The Texas Rangers scored four runs but the Chicago White Sox scored ten runs.
There felt like a few distinct segments to this Human Centipede of a baseball game that was sewn together and presented to us tonight.
In the early innings, the Rangers drew eight walks before they had committed ten outs outs and knocked the Chicago starter out of the game a couple of batters into the fourth. They would have had zero runs to show for it had Joc Pederson not smacked a two-run home run to tie the game in the top
of the third.
The White Sox, meanwhile, capitalized on the weekly Gore Inning for a couple of runs with their standard barrage of weak contact bloop hits that found holes and bad Texas defenders.
Those early failures fed into a stretch where Skip Schumaker went into his Turbo Tryhard Manager mode with such genius tactical maneuvers as sacrifice bunting No. 9 hitter Cody Freeman with a couple on and no outs with a lefty on the mound and two left-handed batters due up.
Corey Seager isn’t a platoon guy by Joc Pederson very much is. Pederson wasn’t pinch hit for. Maybe Schumaker thought it was a little too early to begin his nightly pinch hit dart throwing ritual or maybe he was feeling a bit embarrassed about being strategically worked over by a team that lost 102 games last season with much of the same cast.
Neither Pederson nor Seager drove in runs after Schumaker elected to operate with just two outs in the inning instead of the century plus standard of three.
An inning later, Schumaker lifted Evan Carter for third string catcher Logan O’Hoppe with a couple on base after Chicago had collected a couple of runs, highlighted by a bloop RBI hit that professional first baseman Pederson — still in the game, remember — was hopelessly unable to catch and an RBI hit on a play where Wyatt Langford’s throw to the plate from shallow left field bounced like twenty times before making it as far as the pitchers mound.
Anyway, O’Hoppe struck out and that meant Carter was gone so Ezequiel Duran had to move to center field and Nicky Lopez had to come in to replace Duran at shortstop because Seager was DHing which had necessitated Pederson to be in the field for like his tenth time in the last half decade.
Also, Schumaker pinch hit Pederson for Jake Burger the next inning anyway.
After all this, the White Sox merely pushed their way past Texas’ pathetic early punches, withstood Skip Schumaker’s cunning mid-game techniques, and scored eight runs over the next three innings to turn what had been a game that was full of missed opportunities, then then one filled with exploited weaknesses, into a certain blowout.
Much like the Tom Six films, that was a laborious watch in a series and season filled with ‘em.
Player of the Game: Duran had a couple of hits and drove in a couple of runs.
Up Next: The Rangers don’t play baseball tomorrow, thank god.
