The 2024 White Sox are officially eliminated from postseason contention, and it happened in a fitting fashion.
For one, they lost a Chris Flexen start, which makes it 18 in a row there. They also provided him a tragic lack of support on both sides of the ball, as an early 1-0 lead gave way under a number of miscues in the third inning, and the Sox never came close to getting back into it.
Flexen opened the game by retiring the first seven he faced before Shay Whitcomb blistered a double to right-center for his first major league hit. He moved to third on Mauricio Dubón's single to left, and when Lenyn Sosa couldn't make a hop on Andrew Benintendi's throw home and allowed Dubón to move to second when the ball leaked through him, it foreshadowed the ugliness to come.
Flexen first was deprived a backwards K of Jose Altuve when home plate umpire Mike Estabrook let a 1-2 fastball down the middle at the bottom of the zone go unrewarded. Altuve took advantage of the second live by slapping a single to center that scored both runs to give Houston the lead.
Altuve then took second on a not-that-wild pitch from Flexen, then stole third by taking advantage of Flexen's negligence. He could just trot home when Yordan Alvarez shanked a single to left, making it 3-1.
That's where the scoring stopped, although not for a lack of trying. Brooks Baldwin couldn't find the grip on a double-play turn, resulting in a softer-than-usual throw that allowed Jeremy Peña to avoid an inning-ending twin killing. Flexen then picked off Peña, but Andrew Vaughn paid way too much attention to Alvarez at third. He never actually started a rundown with Peña, and Alvarez never strayed that far from third, so when Vaughn tried firing a throw across the diamond, Alvarez managed to beat it standing up. Fortunately, Flexen struck out Jon Singleton -- the fifth out of the inning -- to finally escape his personal hell.
The White Sox couldn't mount another threat off Hunter Brown after the first, when Benintendi walked with two outs, and Vaughn and Gavin Sheets singled to make it a 1-0 game. The Sox only tallied three other hits and two walks the rest of the way, and of those baserunners were erased prematurely. Sheets broke the wrong way on Dominic Fletcher's line drive to short in the fourth inning, resulting in an unassisted double play. Luis Robert Jr. was caught stealing, and Vaughn grounded into a double play to end the game.
Bullet point:
*Gus Varland made his White Sox debut in the eighth and gave up an unearned run on an errant pickoff move with runners on the corners.
