Jameson Taillon was done after the sixth inning Saturday night, and the damage was already written in the scoreboard. The Chicago Cubs lost 8-3 to the Chicago White Sox at Guaranteed Rate Field, with all eight White Sox runs coming on home runs and Taillon allowing five of them.
The right-hander entered the night with the second-most home runs allowed in baseball at 11. By the time Craig Counsell went to the bullpen after a leadoff homer in the sixth, Taillon had taken the league lead in home runs allowed, a jarring turn for a pitcher who had carried a 3.41 ERA over his previous five starts. Counsell did not dress it up afterward. Taillon, he said, “threw some badly missed location pitches” and the White Sox “put ’em in the seats.”
Taillon sounded as frustrated as he looked. He said every mistake he was making felt like a homer, that he needed to give himself “a little more leeway,” and that he has to attack hitters more aggressively with four-seamers up and in and cutters off the plate toward their hands. He added that the game was telling him to make an adjustment, and that he knows home runs are part of his game, “but it shouldn’t be to this extent.” Four of the long balls came against left-handed hitters.
The White Sox were built for nights like this. They entered play Saturday with 59 home runs, the fourth most in baseball, and they wasted no time turning mistakes into a rout. For the Cubs, the loss was not just about one bad night from Taillon. It was also another reminder of how thin the pitching staff has become, with injuries and limited long-man depth already shaping how Counsell uses the staff. Ben Brown has moved to the rotation, Javier Assad worked Friday night, and every bullpen call matters more than it should.
There was one clean stretch for the Cubs. Ethan Roberts threw two shutout frames and has still not allowed a run in 7 2/3 innings. But the night belonged to the opposite end of the relief mix as well. Jacob Webb, who signed for $1.5 million over the winter, has become a useful option after an uneven start. He gave up five runs, three earned, in his first four outings, then settled in with a 2.45 ERA over 14 2/3 innings, a 27.4 percent strikeout rate and a 6.5 percent walk rate since then.
Webb said early in the season he was still finding his pitches and fine-tuning everything, and that he was probably pressing a little while trying to perform. Since then, he has leaned on execution. His changeup is getting the most whiffs of his career at a 49.3 percent rate, helped by better fastball location. He replaced his sweeper with his curveball in April, and by May he was throwing that curve 9 percent of the time. Webb said the changeup has always been his pitch, but the fastball in the right areas is making everything else play up.
Caleb Thielbar also is expected back after throwing an inning of relief in the minors, giving the Cubs at least one more arm to lean on. For now, though, the story of the night was simpler than the box score usually allows: the Cubs gave up eight runs, every one of them on a home run, and Taillon’s latest outing pushed him into the wrong kind of league lead. He said he needs to make the adjustment. Saturday made it plain that he cannot wait long to do it.
