Erick Fedde entered Saturday with the best home earned-run average in the majors. But even the dependable right-hander couldn’t slow down the latest Chicago White Sox slide.
Fedde allowed three runs in four innings during a 6-3 loss to the Seattle Mariners in front of 21,037 at Guaranteed Rate Field. The Mariners scored three runs in the fourth on the way to sending the Sox to their 13th straight defeat.
That matches the second-longest single-season losing streak in franchise history, which occurred Aug. 9-26, 1924. They’ll attempt to avoid tying the mark of 14 — which happened earlier this season — in Sunday’s series finale with ace Garrett Crochet scheduled to start.
“It sucks,” Fedde said. “There’s just times when it feels like nothing’s going your way or you just haven’t put a game together where you pitch well or hit well at the same time.”
Time will tell if it was the final start with the Sox for Fedde, who has been one of the players mentioned in trade speculation ahead of Tuesday’s deadline.
“Obviously the thoughts are there,” Fedde said. “It’s something I’m not in control of so I’m going to keep showing up the next couple of days and go into work and whatever happens, happens.”
At 27-80, the Sox are 53 games under .500 for the first time since 1932 (46-99). They are the fifth team in major-league history to lose 80-plus times in the first 107 games of a season and the first since the 1932 Boston Red Sox (26-81).
The Mariners have displayed plenty of power in the series. They hit four home runs in Friday’s 10-0 victory and three more Saturday.
The first came during the three-run fourth when Jorge Polanco took Fedde deep leading off the inning. Dylan Moore and Victor Robles added RBI singles to give the Mariners a 3-1 lead.
Fedde allowed the three runs on six hits, struck out four and walked two on 79 pitches. Manager Pedro Grifol said the Sox are monitoring Fedde’s workload and had targeted around 85 pitches for Saturday.
“I wasn’t going to send him back out at that particular time,” Grifol said.
Fedde, who is 7-4 with a 3.11 ERA (1.87 at home, tied for third in the majors after his outing), has pitched 121 2/3 innings in his first season back in the big leagues after spending 2023 in the Korea Baseball Organization. His career high in the majors is 133 1/3 in 2021 with the Washington Nationals. He had 180 1/3 innings last year for the NC Dinos.
Fedde said there was a discussion about Saturday’s plan beforehand.
“They talked about me having a long year already or a busy year,” Fedde said. “But they said I wasn’t going to go super heavy on pitch count today and unfortunately I threw a lot of pitches in the fourth. Wanted to go back out but that was the plan and I should have thrown less (pitches in earlier innings).”
Cal Raleigh and Polanco hit back-to-back solo home runs in the fifth against reliever Justin Anderson, extending the Mariners’ lead to 5-1.
Meanwhile, it was another sluggish night for the Sox at the plate. They loaded the bases with one out in the second but failed to score. They had another big opportunity in the fifth, placing runners on the corners with one out. Again, they came up empty.
The Sox scored once in the eighth, on a wild pitch, and had runners on second and third with two outs when Luis Robert Jr. struck out. Robert struck out four times Saturday and reached on an error leading to score the team’s first run.
The Sox went 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position. They have scored three runs or fewer in nine consecutive games and 12 of 13 during the skid.
“We had opportunities in the second, fifth and the eighth and we just couldn’t get that big hit to put more runs on the board,” Grifol said.
And now the Sox find themselves staring down a historical woe. Again.
“You’ve got to keep working hard and hopefully we get one where we can put an end to this,” Fedde said. “If anything, another goal is to just keep playing quality baseball and hopefully put some wins together.”
