keep your head up and keep working.”

Cease allowed three hits with exit velocities below 80 mph, per Statcast, so not everything was hit hard against him. But he didn’t seem to find any sort of flow from the outset, as the Twins, who have hit 261 home runs as a team this season, opened with five straight singles and wouldn’t let up.

After slipping during his delivery during a second-inning walk to Jorge Polanco, Cease unleashed a wild pitch well over the head of Nelson Cruz and McCann on the first pitch of the next at-bat. White Sox manager Rick Renteria and assistant athletic trainer James Kruk checked on Cease, but he stayed in the game and allowed two more runs in the second, following a four-run first. Back-to-back home runs from Jake Cave and C.J. Cron ended Cease’s day at 61 pitches with nobody out in the third.

Renteria felt as if Cease was more frustrated than having anything physically wrong with him when he came to the mound after the wild one to Cruz. But he did pose the theory postgame of Cease possibly tipping pitches, one of the potential issues to be re-examined.

“Do we have to do better? Yes. Does he have good enough stuff, that that shouldn't be occurring? More than likely,” Renteria said. “And now we're going to go even further and see maybe, you never know, maybe he's got a tell or something here or there that we've got to make sure we break down and discover for ourselves and clean it up.”

“It's definitely possible,” said Cease of tipping pitches. “But at the end of the day, I know if I execute pitches better, I'll have better results. Sometimes it takes a little bit to digest and really break down what happened. So I'm going to continue to do that and continue on the process.”

Thursday’s subpar start dropped Cease’s record to 3-7 and raised his ERA to 6.92. He has allowed 12 first-inning runs and 13 home runs over 52 innings pitched, while striking out 53 and walking 23.

Ultimately none of those 2019 numbers really matter. This is Cease’s first taste of big league life and not even his first full season as part of the rotation. The same was the case for Lucas Giolito in ’18, when the right-hander struggled mightily. One year later, Giolito is in the conversation for the American League Cy Young Award.

While Cease and the entire organization want better results over the final month, these struggles are all part of the learning process for the 23-year-old.

“In his career, he’ll look back at a day like today and realize he learns a lot more from games like this than when he might have more success,” McCann said. “He’s going to dwell on the negative stuff for a while, but he has to find something positive to take from it and tomorrow is a new day.”

“We just have to figure out if it's simply missed location, which we'll know after I watch more video, or if there truly is, in my sense of watching, 'Gosh, it looked like they were pretty much on everything,' and then we'll make an adjustment from there,” Renteria said. “Hopefully we can find a correction that's needed and continue to put him on a good path.”