ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Hawk Harrelson used to say that winning major league baseball games came down to which team made the fewest mistakes. And as a churlish teen, I used to interpret that as indication I was watching a White Sox team that lacked the ability to impose its will upon opponents.
But then again, Sunday’s rubber match victory at Tropicana Field saw the best White Sox team in five years jump out to an early 2-0 lead in the first inning mostly due to the best team in the American League committing flagrant acts of self-sabotage. And the real turn is that it eventually led to the White Sox imposing their will.
“We did a really good job to put the front office in that position [to trade for Luis Castillo],” said Miguel Vargas. “It’s great. I think we are on the same page thinking about the World Series, that’s great for the organization and for the team.”
Sam Antonacci reached to lead off the game when Ryan Vilade–making his second career start at second base–booted a routine grounder. After he made it to third on a two-out Colson Montgomery double, Antonacci scored when starter Griffin Jax mishandled Andrew Benintendi’s soft tapper to the mound. The play that scored Montgomery was odder still, with an apparent slow-motion double steal aided by a bounced changeup getting away Nick Fortes behind the plate, and Ben Williamson’s strange passivity in putting a tag on Benintendi–which would’ve ended the inning–as he glided around him into second.
“To get two runs early is obviously a nice way to start the game,” Will Venable said. “Really, because of those two errors, right? Those were two tough plays for them, where obviously they’re such a good defensive team that they usually make those. But a good job by our guys to take advantage.”
While 2-0 is not a decisive advantage, Venable often touts the value of taking the lead even by a single run due to the impact it has on the decisions of the opposing dugout. A fourth inning Benintendi solo shot on a backfoot sweeper that never got home was the only other tally Sox hitting managed in Jax’s five innings of work. But with his club down 3-0, Rays manager Kevin Cash didn’t turn things over to his top relief arms like on Saturday, but instead went to the 38-year-old Craig Kimbrel.
In a fashion veteran Sox Machine readers might recognize, Kimbrel looked awesome mowing down Colson Montgomery to lead off the sixth, shaky in allowing Benintendi to fly out to the wall in center. And only when it got to two outs and the bases empty, did he really start making things interesting. Kimbrel walked both Tristan Peters and Chase Meidroth on 11 pitches total, but Fortes thought they had Everson Pereira rung up on a 1-2 heater away, only for the ball call to hold up on review. The next pitch was a sweeper that caught both all the plate, and all of Pereira’s barrel for a ringing two-run double to the left-center gap.
“It was a very satisfying feeling,” Pereira said via interpreter. “I wasn’t sure of anything. I just was hoping for the ball to be out of the strike zone. Watching the replay, it was definitely closer than I was expecting.”
The building advantage allowed Venable to extend an efficient, if not overwhelming Anthony Kay to a career-high 6 1/3 innings of scoreless baseball. He only struck out three, two of them coming against a befuddled Cedric Mullins, but the waves of weak contact were reliable, even when the Rays twice loaded the bases against him.
When three of the first four hitters singled against him in the fourth, Kay turned to his cutter to jam Jonny DeLuca into a soft popout to Colson Montgomery, and then turned to it again to induce Ben Williamson into a high, inning-ending chopper back to the mound that he handled himself to end the threat. When two infield singles sandwiched around a sharp Chandler Simpson grounder up the middle re-loaded the bases with two outs in the sixth, Kay took a long mound visit from Zach Bove as Grant Taylor warmed (for the third time this series). But Kay emerged from the chat to get Williamson to roll over a changeup to Montgomery for another routine-looking escape.
“That’s kind of my go-to pitch, is getting the cutter in on guys,” Kay said. “A lot of the success today led with that. It showed that getting the cutter in leads to being able to use the changeup a little bit more and using the four-seam up a little bit. When that thing is working, that’s when I’m at my best.”
After getting hot but not coming twice already this series, Taylor’s velocity was down roughly 3 mph across the board. Nevertheless, he relieved Kay after a one-out walk in the seventh and struck out Yandy Díaz with a curve at the end of an eight-pitch battle, before getting Jonathan Aranda to roll over another bender. Better yet, Taylor pitched over both a leadoff Junior Caminero single and Simpson infield knock that got him to second on a rushed Colson Montgomery throw in the eighth. He got Vilade to bounce into a 5-4-3 to empty the bases before Simpson, before Vargas made a gem of a spinning snag on a hard grounder to the six-hole to end the medium-leverage portion of the game.
“He did have a few days off after two innings a few days ago, but yeah, the last two days he ended up getting hot, got hot earlier in the game today,” Venable said. “So, I think just overuse on the mound.”
Because when you take a 5-0 lead into the ninth, then the opposing manager really digs into the crates. Pereira added to his big day in rookie Alex Cook’s second inning of work, launching a fastball on his hands for a two-run shot to left-center, before Vargas added a two-run shot of his own by ambushing a grooved sinker Chris Roycraft sinker for his 24th dinger of the season.
*Bullet points:
*Duncan Davitt got career strikeout No. 1 against Richie Palacios while pitching the ninth. Then he got optioned postgame, with Castillo joining the team in Boston as the telegraphed corresponding move.
*Pereira wasn’t even supposed to be here today; he replaced Braden Montgomery, who was a late scratch due to what the team said is a superficial skin infection on his right ankle.
*Briefly, Colson Montgomery was the first White Sox player to steal home since Braden Shewmake on April 24, 2024. Shewmake has played for four other MLB organizations since, and the scoring on Montgomery’s steal has since been changed to advancing on a wild pitch. No scoring decision has been made on Benintendi’s euro step to duck a tag at second.
*Peters snapped an 0-for-24 slump with a fourth inning single. Pereira’s two-run double ended an 0-for-20 skid.
*The Rays are now 16-2 against left-handed starters at Tropicana Field this season. A ninth inning solo shot from Williamson made the weekend’s scoring margin 15-3 in favor of the Sox.
Record: 59-52 | Box score | Statcast
