The White Sox, as most everybody following baseball knows, are the worst team in baseball.
The White Sox, as fewer people might know, hadn't won on a Monday all season.
Apparently they'd been saving up for tonight, because they're now 1-14 on Garfield's least favorite day of the week after setting season highs for any day in:
- Runs: 12 (previously 11 on June 29)
- Hits: 18 (14 on Friday)
- Extra-base hits; 9 (7 on April 10)
- Margin of victory: 10 (8 on June 29)
And they did it against the best team in baseball, which started one of the better pitchers in the game. That's one way for Grady Sizemore to get his first win.
Gavin Sheets and Andrew Vaughn had four hits apiece, and combined for five doubles between them. Dominic Fletcher had three hits. Korey Lee rocketed his 10th homer of the season out to left, Brooks Baldwin buggy-whipped his second career homer out to right, so while the White Sox came into this one with the second-fewest homers in MLB, while the Yankees had hit the second-most, the lesser team won 2-0 in that column tonight.
Nicky Lopez drew a walk against Luis Gil to open the night, and they never allowed him to relax. The resurgent Andrew Benintendi spanked an outer-half fastball to the right-center gap to tie game at 1, Gavin Sheets poked a double to left to score Benintendi, and even though Sheets was thrown out at home on the first questionable send of Justin Jirschele's third-base coaching career, the Sox led the rest of the way.
A six-run explosion in the seventh is what turned it into a rare laugher, especially since Enyel De Los Santos took over with one out and nobody on, only to give up six straight hits, culminating in Baldwin's three-run shot that put the Sox in double digits. The combination of Vaughn's fourth hit and Sheets' fourth hit made it an even dozen.
As funny as it was to see, it might've actually been funnier to see the White Sox win by one, because then you'd hear far more lamentations about repeatedly letting Bush off the hook. The Yankees went 2-for-18 with runners in scoring position, standing in stark contrast to the White Sox's 10-for-17 performance.
Bush's control problems from his debut in Oakland followed him into tonight's start. He immediately ran afoul of the general strategy for facing the Yankees by starting the game walking the two batters in front of Aaron Judge, and Judge doubled to left for the first run before the first out.
Yet the runners on second and third did not advance, because Bush induced three consecutive pop-ups to skirt further damage.
He allowed the first two to reach in the second on a single and walk, and they both advanced a base on a flyout and an error by Dominic Fletcher on a throw to third (Lenyn Sosa actually whiffed on a catchable bounce). Bush then walked Alex Verdugo to load the bases for Juan Soto and Judge, but Bush induced yet another popout, then survived a warning-track fly to right.
The third was more straight forward, because the Yankees reached on a pair of singles over the course of the first three batters, then grounded into a double play. But Bush was at it again in the fourth bwhen he walked the eighth and ninth hitters to open the inning. Once again a popout helped him out (a Verdugo bunt), and then Gavin Sheets made a great diving stab Soto's smash to the right side for the second out. That opened up first base for an intentional walk to Judge, and Bush once again left the bases loaded by striking out Giancarlo Stanton.
Bush opened the fifth with two outs, but that's somehow when he gave up his other run. Jazz Chisholm Jr. kept the inning alive with a single, stole second, and when he took off for third, he opened up the left side for Anthony Volpe's grounder to leak through, and while Lopez made a valiant attempt to gun down Chisholm at the plate, Chisholm touched the plate before Lee could get the tag down, making it a 4-2 game.
Grady Sizemore then pulled Bush one out short of his first career win, because he was at 97 pitches with the top of the order lurking for a fourth time. Touki Toussaint ended up vulturing the win by getting DJ LeMahieu to ground out to end the fifth, then pitching the first of four full scoreless innings by the White Sox bullpen to carry it across the finish line.
Bullet points:
*Bush's final line: 4.2 IP, 6 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 7 BB, 2 K. Baseball-Reference.com says he's only the 20th big-league pitcher to allow at least 13 baserunners in fewer than five innings while only giving up two runs, and the first since Jose Ureña in 2017.
*Sosa was the only one to go hitless, going 0-for-5 from the second spot, but at least he dodged an error.
*Toussaint contributed an error on an errant pickoff move, but it didn't hurt him.
