White Sox 2, Tigers 1: Chris Sale a winner on record-setting night

A rocky season by Chris Sale's standards ended with a satisfying evening.

Sale set the White Sox single-season record for strikeouts en route to seven innings of one run ball, picking up his 13th victory of the season to close out a historic year.

The Condor set the record in the second inning by freezing James McCann with a backdoor breaking ball, giving him 270 for the season to break Ed Walsh's 107-year-old record.

It was Sale's third strikeout of the night, and he went on to finish with a total of 274 after fanning seven over seven-plus innings.

Sale's evening probably should've ended when J.B. Shuck made a spectacular catch in right field I would describe as "horizontal Dewayne Wise."

Instead, he came back to start the eighth and allowed the first two batters to reach on a double and a plunking. Robin Ventura then took his time calling for Matt Albers, dragging out the conversation long enough for Albers to doubt the call and start heading back to the bullpen. Regardless of the stutter start, Albers stranded Sale's runners by going three-up-three-down with a medium-range flyout, a shallow flyout, and a grounder to third that Tyler Saladino snagged with a nifty stop on the backhand side.

David Robertson then capped it off with a 1-2-3 inning for his 34th save, completing a pitching effort that allowed one crooked number to hold up.

The Sox trailed 1-0 on a Jefry Marte homer entering the bottom of the third, but Carlos Sanchez squeezed a grounder through the right side to start the inning. Saladino was hit by a pitch, and Adam Eaton drove them both home with a double to the left-center gap. He was then thrown out trying to get to third, but the Sox ended up not needing that run.

Bullet points:

*The wind was howling toward home plate most of the night. A potential Tyler Flowers moon shot toward the foul pole ended up falling 25 feet short of the fence and in foul territory, even surprising left fielder Rajai Davis.

*That wind might explain the large strike zone and the two-hour, 13-minute game.

*The Sox threw leather all night. Besides the catch by Shuck and the play by Saladino, Alexei Ramirez caught a one-hopper while falling backward in his typical style.

Record: 75-85 | Box score | Play-by-play | Highlights