White Sox get swept by Rangers, 5-3

Sometimes it pays more to be lucky than good. But you need the lucky part to last for a while.

The White Sox got loads of luck in the first inning against Max Scherzer, making his first appearance for the Rangers since being traded by the Mets. First of all, the White Sox were lucky the future Hall-of-Famer was either nervous or had too much adrenaline pumping, because he started out having no idea where his pitches were headed. Then they got very lucky in terms of where the balls the White Sox barely hit ended up.

Six Pack of Stats

By MELISSA SAGE-BOLLENBACH

FanGraphs

Pressure Play
Eloy Jiménez grounded out in the top of the eighth with runners on first and third and two outs, earning him a 4.41 LI. 

Pressure Cooker
The Big Baby had a big chance to do some damage with that eighth-inning at-bat, but he collapsed under the dim lights of a non-contending team with that same, one at-bat, 4.41 pLI. 

Top Play
Gavin Sheets knocked a 14.6% WPA single that scooted through the left side in the top of the first, scoring Andrew Benintendi and Yoán Moncada and giving the Sox a 3-0 lead that unfortunately didn’t last.

Top Performer
Marcus Semien went 1-for-3 with a home run and a walk. His 14.5% WPA was enough to take today’s top spot. 

---

Hardest Hit
Mitch Garver scalded a game-tying mashed tater in the bottom fourth at 111.4 mph. 

Weakest Contact
Nathaniel Lowe tapped a seventh-inning ground out at 43.1 mph.

Luckiest Hit
Josh Jung’s second-inning single only had a .180 xBA. 

Toughest Out
Lowe’s line out in the bottom of the fifth had a .630 xBA. 

Longest Hit
Garver had the farthest hit of the afternoon with his 457-foot, fourth-inning bomb. 

---

Magic Number: 42
The Pale Hose struck out 42 times during the three-game series. Do you think plate discipline is a problem?

Bloop singles by Tim Anderson and Andrew Benintendi ... both in the low-60 mph range ... walks to Yoán Moncada and Yasmani Grandal, and a seeing-eye, opposite-field grounder by Gavin Sheets, and the Sox had two runs more than they’d scored in their previous three games combined, and a 3-0 lead. Not only that, but Scherzer had tossed 37 pitches.

Then, after Touki Toussaint breezed through an eight-pitch bottom half, the Sox struck for three more slightly-harder singles in the second, though they failed to score because there was a double play in the middle. Still impressive, right?

Might have been more impressive if the White Sox managed more than three more singles the rest of the game against Scherzer and three relievers, their only threat in the least thanks to a bad-hop infield single by Moncada, a passed ball and a third-strike wild pitch in the eighth, which ended on an Eloy Jiménez ground out.

Meanwhile, the Rangers pecked away against Toussaint, who was having control problems of his own — a common problem for him. The Rangers got a couple of pretty cheap hits of their own around a walk in the second (inexplicably not sending home another runner who would have scored easily), used two walks and a rifled single to make it 3-2 in the third, then quit fooling around and smashed impressive homers by Mitch Garver and Marcus Semien in the fourth, Garver’s traveling a mighty 457 feet.

Touki had nine strikeouts, but his four walks and getting far too much of the plate against Garver and Semien did him in. By the end of four innings, he’d actually thrown more pitches than Scherzer, the latest example of the horrid inefficiency of Sox pitchers.

That was it for scoring until the ninth, when Gregory Santos gave up three hits and a run, leading to the final 5-3 tally.

The Sox held Scherzer to a mere nine strikeouts, but whiffed five times against relievers to chalk up 14 Ks on the day. They didn’t walk again after the first. The Sox hitter who didn’t have much luck was Andrew Vaughn, who had 109 and 104 mph outs, though he did offset that somewhat with a 75 mph single.

Thank goodness for new rules, though — the game was over in a merciful 2:27.

Now it’s on to Cleveland, with the Sox at least having a chance to mess with one of the teams that will win the AAAL Central.