Maybe Jonathan Cannon should've skipped his start. Or maybe he could've just skipped the first inning.
Staked to a 2-0 lead on a Miguel Vargas homer, Cannon gave up a pair of two-run shots in the bottom of the first, and the Mets kept the Sox at arm's length the rest of the night.
Cannon's night was close to being something else entirely, because the Mets scored all four of their runs with two outs after a colossal baserunning blunder. With one out and Brandon Nimmo on first, Michael A. Taylor trapped Juan Soto's drive to right center with a diving attempt, but Nimmo believed Taylor caught it and retreated full-tilt back to first, which Soto didn't expect. Nimmo made it back safely, but he passed Soto in the process, which meant Soto passed him as far as the rulebook was concerned for the second out of the inning.
Alas, the inning overstayed its welcome by six batters. Pete Alonso mashed a decently located sinker out to center to tie the game at 2, and that opened the floodgates. Brett Baty singled on the first pitch, Jared Young turned on a second-pitch cutter and cranked out to right for a 4-2 lead, and then Mark Vientos and Jeff McNeil singled on first pitches, making it five hits over the course of six pitches. Cannon then plunked Francisco Alvarez to load the bases, but he managed to get Francisco Lindor to ground out with the bases loaded to keep it manageable.
In fact, the Mets thrashed Cannon so efficiently in the first that he had plenty of fuel left in the tank. He ended up coming up one out short of six innings on just 94 pitches, which allowed Will Venable to only use Jared Shuster over the remainder of the game. His sinker was missing a tick, while the exit velocities were supercharged; 15 of 22 batted balls allowed by Cannon qualified as "hard-hit."
The White Sox offense made a couple runs at making up the ground. While Tylor Megill kept the Sox in check after Vargas got the bat head around on a fastball up and in, his evening ended with a pair of six-pitch walks to Edgar Quero and Joshua Palacios that loaded the bases. In came José Buttó, and one pitch later, Buttó quashed the threat by getting Lenyn Sosa to fly out to deepish left-center.
The White Sox were actually able to come up with the clutch hit that eluded them over the first 15 innings of this series in the seventh. With Chase Meidroth on first and two outs, Mike Tauchman singled him to third, setting up a run-scoring passed ball to make it a 5-3 game. Vargas then came within a foot or two of tying the game when he thought he got all of Buttó's 2-2 slider, but it banged off the top of the left field wall, and Vargas had to settle for an RBI double to narrow the score to 5-4.
Alas, while Lindor opened the game by making two outs in the first inning, he got the last laugh with a seeing-eye RBI single with two outs in the eighth for a key insurance run off Shuster. A Tauchman walk brought the tying run to the plate with one out in the ninth, but Vargas lined out to third, and Andrew Benintendi struck out to end it.
Bullet points:
*Tauchman reached base four times with two singles and two walks from the second spot, and Vargas drove him in twice. Austin Slater reached in his only plate appearance with a pinch-hit single, so the platoon continues to work.
*Vargas' homer had a launch angle of 44 degrees, which is met or exceeded by only three other hitters so far this season. Seby Zavala was the last White Sox player to hit one that high, back in 2023.
*Wednesday's game was moved from 6:10 p.m CT start to 12:10 p.m. in anticipation of weather.
