...and the White Sox let them off the hook.
The late Dennis Green was famously kind of off his rocker during his famous postgame rant. It certainly seemed like his Arizona Cardinals had a gameplan to beat the Chicago Bears that night in Phoenix, but that 2006 Bears team won 13 games and the NFC title, and was the caliber of squad where it should never be assumed they're beaten until the final whistle.
The 2025 Angels, the rare squad that has seemingly upset their fanbase by not giving up at the deadline, are not those Bears. But in Zach Neto, Kenley Jansen, and Taylor Ward they have some dudes who are capable of winning games, with the latter swatting a three-run walk-off home run of Tyler Alexander in the ninth to send the Sox on an unhappy flight to Seattle.
In frittering away a five-run lead and a series sweep in Anaheim, the Sox proved that embodying those 2006 Cardinals--a team that entered their bye week 1-7 and played .500 ball from there on out--is still an aspiration.
Sox starter Sean Burke was overseeing the third-straight sleepy Angels offensive effort of the weekend for two trips through the order. He peppered the letters with four-seamers for whiffs, gliding into the sixth staked to a 5-0 lead with seven strikeouts, looking primed to set a new season-high and collect his fifth win.
Instead, he didn't record an out in the sixth, as Neto's opening solo shot was the first of three authoritative swings on Burke's slider. Mike Trout followed a Nolan Schanuel walk by slicing another bender for a double down to right, before Ward flicked a run-scoring single to left on another outer half slider.
Mike Vasil entered in relief and recorded three consecutive outs to close the sixth, but still couldn't stop the bleeding, as a poor Edgar Quero backhand allowed a third run to score on a wild pitch. And when Vasil returned for the seventh with a two-run lead, he found the home team sitting on one of his breakers as well. Christian Moore opened the frame by rifling a curve back up the middle, and after a Yoán Moncada pinch-hit single, Neto sent another curve into the left-center gap for a game-tying two-run double.
From there on out, the Sox were on the backfoot in a game they once commanded, in a stadium they had spent 23 innings strangling the life out of. The two sides of the ninth inning represented how the advantageous stretch of the game had ended for the. Where the Angels had Jansen facing down Lenyn Sosa and eventually inducing a fly out on one of his famous up-and-away cutters to strand a pair, the Sox had already pushed Steven Wilson for 10 outs in this series, and turned the game over to Alexander to send it to extras against the heart of the opposing order.
He lost a left-on-left battle with Schanuel for a hustle double that was troubling in its own right, but was also a perfect excuse to intentionally walk Trout. Just as Dan Plesac was trumpeting Ward's free-swinging ways, Alexander couldn't get a chase on three fastballs above the zone, before his full count sweeper never made it home. Andrew Benintendi has recently proved his home run robbing skills aren't dead, but he hasn't become 14-feet tall recently either, and the Angels mobbed Ward at home plate, looking like a team that had been released from a frustrating weekend.
It wasn't exactly Hagler vs. Hearns, but Sunday offered a rematch of Angels sinkerballer Jack Kochanowicz--who throws fastballs pretty much constantly--against a White Sox offense that has revived itself but hunting heaters relentlessly. Sox hitting has been resurgent, and Kochanowicz has fallen upon hard times since holding them to two runs over six innings in the opening series of the season, so the matchup seemed tilted in favor of the South Side.
For the first three innings, that held up. Sosa and Luis Robert Jr. both singled sharply on sinkers in the first with a Benintendi walk sandwiched in between to put the Sox up early, but Colson Montgomery proved once more to be the man to land the punch that stung. Fouling off a couple of attempts from Kochanowicz to bury a sinker low and in, Montgomery whipped the fourth such offering just over the wall in right to seal up a fourth-inning four-spot.
Two innings later he followed another Robert single with an elevated sinker to right-center, plating Sosa after his leadoff walk. And that this rally, like the inning before, was cut short by a double play ball from Quero seemed like a temporary inconvenience given how consistent the quality contact against Kochanowicz had been.
That didn't necessarily stop--the Sox had six outs hit 100 mph or harder off the Angels right-hander--but they managed just three baserunners over his final three innings. The last of which was a Brooks Baldwin double that pushed Kyle Teel to third with two outs in the sixth, but Josh Rojas could only ground out on a grooved first-pitch sinker to end the threat. The lack of extra damage would loom large.
Bullet points:
*Robert had two hits, scored a run and drove in another, and made this sweet catch. So, no buyer's remorse just yet.
*Montgomery has homered seven times in his last 11 games.
*Brooks Baldwin recored his first three-hit game and has five hits over his last two games, both started at third base.
*The White Sox released Penn Murfee and Noah Syndergaard from Triple-A Charlotte over the weekend
