A few things went wrong for the White Sox in the ninth, but Nick Madrigal made it all moot with a walk-off double.
It only needed to be a walk-off single since Luis Robert could have crawled home, but given how infrequently Madrigal hits a ball over an outfielder's head, he's gotta get some ISO out of it.
With two outs and (of course) two strikes, John King's attempt to throw a putaway breaking ball rolled over the middle of the plate, and Madrigal charged it over the head of a leaping Joey Gallo, whose name rhymes with "shallow." That's where he was playing, and for the third time in two games, such outfield positioning burned the Rangers.
With that swing, Madrigal made up for Liam Hendriks, who surrendered a homer for the second straight game, and for the fourth time over his first 8⅔ innings. It was a fastball several inches above the strike zone, but that didn't stop Willie Calhoun from tomahawking it over the wall in right center to tie the game in the top of the ninth. Hendriks blew his second save, but because scoring doesn't quite have an answer for the situation, he also picked up his first win.
Madrigal also made up for the curious decision before him, when Yasmani Grandal bunted Robert to second after his leadoff single. Grandal showed bunt on the majority of his pitches, and while it advanced the runner to scoring position, it also took the bat out of Yermín Mercedes' hands. Billy Hamilton followed by striking out, making extra innings a real threat before Madrigal came through.
The first eight innings featured some of the White Sox's crispest baseball of the year. Dallas Keuchel scattered seven hits over six-plus shutout innings. He only struck out two, but he walked none and induced 11 groundouts, surviving an array of contact quality for his first quality start of the year. Codi Heuer survived two singles in the seventh, because Hamilton entered as a defensive replacement for Andrew Vaughn and gunned down Calhoun at the plate with two outs to keep it a 1-0 game.
The Sox had that 1-0 lead because of a couple defensive lapses on Texas' side. The Rangers played strong defense all night long, and lucked into some run prevention to start the sixth when Tim Anderson briefly lost contact with second base while sliding into/through it on a stolen base attempt (or so New York said).
Somehow, a White Sox offense characteristically silenced by Kyle Gibson over the first five innings overcame that misfortune. Yoán Moncada singled with two outs to keep the inning alive, took third when José Abreu's hot one-hopper ate up Isiah Kiner-Falefa at shortstop, then scored via #WILDPITCHOFFENSE.
Moncada was the only White Sox hitter with repeat success off Gibson, as he went 3-for-4 to raise his average to .265. They didn't have an extra-base hit until Madrigal's game-ender, and they also lacked a hit with runners in scoring position until then. That was only their fourth such at-bat, but that's all they needed.
Bullet points:
*Michael Kopech is starting tomorrow, when Lucas Giolito was originally scheduled. The reason:
*The Rangers had 11 of the 17 hardest-hit balls on the night.
*Andrew Vaughn tapped into his inner Yoenis Cespedes by bypassing the cutoff man to keep a runner at third. The stop sign was already up and the trailing runner made it to second no matter what, but it was fun theater.
