Rick Renteria designed this game to lose it by one run, and that's exactly what the White Sox did.
I suppose congratulations are in order.
The White Sox trailed 2-1 in the top of the seventh when they strung together two successful plate appearances against Aaron Nola for the first time all evening. Eloy Jiménez reached on an infield single -- he should've been out, but Gabe Kapler lost the challenge earlier in the game -- and Tim Anderson slashed a double to right.
Up came Yolmer Sánchez with runners on second and third.
You might be able to guess what Rick Renteria had in mind.
So did the Phillies.
Everybody guessed it: an unsuccessful safety squeeze.
Now, why would Rick Renteria play for the tie on the road when it's an offense-friendly park and his best relievers were well-utilized over 15 innings the night before? Beats me, but it's a bad sign when teams expect him to use that kind of self-defeating strategy and ambush it accordingly.
That failed to score a run, Matt Skole pinch-hit for Seby Zavala and struck out, and the events of the rest of the night magnified the effects of that piss-poor decision. Hell, even the Barbasol ad that played on MLBTV after the inning was in on the joke.
In the bottom of the seventh, Jace Fry showed the folly of playing for the tie when he loaded the bases with nobody out. Dylan Covey came jogging out of the bullpen and ... actually fared pretty well? He got a shallow flyout, a run-scoring fielder's choice that developed too slowly for a double play despite the best efforts of Sánchez and Anderson, and after a hit by pitch reloaded the bases, Bryce Harper bounced out.
The Sox exited the inning trailing 3-1, but Covey did well to minimize damage. So did Ross Detwiler, who held the Phillies to back-to-back solo shots by Harper and Rhys Hoskins over 5⅔ innings. The pitchers deployed by the White Sox overachieved to hold Philadelphia to three runs on four hits over eight innings.
Alas, Renteria didn't want to score three or four runs until it was too late. The Sox mounted a rally off Nick Pivetta in the ninth because Jose Abreu reached on an error and Jon Jay sliced a single inside the left-field line to start the inning. Jiménez and Anderson struck out in the kind of sequence that reinforced Renteria's bunting instinct, but Sánchez came to the plate in a situation where he had to swing away, and he slapped a fastball to center for a single that scored Abreu and moved the tying run 90 feet from home.
Alas, Adam Engel, pinch-hitting for the pitcher's spot, struck out to end the game.
(That was another curious choice: Instead of pinch-running with Engel for Jon Jay, he pinch-ran with Ryan Cordell instead. A .220 hitter with an engorged strikeout rate is a .220 hitter with an engorged strikeout rate, I suppose.)
At any rate, the White Sox fell to 5-17 in the second half, and have lost five straight games where an opposing manager didn't use a position player to throw multiple innings in a tie game.
Bullet points:
*Anderson committed the kind of careless error that drives fans nuts by not keeping his glove down on a routine grounder in the bottom of the fourth. He and Zavala made up for it by cutting down Jean Segura on a stolen base attempt, and it was an important out considering Detwiler gave up the two homers immediately afterward.
*Fly balls brought Jiménez and García together on multiple occasions, and Jiménez managed to avoid another injury-causing collision despite close calls. But one of those was a spin-laden floater, and he overran the hop for an error.
Record: 47-61 | Box score | Highlights
