Any casual viewers that carved out the latter portions of their Saturday night to watch the White Sox and Rockies combine for 13 runs on 26 hits, might be surprised to learn that this was the work of two bottom-five offenses in the league.
That the two sides left the night with only 50 wins between them might register as a smaller shock. But if the difference between a garden-variety last place team and historical ineptitude is simply accepting offers from the opposition to win the game, the White Sox demonstrated why they hold three-fifths of the pot.
A Sox lineup where the 3-4-5 hitters didn't add up to a full year of service time made this one eventually look lopsided with a symmetrical attack. They put up crooked numbers in the first and second, as well as the eighth and ninth, sandwiching a two-out Josh Rojas' bloop single to cash in Kyle Teel's leadoff walk in the fifth.
His season numbers indicated they could've winged it, but Sox hitters had a plan against Rockies starter Germán Márquez. Lenyn Sosa and Brooks Baldwin both tucked their hands in to pull inner-half heaters for doubles to open the scoring in the first, which became a two-spot when Colson Montgomery lifted a first-pitch curve into the thin air, where it carried long enough to clang off the top of the wall in right-center for an RBI triple. Maybe he used the elements for his first big league hit, but he'd be a fool not to.
By the end of the night, Montgomery was part of a trio of three-hit performances from the Sox batters, so the semantic debate is moot. Sosa and Tauchman were the other members of the trio. And after another pulled fastball for a double by Austin Slater, the former (Sosa) followed the latter's (Tauchman) scooped RBI single in the second by blasting a grooved 3-1 heater for a two-run shot to right-center. That staked Jonathan Cannon and the Sox to an early 5-2 lead, and put them in the position of fending off the Rockies nipping at their heels for the bulk of the evening.
Still not touting his sharpest command or nastiest stuff since returning from his back injury, Cannon had yielded a 2-0 lead and allowed three hits on his first six pitches of the game, and that was before the hairy part of the night began. He retired the next 10 hitters in order, before the Rockies opened a four-inning streak of having at least two batters reach base--and went scoreless in spite of it.
After Mickey Moniak's two-out double in the fourth, Slater's strong throw in dissuaded him from scoring on a Ryan McMahon single to right. Cannon looking out-of-sorts en route to walking Michael Toglia to load the bases was just prologue to Orlando Arcia grounding out on the first pitch to end the threat. When a Yanquiel Fernández single and Tyler Freeman double led off the fifth against Cannon to put runners in scoring position with no one out, none of the next three Rockies batters managed to leave in the infield.
Will Venable decided that was enough magic for one night out of Cannon when he walked McMahon and then yielded a single to Toglia with one out in the sixth, only to tap Jordan Leasure to reverse a season's worth of misfortune in a single five-out appearance. Leasure badly bounced two sliders before a fastball off the edge got Arcia to bounce into a slick double play turned by the unlikely pairing of Sosa to Montgomery.
As incredible as it would have been to watch White Sox Twitter as an entity endure three offensive innings of this nature, somehow, the bottom of the seventh might have topped them all.
Leasure grooved a full-count heater for a leadoff double to Fernández, before walking Freeman on four pitches. He recovered to induce a weak comebacker from Hunter Goodman that took an extra moment to gather, and Leasure compounded his miscalculation on timing with the always dangerous assumption that Sosa had his foot on the base, setting up a rare 1-4-3 fielder's choice to load the bases with no one out. Pivoting on a dime once more, Leasure dug deep for two of his best at-bats of the year, burying a slider to strike out Jordan Beck at the end of a nine-pitch war, before getting Thairo Estrada to roll over an 0-2 slider to set up Josh Rojas to turn a 5-3 double play to end the threat.
The brushes with disaster led the Sox to invest heavily in insurance, and rudely decline to return the Rockies' favors. When funky righty Jimmy Herget loaded the bases with no one out in the eighth, Sosa drilled a plate-splitting curve back up the middle for a two-run single, matching the career-high 4 RBI performance that he set less than two weeks ago. Colorado bringing out lefty Ryan Rolison seemed like a neat trick as he cut through the heart of the Sox order to stop the bleeding, and less so when he came back out for the ninth and allowed a 464-foot homer to Michael A. Taylor to dead center.
Extras runs were extra appreciated after Grant Taylor was used to save a one-run win the night before. Brandon Eisert and Steven Wilson covered the final two innings with only a Brenton Doyle solo shot mixed in. While they both have gotten high-leverage outs before, something about Eisert's body language on this routine lineout to right suggests less than 110 percent confidence.
More than enough other things went right.
Bullet points:
*The Rockies held a moment of silence for Bobby Jenks pregame.
*Sosa's three-hit performance combined with a rare night off for Miguel Vargas gave the second baseman the team lead in hits with 71 on the season.
*Teel and Ryan Noda were the only two Sox batters to go hitless, but they combined for three of the team's five walks and three runs scored. Every Sox hitter either scored or drove in a run.
