Because Bill Walton brought his weirdness to a baseball broadcast, the larger baseball world was unusually riveted by an August White Sox game for once.
Credit the White Sox for putting on a show, even as an undercard.
Lucas Giolito struck out 11 Angels over six innings for his 13th win, the Sox weathered another night of the Mike Trout show, and James McCann contributed his second eighth-inning grand slam in three games to enable the Sox to cruise to the finish.
Giolito's posted a strong line -- 6 IP, 6 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 3 BB, 11 K -- that belies how hard he had to work. It wasn't just the strikeouts elevating the pitch count, which finished at 113. He spent most of the game in the stretch, because the Angels put the leadoff man on in four of Giolito's six innings.
He limited the damage to a leadoff "triple" coming around to score in the third (David Fletcher hit one over Eloy Jiménez's head, but an average left fielder probably flags it down), and a Trout solo shot in the fifth. The Angels had better opportunities for a crooked number but couldn't capitalize. Giolito loaded the bases with a single, HBP and walk with one out the first inning, but wriggled out of it with a strikeout and groundout.
He opened his night with that Houdini act, and he closed it with one as well. He started the inning by giving up a single and a four-pitch walk, and Yolmer Sánchez and Tim Anderson could only get the out at second on a potential 4-6-3 ball. Brian Goodwin entered to pinch-hit and get the matchup advantage, but he popped out to shallow left for the second out, and Giolito finished the inning by fanning Fletcher.
The Fletcher strikeout was emblematic of Giolito's effort. Fletcher had only struck out 43 times over 115 games, a big reason why the Angels had baseball's second-lowest strikeout rate. Giolito raised that rate with 11 punchouts, and his fastball did the heavy lifting. He threw 68 of them out of 113, getting 14 swinging strikes. It paired well with his slider, which got whiffs on eight of 30.
All the while, the offense gave him enough despite its attempts to govern the output. They took a 2-0 lead in the third by swinging the bat -- Leury García doubled, Tim Anderson singled him home, and Anderson came around on a balk, groundout and #WILDPITCHOFFENSE.
An inning later, the Sox bunted into another run. Jon Jay bunted Welington Castillo to third, and the Angels for whatever reason played back on Yolmer Sánchez with a runner on third, so Sánchez dropped his mandatory squeeze bunt for a 3-1 lead. It seemed unnecessarily cautious when they swung the bats well against rookie Patrick Sandoval, but they never trailed.
And McCann made sure that there would be no late-inning hijinks, either. Once again, García and Anderson reached with hits to put runners on the corners with nobody out in the eighth. García broke for home on Jose Abreu's grounder to short, but was able to return to third because Max Stassi couldn't handle the throw cleanly. That set the table for McCann, who cleared the table by sending a 1-0 Ty Buttrey slider nearly 450 feet out to left.
Bullet points:
*Trout went 1-for-4, but the hit was a homer off Giolito. He also reached base on Giolito's first-inning HBP, and again when Evan Marshall fumbled a soft chopper toward the first-base side of the mound. Fortunately, Trout decided to retire himself by breaking for third on a grounder to Tim Anderson, and Anderson made the easy throw to cut down the lead runner.
*Aaron Bummer cleaned up Marshall's mess, throwing two perfect innings his way (five groundouts, one strikeout).
*Trout also cut down McCann at third when McCann tried to tag up on a fly. His first slide was safe, but it also took him past the bag, and he couldn't get back to it before a tag was placed.
*Walton was fun ... for a night. He had the attention span and misdirected energy of a grade-school field trip to a minor-league game, but he also dropped a lot of good book titles, had a more sensible attitude toward sports labor than Hawk Harrelson and Tom Paciorek did last year, and created some abstract word tales I didn't mind hearing:
It'd be fun to hear again, but not anytime soon.
Record: 55-66 | Box score | Highlights
