In the White Sox's first game of last year's postseason, they benefited from a favorable pitching matchup on paper that materialized in practice. They had Lucas Giolito against a lefty in Jesus Luzardo, and everything went according to plan in a 4-1 victory.
This year, the script was stacked against the White Sox. Lance McCullers Jr. is lab-designed to destroy the White Sox as a righty who only has to use his fastball when he wants to and gets both strikeouts and ground balls, while Lance Lynn's array of fastballs has never impressed the Astros.
Those two things played out accordingly. McCullers got more soft contact than strikeouts, but dominated just the same over 6⅔ innings. Lynn's location wasn't on, and things like leadoff walks and ill-timed wild pitches added more stress than he could absorb. The White Sox fell behind 5-0 on Lynn's watch, and eventually 6-0 before the offense could find its good swings, mostly against pitchers who weren't McCullers.
If the game had inflection points, they weren't likely to change the outcome much. For instance, Yoán Moncada probably should've thrown to first to retire Alex Bregman, rather than make a low-probability throw home to nab José Altuve on a contact play in the third inning. Altuve had reached on a leadoff walk, took second on a Michael Brantley sac bunt (unsuccessful attempt to single against the shift, foiled by Moncada), then took third on a wild pitch. Moncada made a nice sliding pick, but he hesitated the slightest amount with his throw home, as if his body was telling him "take the out." Moncada instead chose an attempt to keep it a 1-0 game, but it didn't work, and Bregman ended up coming around to score on a Yordan Alvarez double to make it a 3-0 game.
The other involved pitching to Brantley an inning later, after Altuve doubled Kyle Tucker to third with two outs. Brantley came to the plate with a base open, and Lynn could have walked him to bring Alex Bregman to the plate instead. Brantley, who had two unimpressive at-bats to start the game, came through on his third with a single through the right side to put the game in low-leverage territory.
Reynaldo López, Garrett Crochet and José Ruiz took it from there, with López allowing the only other run on an Alvarez solo shot. Maybe if La Russa goes to the bullpen earlier, the Sox are able to keep the Astros below five runs.
But then there's still the matter of figuring out McCullers, which the White Sox could not do until the very end. Through the first six innings, he limited the Sox to a Luis Robert HBP, a Yoán Moncada single and Robert reaching on an error that probably should've been called a single. The Sox only hit three balls harder than 90 mph during that time, and Moncada's single was the only one that got off the ground.
They started hitting McCullers harder as he approached the 100-pitch mark, although three singles in the seventh inning failed to generate a run because of a Yasmani Grandal double play in the middle of it. They finally broke through in the eighth with a two-out rally off Kendall Graveman, which Tim Anderson started with a single. Yoán Moncada drew a walk, and José Abreu did his RBi thing with a single to right to score Anderson to spoil the shutout. Up came Grandal, who worked a deep count before lining out to deep center at 104 mph.
They also faced closer Ryan Pressly in the final inning, including a Robert single for what should've been his third hit of the game. The Sox can build off this, at least provided that Giolito offers more than Lynn at the front of Game 2, and provided that some of their hits are more than singles.
Bullet points:
*Lynn threw fastballs on 74 of 76 pitches, which made a sort of history.
*The Astros only fared slightly better than the Sox with runners in scoring position (2-for-8 vs. 1-for-8), but getting runners to third increases the ways to get a guy home.
*Robert was thrown out trying to steal second on Martin Maldonado after his second-inning HBP. The Astros had a guy in motion a few times, but the running game didn't factor into this one.
