HOUSTON -- Six days ago, Owen White was recalled from Triple-A Charlotte.
"He’s pitched in different roles, but is stretched out as a starter so we expect to use him in bulk innings," Will Venable said at the time.
But the Tigers series wrapped without White finding his way into a game. When the Sox rearranged their rotation to set up a bullpen game on Sunday, they tapped Mike Vasil for the start instead. They even signed Tyler Alexander an hour before first pitch and had him throw three innings of a game he showed up in the middle of, but not White. Bryse Wilson pitched twice against the Royals, including a three-run top of the ninth that proved to be his swan song, but again White was left to explore the accommodations of the left field bullpen.
Yet as surely as the meek will inherit the Earth, 15 minutes into Wednesday's game in Houston, it became readily apparent that White's team debut was nigh. It was sometime around this image coming into existence.
White Sox starter Sean Burke would get nine more outs after Christian Walker launched this plate-splitting slider to the moon, making it 3-0 with the third Astros extra-base hit of the first inning. But that only afforded Walker an opportunity to return to the scene of the crime in the third.
A 94 mph fastball a ball above the top border of the strike zone is a location less likely to compel Burke to throw up his hands in dismay, but all it served to accomplish was to induce a 106 mph two-run double from Walker after his 107 mph homer in the first. Since a plate-splitting 1-2 slider to Jose Altuve and a four-pitch walk to Yainer Diaz had built a two-out rally for the Astros, Walker's two-run missile just read as karmic debt being paid.
"Usage-wise, it just seemed like it was a lot of spin," Venable said postgame. "Didn’t really establish the fastball. I just thought they were sitting on spin and hit spin. We were just a little late to adjust."
Three more doubles--Cam Smith, Jeremy Peña, Isaac Paredes--in the fourth capped off Burke's night with seven extra-base hits allowed, which is one fewer than how many the White Sox offense hit in their four-game series against the Tigers. Burke strangely threw a plurality of curveballs against a righty-heavy Astros lineup, but the explanation for that could be as simple as did you get a load of what they were doing to his fastball and slider?
"I think there were some points in the game where I got a little bit too soft, just following a pattern of a lot of sliders and curveballs," Burke said. "It's a good fastball-hitting team, so I didn't want to just hand-feed them a ton of fastballs like I do with some other lineups. Definitely feel like I could have used the fastball a little bit more, a little bit differently, just to get them off the breaking stuff and that would be a little bit more effective."
Leaving the game in the fourth with 7-0 deficit meant Burke wasn't around to see his offense eventually rub a couple nickels together against Astros rookie Ryan Gusto, who took a start into the sixth for the first time since April 23, and completed six frames for the first time in his career. Venable flooded his lineup with lefties in response to Gusto's platoon splits, to meager but not-anemic results; Mike Tauchman was the only one of the five to not reach base, but picked up an RBI. But with all due respect to Vinny Capra, it's probably not the Sox's night if their little-used utilityman has their biggest hit of the game.
Capra followed Josh Rojas' second single of the night by hooking a slider away for a bloop double down the left field line, before it bounded into the stands for an automatic double with one out in the fifth. Playing with the infield back on account of leading by a zillion runs, the Astros conceded an RBI groundout to Tauchman before Miguel Vargas stung a heater for a two-out run-scoring single.
"They attacked us in the first couple of innings and we couldn’t come back," Vargas said. "It’s tough sometimes."
It's always nice to give Chuck & Ozzie a highlight or two to play on a loop during the postgame show.
Bullet points:
*White covered the final 4 1/3 innings, striking out five, walking two but allowing three runs as the Astros knocked him around in the eighth. Somewhere, you hope former Sox long reliever Tony Peña was watching and clapping like Charles S. Dutton at the end of Rudy.
"The first run, the soft contact there that got him in trouble and then whether he ran out of gas or whatever it might have been in the last inning was tough," Venable said. "The guy hasn’t pitched in a little while even though he was built up. So, that kind of comes with that role. But I thought he did an outstanding job. His stuff looked good."
*Walker fell a triple short of the cycle, and a check-swing bloop for a single, pushing Diaz to go first-to-third to set up another run in the fifth confirmed it was kind of his night.
*Vargas extended himself over the railing to the camera well to make a excellent snag on a popup to the third base side, ending the third inning. It was too late to save Burke's ERA, but it did preserve the life of CHSN's Connor McKnight.
*After walking eight times and striking out 13 times on Tuesday night, the Sox walked once on Wednesday and struck out 12 times.
