The White Sox have been worse than .500 all season long, so declaring them a must-watch team seems a bit hyperbolic.
But Friday’s 8-2 annihilation of a Padres team very strong out of the gate — 5 1/2 games better than Chicago entering play — touched on the three players most likely to make you stop whatever you’re doing and stare.
First off, and most substantially, it was a masterpiece start by Noah Schultz, in just his fourth career outing — although it didn’t begin as such. Schultz’s outing began
miserably, a miserable first inning that found the wunderkind southpaw walking two Padres on, balking the runners to second and third, and then filling the bases with a third walk. However, the lefty attacked Ty France with three straight fastballs for strikes, generating a ground out to escape the jam.
And from there, that was all she wrote. After throwing just 15 of 29 pitches for strikes in the first, Schultz melted through the next three innings with 20-of-27 strikes, one single and zero walks.
Even better, Padres starter Germán Márquez, who’d already had a sloppy and inefficient first frame, was even worse in the second, issuing four walks. Three of those walks scored on a Sam Antonacci single, Andrew Benintendi sac fly and an Austin Hayes ground out. Then, with two on and two out with a full count, Munetaka Murakami took over the MLB lead in home runs and gave the White Sox a 6-0 lead with a no-doubter to right-center:
Our second must-watch player continues to place himself in rare air in MLB history. Per Sarah Langs, Murakami now ranks third all-time in home runs through 32 career games. Something tells me he is going to be No. 1 on the list by the time we get to Game 50 or so.
And finally, must-watch ABs come from Colson Montgomery as well. And Colson extended the White Sox rout with a first-pitch screamer out to right-center with two outs in the fifth:
That homer should have been a two-run shot, as right before Colson’s clout Miguel Vargas connected on a superb hustle double, turning a standard single to center into a two-bagger with an aggressive, hard cut at the first base bag. Vargas beat the throw but was ruled out on the field; the appeal at second was denied, backed by a claim that Vargas drifted off of the bag during his slide.
He did not:
Schultz ended up going a scoreless six innings and holding 88.9% of the Padres lineup hitless (Fernando Tatís Jr. was the only one to touch him, with a single in the third and triple in the sixth). The southpaw did not walk a single batter after the first inning, and struck out two.
Kudos to the offense as a whole tonight, for being smart enough to sense that Márquez was on the ropes struggling to get his knuckle-curve over the plate and working at-bats deep. Eight batters had worked counts at least five pitches deep through the first 3 1/3 innings of the game.
Three singles in the eighth rounded the White Sox run total up to eight.
The Padres did finally rally off of the eminently-hittable Osvaldo Bido in the eighth, stringing a walk and three singles together to puncture the scoreboard with two runs.
