After the White Sox improbably rallied for a four-run eighth to take the rubber match of what was a crucial three-game set for Detroit, Good Twitter User Neal Hamer posed the following interrogatory
@JRFegan is this the first series the Sox have won against KC, Detroit or Cleveland this year?
— Neal Hamer (@nealhamer) September 7, 2016
Ha, the first all year, that’s absur–ooooooohhhhh my goodness. They had one previously–one!–in mid-June, also against Detroit, and also at U.S. Cellular Field. It’s practically a house of horrors for them (they’re 5-5 this season)!
1. Down 4-3 due to a particularly rough day for starter Jose Quintana, the Sox faced reliever Shane Greene, followed by Justin Wilson in the eighth, and pretty much detonated on both of them. Greene at least achieved the feat of recording an out. Jose Abreu led off the inning with his third single of the day, and came around to score when Justin Morneau followed him by banging a double to right-center to tie the game. After a Todd Frazier groundout, Avisail Garcia, in a singular moment that surely redeemed all his prior struggles, grounded a 95 mph fastball back up the middle to push across pinch-runner J.B. Shuck and give the Sox a 4-3 lead they would only build upon.
2. That moment sort of decided the game on its own, but Wilson came on and issued a walk to Omar Narvaez (naturally), and successive RBI singles through the left side of the infield to Tyler Saladino and Adam Eaton to put the game out of the reach. Bringing on Mark Lowe seemed to serve as a surrender, but he wound up closing out the inning with no further damage, even if he needed Abreu to lineout to center with the bases juiced to do it.
3. The Sox only know one way to operate with a lead, so David Robertson, less than 18 hours removed from his shaky save Tuesday night, came on for his fourth appearance in as many nights, and immediately walked J.D. Martinez and allowed a single to Justin Upton to draw all the comfort away from a three-run lead. But Robertson now has been doing this along enough to establish a method, and for the second-straight night he cut through the bottom of the Tigers’ order, and whiffed an overwhelmed, pinch-hitting Tyler Collins to end the game.
4. Upton scooping a curve and blasting a three-run bomb out to left in the second inning initially put the Sox in a 3-1 hole, and was the primary black mark on Quintana’s second-straight rough start. He recovered to retire 11 in a row afterward, but was chased from the seventh inning by the unlikely trio of James McCann, Casey McGehee and Jose Iglesias, the latter of which also scooped a curve down-and-in and ripped it into the left field corner to put the Tigers back ahead.
5. Embattled former All-Star Anibal Sanchez started for the Tigers, and while he was very far from dominant, allowing 10 baserunners in five innings, Brad Ausmus had to be happy to be able to pull him from a matchup with Quintana and go to the bullpen with a tie game. Melky Cabrera smacking an RBI double to left-center initially put the Sox up in the first inning, but it was Upton getting a bad read on a Cabrera bloop that hurt Sanchez in the third. Saladino scored as Upton drifted back for a duck snort that would instead drop in front of him, and the gaffe allowed Eaton to scoot to third, from where he would score on an Abreu sacrifice fly.
Team Record: 67-72
Next game is Friday vs. Kansas City at 7:10pm CT on CSN
Lead Image Credit: Kamil Krzaczynski // USA Today Sports Images