This is the fifth season in which Major League Baseball has started extra innings with a runner on second, and it appears that everybody is content to live with the fundamental injustice of a reliever getting saddled with a loss without him -- or his defense -- doing anything wrong.
In Michael Soroka's case, he threw the 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th innings, allowing just a single and two walks (one intentional) over his four frames. He twice kept zombie runner from scoring, and when he couldn't manage that, he limited the damage to the one (unearned) run.
His reward for that heroic performance? Falling to 0-8 on the season because the White Sox offense couldn't score when the Rockies didn't. The Rockies went ahead 5-4 on a sac bunt and a sacrifice fly despite Luis Robert Jr.'s best effort. He made a strong throw home against his momentum, but Ryan McMahon slid under Korey Lee's tag, and a review didn't show contact with Lee's first swipe attempt.
McMahon then foiled the Sox in the bottom of the 14th. After Andrew Benintendi struck out, McMahon made a nifty pick on Lenyn Sosa's two-hopper to keep Paul DeJong rooted at second, and Nicky Lopez grounded out to end the longest White Sox game since the 15-inning Vince Velazquez Game in 2019.
The Rockies defense stepped up big in this one, particularly Brenton Doyle in center. His diving catch in the bottom of the sixth stole extra bases from Luis Robert Jr. and perhaps an RBI depending on where the ball bounded to, and he took a walk-off hit away from Tommy Pham with two outs in the 12th.
The White Sox were able to thwart the Rockies defense in the 13th, as Robert answered an Ezequiel Tovar flare over Andrew Vaughn with one of his own in shallow center, tying the game at 4.
Garrett Crochet threw the first seven innings, although that only registered as covering the first half of the game. He was dominant outside of the second inning, when the Rockies greeted him with three straight singles, scoring one of them on a balk, and another on a sacrifice fly that gave them a 2-0 lead.
He allowed only two other hits of the other six innings. A third runner reached on a Lenyn Sosa error in the third, but Crochet erased it with a double play ball. He didn't walk a batter, struck out 11, and threw a whopping 69 of 88 pitches for strikes. He generated 24 whiffs, including 17 on his four-seam fastball.
But until Robert's 13th-inning single, Andrew Vaughn was the only White Sox allowed to drive in runs. His 10th homer of the season represented the first breakthough against Kyle Freeland and made it a 2-1 game in the fourth, and then he followed Pham's bases-loading walk with a run-scoring walk in the eighth to tie the game at 2.
When Hunter Goodman hit a sac fly in the top of the 10th to retake the lead, Vaughn responded with one of his own to tie the game at 3, and that's when Soroka entered to take one for the team.
Bullet points:
*The White Sox were unable to win four in a row, which would've tied their longest streak of the season.
*The White Sox defense wasn't Rockies-good, but Sosa's error was the only misplay that stood out, Robert made a leaping catch on the warning track in the fifth to take a double away from Doyle, who then returned the favor.
*Pedro Grifol emptied the bench on the position player side, and he used five relievers after Crochet.
