White Sox out-bomb the Bombers in opener for 6-5 win

The air in the Bronx wasn’t just filled with Quebec wildfire ash in the first game of today’s doubleheader. It was loaded with scorched baseballs as well.

Fortunately, the White Sox did more of the scorching, with Jake Burger, Luis Robert Jr., Yoán Moncada and Eloy Jiménez all going deep — the first time ever for Luis, Yoán and Eloy to homer in the same game, and Yoán’s first shot in more than two months.

The game see’ed and sawed and see’ed and sawed, and in the end came down to the White Sox trying to blow a 6-5 lead in the bottom of the ninth, and the Yankees refusing the gift.

Lance Lynn and Luis Severino started the game, and neither showed much of anything. Right from the start, each put two men on in the first, but escaped.

Not so in the second. Severino walked Andrew Vaughn to start the inning, then set one on a tee for Jake Burger, which isn’t generally a good idea.

Not to be outdone in ineptitude, Lynn gave back the runs in the bottom half on a triple, a double and a single, all with two outs, the first two hits by a couple of the weakest batters in the league, Billy McKinney and Kyle Higashioka.

Severino one-upped — guess it should be one-downed — Lynn by giving up solo shots to Robert and Moncada in the third. This time Lynn waited an inning before giving back the runs, on a Willi Calhoun dinger in the fourth. But then he trumped Severino by giving up a run in the fifth.

That was it for the starters, with Lynn needing 98 pitches to get through five, giving up eight hits, three walks and five earned runs in the process. Of the 98, only nine were swinging strikes.

That made for a battle of bullpens, and Yankee Michael King screwed that up royally. Two of his first three pitches were grooved to Luis and Eloy, one good for a double, the next for a 416-footer.

That put the Sox up 6-5 in the seventh, after which no one got on base for either team until Kendall Graveman came in in the bottom of the ninth. Graveman walked pinch-hitter Josh Donaldson, who was pinch-run for. That triggered a Yankees hit-and-run, which Romy González kicked around for a while, leading to all hands safe. It was called a hit by a very friendly official scorer.

With no outs, two on and the game on the line, with the 2- and 3-spots in the order coming up, the Yankees got a chance to really miss Aaron Judge. First, Gleyber Torres feebly popped up foul. Then Anthony Rizzo, who’s supposed to be good, got a 2-0 count and did what almost all major league batters inexplicably do, even though it almost never works — he assumed fastball was coming and swung hard over a changup and into an easy double play.

Game over. Five straight wins for the Sox, including two against a non-AAAL Central team, heading into a nightcap against an emergency fill-in starter brought up from the minors. Chicago’s record is now 28-35, which ain’t much, but leaves them just three games out in a division with every team worse than .500.