Six Pack: White Sox 5, Cubs 3

The Game in a Nutshell

The Big Baby went BOOM in the first inning, pushing the White Sox lead to 5-0 and giving the South Siders enough to win without having recorded a single out. It was cracking contact off of Yu Darvish from the get-go: Tim Anderson hustle double with two strikes, Yoán Moncada RBI single, then José Abreu singled, and Edwin Encarnación ducked out of the way on ball four to pack the sacks with Good Guys. Cue Eloy. And after a DEEP fly out from Luis Robert and a K by Leury, James McCann singled and, in just the first inning, Rossy threw up the white flag and pulled his Cubs off the field.

White Hot
Sorry, Eloy, Yoán, Timmy, but the key winner tonight for the White Sox was Dallas Keuchel, who was pitching like he owned the place: tons of grounders, one hit, faces the minimum through five. Ho-ly crap, if this is our No. 2 starter.

Finest Foe
Kyle Schwarber had no “Schwarbombs,” to the chagrin of Chads and maybe a few Trixies everywhere, but did go 2-for-3 in a game that basically looked like the Cubs were swinging with Wiffle bats.

Magic Number: 2

The White Sox so crushed Darvish right out of the gate, the first inning was called after just two outs. While not wanting to run up pitch counts too badly is understandable, the decision to just cut off the inning was strange given Darvish pitched into the fifth inning. I mean, look at how Gameday treated the mercy killing of the first inning:

In truth, the White Sox nine men but the inning was just cut off. Maybe no batting around was a ground rule for this game, dunno. Way to just randomly drop José Abreu at third base and then have him get [checks notes] picked off, Ricky!

Sox Vox
“They’d probably like to see Darvish go five...”—Steve Stone, at some point during Yu’s horrific first.

First Look: Tuesday

Back to intrasquad action, where Ricky Renteria plans on getting Yoán Moncada a lot of reps to see how he responds to his first taste of action tonight. Both Reynaldo López and Dylan Cease will get up and down four or five times on Tuesday, making it clear it has not yet been determined who is the third starter, and who’s the fourth.