Lance Lynn became the first of the previously injured White Sox starters to venture into the sixth inning.
He took the loss because of the longer leash, but it was still an idea worth pursuing.
Lynn gave up a pair of singles and a sac bunt before yielding the inning to Garrett Crochet, who gave up the go-ahead single to DJ Peters that proved to be the winning margin. It could've been a two-run single, but Luis Robert and Yasmani Grandal teamed up for a fantastic outfield assist that kept it a one-run game.
Alas, the White Sox offense could only muster three hits. They generated seven walks, but outside of a Grandal solo shot in the sixth that tied the game at 1, they couldn't find impact contact against a Rangers bullpen game. A lot of their contact stayed on the ground, including five groundouts induced by former White Sox Drew Anderson, who logged his first career win. He allowed just the Grandal solo shot over three innings, which was good enough to get the game into the seventh for Texas.
The Sox started taking better swings late in the game, but the Rangers defense kept them off the board. In the seventh, Adolis Garcia made a leaping catch on the warning track to rob Yoán Moncada of a game-tying double some 393 feet away from the plate. An inning later, Leury García smoked a 100 mph line drive with two on and two outs, but Nick Solak snagged it with a leap to preserve the margin.
So Lynn ended up taking the defeat, even though he allowed just one earned run over 5⅓ innings. The first Texas run scored in the fourth via a painstaking sequence. Andy Ibañez's sinking liner up the middle skipped past a diving Leury García with one out. Lynn seemed to erase it when he got a grounder to third, but Romy González dropped Yoán Moncada's throw as he came across the bag. Instead of three outs, the Rangers had first and second with one out.
Lynn then walked the bases loaded, but got another potential double play ball to the right side of second base. Leury García flagged it down, retreated to second for one, then fired to first for two.
Or so the White Sox thought. While Jonah Heim was originally ruled out at first, Chris Woodward challenged the play and got it overturned, allowing the game's first run to score by a matter of inches.
The González error forced Lynn to throw 12 extra pitches to close out the fourth, but he was still efficient enough to get through five innings with a pitch count of 73. He struck out five around six hits and two walks over his 5⅓ innings, so he's 2-for-2 in encouraging outings since coming off the injured list.
Bullet points:
*The magic number remains 5, as Cleveland beat the Yankees.
*Grandal had a homer and two walks to start a new on-base streak after seeing his previous run snapped at 30 on Friday.
