A score of scores in two games? Ridiculous!
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. But it’s even better to be lucky early and then get good later to seal the deal.
The luck came both ways the first few innings. For the first time since joining the Sox in May Adrian Houser just didn’t have it, getting clobbered by pretty much everyone in the MLB-worst Pirates offense. He escaped a three-hit first inning when Mike Tauchman got a fortunate bounce and made a nifty throw for the third out.
Houser escaped in the second after an Oneil Cruz leadoff triple, thanks mostly to a line shot right at Josh Rojas. Houser’s luck ran out in the fourth, however, when the Pirates hit the blazes out of the ball and ended up with three runs on four hits. He ended up giving up 10 hits, almost all solid, and a walk in 4 ⅓ innings and quite possibly sending his trade value onto the cliff edge.
Luck on the other side of the ball came the Sox way in the fifth, when Luis Robert Jr. dribbled one to second (their first hit off of Mike Burrows, and one of Robert’s very few hits this season off of a righty) and moved around on an error, a stolen base and a Lenyn Sosa single, which was followed by an RBI double by Rojas. Why was that luck? The hardest of the hits was softer than 82 mph.
But after the Pirates took a 4-2 lead, skill came into play. Burrows was taken out after just 76 pitches and five innings for some reason, and the White Sox made the Pirates pen walk the plank. Miguel Vargas doubled, Kyle Teel got a swinging bunt single (OK, it wasn’t all skill), Robert got another dribbled hit, Austin Slater singled and Sosa got hit in the stomach by a pitch, bringing up Tauchman with two outs.
That three-run double made it 7-4. The Sox added one more that inning on a Chase Meidroth single, then piled on two more in the seventh on Sosa’s third hit of the night:
Meanwhile, the bullpen shut out the feeble Pirates offense for 4 2⁄3 innings, with a little help from Tauchman, again:
Tauchman may have raised his trade value as much as Houser had lowered his.
Each team ended up with 13 hits, with Teel and Vargas both getting two, but the Sox cleverly put a lot of theirs in one inning — final score, 10-4.
That keeps the White Sox undefeated since the All-Star break, with a chance to sweep the series tomorrow afternoon because the Pirates for some reason decided to save both Paul Skenes and Mitch Keller for other opposition.
(An aside: Isn’t it bad enough we’re stuck watching a bad team being announced by pathetic frat boy John Schriffen? We have to put up with the horror that is Dan Plesac as well? Why, oh why — is it that by comparison Schriffen almost seems competent?)