If Will Venable wanted to take the page out of Pedro Grifol's playbook by calling the White Sox offense flat in a game started by Kyle Bradish, there'd be more justification for doing so.
Coming off three runs over three losses in Cleveland, the White Sox ambushed Bradish for a run on three first-inning hits, and then apparently met their allowance. Dominic Fletcher's leadoff double in the fifth -- a few pitches after barely missing a leadoff homer -- was the only other hit, and three unproductive at-bats left him stranded there.
"Just couldn’t really string anything together," Will Venable said, opting for his typical postgame demeanor. "Bradish did a great job. He’s got really good stuff. He just kind of had us in between, really beat us in a lot of different ways."
Bradish wasn't necessarily the antagonist, though. He was effective in the sense that he allowed just one run over five innings while striking out nine, but the White Sox made him work with four hits and four walks, and left a lot of work for the Orioles bullpen.
It's just that Kade Stroud and Dietrich Enns proceeded to retire all 12 batters they faced, including six by strikeout. Throw in the order of Bradish's final inning of work, and the last 15 White Sox who came to the plate were set down in order.
"It's part of baseball," said Chase Meidroth, who extended his hitting streak to 11 games. "We're better than that. A lot of good swings on the ball, a few balls right at people. We're going to keep going and move on to tomorrow and get a win tomorrow."
The White Sox struck out 15 times overall, including an 0-for-4, three-K night for Kyle Teel, and a golden sombrero for Lenyn Sosa. White Sox hitters swung and missed 28 times, and when they did make contact, it resulted in only four hard-hit balls.
"Really, again, it starts with the fastball, just really being aggressive early to it in the zone," Venable said. "Seen some foul balls and some swings and misses, some takes. So just got to get back to the foundational stuff and shorten up and get to the heaters."
The White Sox's pitching efforts, opened by Tyler Gilbert with Sean Burke as the bulk boy, tried to match Baltimore inning for inning, but the game took the decisive turn once the bullpen entered for real in the sixth.
Steven Wilson offered no immediate clues by retiring the first two hitters. Wilson then walked Coby Mayo with two outs, which both extended the inning while ending his evening.
Will Venable then went to Tyler Alexander for multiple lefty-lefty matchups, but while it made sense on paper, it couldn't have worked any worse in practice. Alexander lost three consecutive battles, giving up a single to Samuel Basallo on an elevated 2-2 sweeper, and then an opposite-field homer to Colton Cowser on an elevated sinker away. Jackson Holliday then made it three in a row with a double inside the right field line before Jeremiah Jackson flied out to bring the inning to a merciful end.
Jackson had provided the first Baltimore run in the third with an RBI single that produced the only damage off Burke, but Burke's outing probably didn't change many minds. He allowed just one run over four innings, but he walked four and plunked another, and averaged 22 pitches per inning after Gilbert's 10-pitch, eight-strike first.
"Stuff-wise I felt good," Burke said. "I did a pretty good job of getting ahead of guys. Just trying to do a little too much with the two-strike pitches, and I ended up being uncompetitive and kind of backed myself up to a count where I needed to make a pitch. So, I think this week and going into the next one, putting an emphasis on continuing to try to get ahead of guys and be a little bit sharper with my two strike pitches."
Bullet points:
*Colson Montgomery's 111.2 mph base hit that preceded Curtis Mead's opposite-field RBI single in the first inning was the hardest-hit ball of the night. The Orioles had seven of the next eight.
*Meidroth extended his hitting streak to 11 games and also made a couple of nifty plays in the ninth. First he quickly turned a 5-4-3 double play to make up for the time lost with Mead's double pump, and then saved Sosa an error by scooping a deflected ball with his bare hand and firing to Sosa, who made the right call in immediately retreating to the bag.
"Never give up on the baseball," Meidroth said of his scramble to rescue Sosa. "Always follow the baseball. There's always somewhere to be."
*Enns posted the third three-inning save against the White Sox this year, but the first in an actual save situation. The other two were blowouts.
