Luis Castillo’s inability to consistently provide length has only intensified concerns about the White Sox starting rotation.
Saturday night at Rate Field was, without question, the worst start we've seen from Luis Castillo in a Chicago White Sox uniform.
Despite issuing only one walk, Castillo had trouble finding the strike zone and putting away hitters. He worked inefficiently, allowing eight hits, four earned runs, and two home runs over just 2.2 innings. The outing raised his ERA with the White Sox to 5.89 through four starts.
And the main number to be concerned about is the 18.1 innings he's pitched across those four starts. That means Castillo is averaging fewer than five innings per outing.
While I understand that I'll sound like a broken record saying this, it leaves the White Sox with a pretty significant starting pitching issue. Even with a 3.5 game lead in the AL Central and 33 games remaining on the schedule, it becomes difficult to envision what the White Sox rotation is going to look like for the rest of the season. How are they going to find the innings necessary to emerge as division champions? And should they make the postseason, what do you do in a playoff series beyond Sean Burke and Anthony Kay?
Including Castillo, the White Sox only have three true starting pitchers on their team at the moment. Two of the five rotation spots are filled by bullpen games in which Chicago is hoping to get as much length as possible from Erick Fedde and Jose Urquidy. That worked out during the Crosstown Classic against the Cubs, when Fedde and Urquidy combined for 10.2 scoreless innings in their respective outings. But is that a sustainable plan moving forward?
Not in my opinion, especially if Castillo's starts are turning into mini bullpen games because he can't reliably get through five innings.
It’s as much about length and depth as it is production. And it may leave the White Sox with no choice but to turn to someone like Drew Thorpe, who has pitched well with a 2.86 ERA over 22 innings on his rehab assignment this season.
After the trade deadline, it was my belief, and the shared opinion of many, that the White Sox needed to add one more starting pitcher. They failed to acquire one. That concern is only heightened if Castillo is a nonfactor in the rotation moving forward and doesn't provide the innings that were projected when the deal was made.
The White Sox have already lost a handful of close games over the last month because their best relief pitchers have been unavailable, with the entire bullpen taxed. That's what happens when you have to empty the bag on a nightly basis because your starting pitchers can't give you a quality start close to 60 percent of the time. And unless Castillo gets things back on the right track quickly, you're looking at the White Sox needing to call on their bullpen an awful lot over the final month of the regular season.
It could create a dilemma that Chicago simply doesn't have an answer to in 2026.
