After closing out their homestand with an eight-run loss, on Thursday the White Sox opened up their 10-game, 10-day road trip in Boston with a seven-run defeat tonight, and this one took a human toll. Martín Perez came out throwing batting practice, and he left after three innings with forearm tightness.
The Red Sox took a 3-0 lead after four batters, with every hitter punishing what Pérez had to offer:
- Jarren Duran, 104.7 mph lineout
- Rafael Devers, 102.1 mph ground-rule double just out of the reach of Michael A. Taylor in the center field triangle.
- Trevor Story, 105.1 mph three-run homer.
- Romy González, 106.2 mph lineout.
- Rob Refsnyder, 102.5 mph single to right.
Even Carlos Narváez's inning-ending groundout was hit at 94.5 mph, but it at least got Pérez back to the dugout. Pérez then survived two triple-digit line drives in a 1-2-3 second, but after Brooks Baldwin played a soft one-hopper off to his side for a leadoff "single" in the third, it came around to score on a blistered Refsnyder double off the Green Monster.
Pérez left the third trailing 4-1, but he'd only thrown 52 pitches, which made it suspicious when Penn Murfee replaced him in the bottom of the fourth.
"Sore, and just going to wait for the MRI tomorrow," Pérez told reporters when asked how he felt after the game. "I don’t want to push it ... If you have to take a couple of days off and come back again, we are going to see what it’s going to be. We’ll get everything tomorrow and move on."
Murfee then suffered the same sequence as Pérez, watching Joshua Palacios misplay a fly to right for a "double," then come around to score on Ceddanne Rafael's no-doubt two-run shot that made it a 6-1 game.
The Red Sox feasted all evening, blasting four homers, including a second three-run homer for Story off Tyler Gilbert in the seventh, and the first career homer for Narváez off Bryse Wilson in the eighth. Seven of their 11 hits went for extra bases, and they owned 12 of the 16 hardest-hit balls of the evening.
Unlike Thursday's 8-0 loss to Oakland, at least the White Sox produced something on the offensive side.
Andrew Benintendi seems healthy, which helps. He scored the first two White Sox runs, and in vastly different fashions. He broke up Hunter Dobbins' no-hit bid by hacking a hanging slider just inside the Pesky Pole for a solo shot that made it a 4-1 game in the fourth.
Two innings later, he reached on a Story throwing error with one out, went to third on Lenyn Sosa's single to right, then scored on Palacios' tapper to the right side. If the game were closer than 6-1 at the time, Dobbins might've considered a play at the plate, but he chose the sure out and was wise to do so, seeing as how the support kept coming.
And if you stuck around for the top of the ninth when the White Sox were trailing 10-2, Edgar Quero notched his first major league hit. He entered in the seventh for Matt Thaiss, who got beat up behind the plate, and while he flied out to right field in his first trip, he slashed a double into the left field corner with two outs in the ninth for his first MLB hit. Baldwin followed with an RBI single before the 27th out. It didn't make a meaningful dent in the outcome, but these numbers matter to a person.
Bullet points:
*Palacios hit cleanup for the White Sox, going 0-for-4 with the cheap RBI groundout. He also turned a single into a double in the first inning while slipping, which put an error on his record even before the scorer bailed him out on the fly ball in the fourth.
*Conversely, Story atoned for his two errors with six RBIs, which seems more like the idea.
*Nick Maton hit sixth and came within an inch of a homer inside the Pesky Pole, but it hit off metal reinforcement behind the padding and bounced back into the field of play, and the double held up under review.
*Jordan Leasure was the only reliever who wasn't scored or homered upon, as he struck out both batters he faced in the seventh.
