Sox fans, I’m going to keep this pretty brief.
Yesterday, I was very enthused with the early offense that the team was able to muster up against Clayton Kershaw. It was everything the team needed to get them rolling in this west coast series.
But jumping ahead, Los Angeles had a 5-run 7th inning to give them a 6-5 lead. And at that point, I started thinking about what kind of a loss the game would be.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t a loss I would’ve been too mad about. Chris Sale fought hard, very hard, but just didn’t have a good day. You won’t see him pitch worse than that very often at all; so Sale isn’t the one to shake your head at.
Jesse Crain has been a great set up man for the squad, and the fact that he let up two 2-out hits that ultimately gave the Dodgers that 6-5 lead didn’t upset me too much because again, I knew it was an anomaly.
The only true downside to the game was the 7th inning. With that half inning seeming like an outlier, you kind of just had to shrug your shoulder and say “eh, it happens.”
Photo courtesy CSN Bay Area
But when Alex Rios went deep in the 8th inning to tie the game at 6 a piece, I thought to myself, “wow, if we can pull this one out, we can win a lot of ball games.”
Of course, Matt Thornton came in and let up the game winning run in bottom of the 8th, and the Sox went on to lose the game 7-6. But he didn’t just let up a run, he pitched a pathetic half of an inning. When you walk the leadoff man and let him score with their team only using the wild pitch offense, it’s something you can be upset about.
And it was at that point where my opinion changed and I was finally mad about the ball game.
Still, the takeaway from the game has to be at least somewhat positive, because if you can score 5 runs off of Clayton Kershaw or score 5 runs for Chris Sale, you’ll win the game 9 times out of 10. Losing the game when pairing the two is, as stated earlier, a full-on anomaly.
There’s only one way that you can easily forgive a team about such a disappointing anomaly, though: wins. The White Sox are in a good position, as they’re playing poor baseball and are in 1st place of the AL Central division. But it’s time for them to get going again.
They don’t have to become the hottest team in the game, they just need to win some series. If the Sox lose tonight, it’ll be their 4th straight series loss. And yeah, the last two have been against very good NL teams, but you still can get upset over 4 consecutive poor series.
So without further ado, let’s just tune in to the Sox game tonight and hope that the team can give themselves a chance to win the series on Sunday afternoon.
Eh, I guess that wasn’t all too brief.
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This post was by Founder and Managing Editor of GSB!, @zach_gropper!
GO SOX