After the second inning, it looked like the second-half White Sox finally figured out how to consistently punish bad pitching. Brad Penny had little -- his curve floated -- and the Sox spanked him. Doubles by Adam Dunn and Alex Rios sandwiched a Carlos Quentin walk for the game's first run, and an A.J. Pierzynski sac fly and a Gordon Beckham single made it a 3-0 game. They hit all the batted balls squarely, and Penny wasn't fooling anybody.
Penny didn't pitch much better through the rest of the game, leaving lots of pitches up in the zone. Yet the Sox couldn't muster anything against Penny or the Tiger bullpen, which gave Detroit eight innings to make up ground against Phil Humber.
That they did. Humber recovered well enough from Brennan Boesch's solo homer in the fourth, but the Tigers came back to knock him out in the sixth. It started with an Alexei Ramirez error-turned-double (tough pick on a sinking liner, but it ramped off him and into shallow center) and a one-out walk to Magglio Ordonez.
Humber had the unenviable task of facing Miguel Cabrera with two on, but he attacked Cabrera with a great sequence. He threw his max fastball on the corners (ramping it up to 92 mph), and then threw a great slider to get a tapper to short. But Jim Leyland sent the runners to avoid the double play, and that paid off when Victor Martinez golfed a not-great curve into right field to tie the game.
A Jhonny Peralta single knocked Humber out of the game, and when Chris Sale came in, Carlos Guillen was ready. He took a first-pitch fastball into right field, and Carlos Quentin couldn't come up with it cleanly (he also bobbled Martinez's single), which allowed the go-ahead run to score.
Humber started much better than he finished, striking out the side in his first inning. But he could've used more help. The Sox only had one at-bat with a runner in scoring position with fewer than two outs after the second inning, and that was in the top of the ninth.
Record: 46-49 | Box score | Play-by-play