Los Angeles – Michael Kopech gets it. The White Sox lost 101 games in 2023, a modern time record 121 games in 2024, and they are on their second major rebuilding in 10 years. They have been so bad that it seems like they have played meaningful games in September and October.
In reality, they are only four years away from their last play-off berth, when they won the American League Central with a record of 93-69 and a four-game Al Division Series lost to the Astros in 2021.
“I know that recent history can make it look like it was a long time ago, but it feels like yesterday,” said Kopech, the Dodgers-Reliever who was taken from the SOX last July 29 in a deal with three teams. “It was my first playoff experience, and I think it came to me in a number of ways.”
Kopech’s first trip in October baseball with the SOX in 2021 was difficult to swallow. The hard-looking right-handed person received six runs and seven hits in three innings of two games, three of those runs will be in Houston’s 10-1 series-clinchen Game 4 victory.
But it left no sour taste in Kopech’s mouth. If there is anything, it set the table for his World Series -Run with the Dodgers last October, when Kopeches threw nine innings over 10 Playoff appearances in which he allowed three earned points and five hits, slammed 10 and ran seven.
Kopeknech threw a scoreless inning in a bullpen game in which Dodgers Relievers de Padres on seven hits faltered in a National League Division Series-Tying 8-0 Game 4 win, and a one-two-hot-hree inning of a series-clinching 2-0 game 5 overcome.
He achieved the victory with a scoreless fifth inning in Game 3 of the NL Championship Series against the Mets and threw a scoreless fourth inning in a 7-6 World Series-Clinching Game 5 victory on the Yankees.
“It helped me a lot last October, because it wasn’t the first time I was there,” Kopech said this week. “We play in the regular season in sold -out stadiums, but sold -out stadiums in the late season are a different environment. So I think I was better prepared for that.”
Kopjech, 29, moved from the rotation to the bullpen in 2024 and was 2-8 with a 4.74 ERA in 43 games when the SOX sent him to Los Angeles for corner infielder Miguel Vargas.
Kopech provided quiet assistance in the last two months of 2024, with a 4-0 with a 1.13 ERA and six saves in 24 games in the regular season, and he was a workhorse in the late season.
“I had a very bad start of a team that really struggled, and I ended with a really strong finish with the best team in the world,” said Kopech. “I don’t know that I did something spectacular differently, but I have to be part of something very cool.”
However, that heavy workload with the Dodgers took a toll. Kopech was sidelined the entire spring by forearmitis and opened the season on the injured list because of a shoulder decisions.
Kopech was irregular during a rehabilitation tint with nine games with Triple-a Oklahoma City in May, which give up 11 points and eight hits, strikeouts 11 and 10 in 6⅓ innings run for a 15.63 ERA.
But he did not give up a point in his first eight games with the Dodgers, threw eight and walked four in seven innings before he returned to the IL on Tuesday because of the inflammation of the right knee, an injury that is small according to the Dodgers.
Kopech has clearly switched to larger and better things in Los Angeles, but he said that the SOX, who took over Kopech as a 20-year-old in the 2016 trade that Ace Chris Sale sent to Boston, will always have a special place in his heart.
“I have a lot of my growing up there,” said Kopech. “It is a memory like some people have at your university years or your high school years. I was super young when I arrived there, and I was in the big competitions at the age of 22.
“To think about how different I am now as a person, a pitcher, a player, a family member, a friend, at the age of 29 than I at the age of 20, it is day and night. And I think that much of it is due to how much growing I had there.”
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