After four delirious days of out-of-character mashing, onlookers were struggling to recognize these power-hitting White Sox. So Tuesday night in Tampa provided the baseball equivalent of posing for a photo while holding up today's newspaper, as they fell to 8-23 in one-run games on the season.
And after four days of consistently threatening offensively, the Rays and Sox simplified this contest into a battle of big innings, with the AL East playoff hopefuls tapped into a deeper well of chaos in theirs.
Making his first major league start in effectively six weeks due to a forearm strain, Davis Martin was bound to have some kinks emerge in his operation at some point. As fate would have it, they would all emerge in the bottom of the second, as he lost his release point and started missing up and arm side relentlessly. A Jake Mangum's fielder's choice was all that interrupted three walks to open the inning, and even when Martin returned to his normal operations, the baseball gods were hellbent on repayment for his karmic debt.
José Caballero and home plate umpire Nate Tomlinson got into a long discussion to grind action to a halt, such that when play resumed, Martin had a false start in his delivery and balked home the first run of the night. When he recovered to get Caballero to chase a cutter a foot off the plate, all he got for a reward was a bloop that dropped in front of Michael A. Taylor to plate a pair of run. Taylor's second rushed throw of the road trip wildly skipped to the backstop for a two-base error, setting up Caballero to trot home from third on a soft Taylor Walls comebacker.
An early 4-0 hole for a last place team is usually a knockout blow, and in this case it still was, but the Sox at least made use of the full 10-count. Martin retired the next eight batters in a row, and a replay reversal of nice throw from Edgar Quero to nab Caballero stealing second helped him get through five innings with no further damage.
Tyler Alexander struck out four over two innings of scoreless relief work, and any cranky old school college pitching coach worth their salt would be clipping highlights of the left-hander carving with well-located 92 mph on both sides of the plate. Mike Vasil pitched over a leadoff single to Chandler Simpson and two stolen bases to put up a zero in the bottom of the eighth, striking out both Yandy Díaz and Junior Caminero to lower his ERA to 2.53 on the year.
Those small bits of reliever heroism kept a comeback in range all night, which might have just served to make things more frustrating. Rays All-Star Drew Rasmussen easily represented the best starter the Sox have seen since the break, and looked the part for three no-hit innings. Mike Tauchman doubled and Chase Meidroth singled to open the fourth with a breakthrough, both jumping on a grooved two-strike fastballs to start the scoring, before an Andrew Benintendi single and a Miguel Vargas seven-pitch walk loaded the bases with no one out.
But Rasmussen suffered in terms of labor rather than damage. He threw his final 32 pitches of the night in the fourth, but only Edgar Quero fighting off a cutter on his hands for a sacrifice fly altered the score. Colson Montgomery's impressive nine-pitch battle ended with him simply rolling over a similar pitch to first, before Lenyn Sosa chased a pitcher's pitch in a 1-1 count, as he is wont to do, ending the inning with a groundout.
Two innings of Edwin Uceta carving up Sox hitters made for some boring watching. But recent Rays trade acquisition Bryan Baker opened the seventh against Montgomery, and while there's been many generations of hitters for whom no pitch can truly be grooved if it's thrown at 97 mph, Montgomery was born after all that. He yanked the 1-1 heater down the line with a sort of no-doubter authority that belied its estimated 359-foot distance, and pulled the game to its 4-3 final score.
Career home run no. 1 for Colson Montgomery!! pic.twitter.com/0AMK3z5Yf4
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) July 23, 2025
Statcast indicates the ball Brooks Baldwin drove to dead center in the next at-bat traveled nearly 30 feet farther, but it probably needed to reach 45 to avoid a glove. Instead, Montgomery's blast was the only hit the Sox received from outside the top-three of the batting order, and even their efforts had limits
Tauchman led off the eighth with a sharp single to left-center. But a diving stop by Caballero up the middle stopped Meidroth from matching him, before Benintendi rolled into an inning-ending double play to end the last real threat of the evening.
Bullet points:
*Either a healthy collection of friends and family traveled to Tampa to support Montgomery, or all the fans shown applauding while wearing Southridge High School gear are a tad intense about their Colson enthusiasm.
*Each team managed just a single base-hit with runner in scoring position on the night, but the Sox made the mistake of not getting a fielding error attached to the end of theirs.
*Tauchman, Meidroth and Benintendi went 5-for-12. The rest of the lineup went 1-for-19 (Montgomery's homer) with a walk.
*Simpson stole three bases on the night, including when one of his initial efforts was wiped out by an interference call for Diaz hitting Quero with his backswing. Quero gunned down all non-Simpson efforts at stealing.
