Angels 5, White Sox 2: Carlos Rodon pays for wildness
Tonight was not a banner night for the Chicago White Sox organization.
Michael Kopech is lost for this year and the next with a torn UCL.
The Winston-Salem Dash and Kannapolis Intimidators were both swept out of the postseason.
And here in Chicago, Carlos Rodon couldn’t find the strike zone.
Rodon had major control problems, throwing barely half of his 93 pitches for strikes. He issued five walks (one intentional) along with a hit batter over 4â…”nnings, on top of six hits.
He only paid for it in the third inning, but the third inning was the decisive one. He walked the first two batters, a fact made worse by Mike Trout being the third batter, and Justin Upton and Shohei Ohtani lurking behind. Rodon plunked Trout to load the bases, gave up a sac fly to Upton, and then a windswept three-run homer by Ohtani just over the reach of an all-out Adam Engel, whose glove touched the ball as it was in the process of falling off his hand.
The Sox had taken advantage of that jet stream to right center a half-inning earlier, when Avisail Garcia’s one-handed fly to deepish right center carried farther than Trout imagined, based on his route. That gave the Sox a 1-0 lead, but Ohtani’s blast gave the Angels a 4-1 lead, and that was the one that held up.
Rodon should’ve fared worse, as only four of his 11 baserunners scored. He escaped a bases-loaded-one-out situation by getting Taylor Ward to chase a high fastball and Jose Briceno to smoke a grounder at Yolmer Sanchez to end the second. He got Upton to leave ’em loaded in the fourth with a groundout to short, and Dylan Covey stranded Rodon’s last two runners with a groundout in the fifth.
The Sox couldn’t bail him out, because only Garcia had a great game. He reached base all four times up and scored both runs. He followed up the second-inning homer by getting plunked with one out in the fourth. He moved to second on Daniel Palka’s single, then scored on Omar Narvaez’s single to center to make it a 4-2 game.
Alas, the Sox couldn’t finish another rally. They couldn’t even start one, really, grounding into a double plays to snuff out potential threats in the sixth and eighth innings. The seven other hits besides Garcia’s blast were singles, and Garcia drew the lone walk.
Bullet points:
*Tim Anderson committed his 16th error of the year when his attempt to make a ranging play and crossbody throw to his left on Trout skipped past Matt Davidson. It didn’t result in a run.
*Aaron Bummer gave up a solo shot to Andrelton Simmons in the seventh for the other run.
Record: 56-85 | Box score
