As much as fans might want a struggling offense to save some runs for the next night in a game they're leading by nine, there's obviously no way to ensure that. But even if there were, the current state of the White Sox pitching staff would make that notion ill-advised.
The White Sox led this game by as much as nine runs, and even when the Braves made a 10-1 game into a tighter 10-5 score, the White Sox offense summoned its insurance powers and restored the lead to eight in the eighth. Brian Snitker saw his team trailing 13-5 and decided to wave the white flag with such measures as using a position player to pitch and removing Michael Harris II from the game when he was 4-for-4, and that helped more than anybody at the time realized.
Harris collected his fourth hit to open the bottom of that inning, and Snitker called it a night by pinch-running Eli White. Before the inning was over, White would come to the plate representing the tying run against Jordan Leasure, who was called into action after Owen White gave up hits to five of the six batters he faced, including a three-run shot to Jurickson Profar that made it a 13-9 game.
Harris would've been the quintessential right man at the right time had he come to the plate with two outs. White stood in his place instead, and Leasure set him down on three pitches, dotting a fastball on the inside corner to finally stop the bleeding. Grant Taylor took over for the ninth and gave up a leadoff single and a very wild pitch, but otherwise, handled matters with a couple of strikeouts to seal a White Sox victory that snapped a four-game skid while ending the Braves' five-game winning streak.
The White Sox have had enough moral victories that a real one can't be dismissed no matter the shape, but it's tidiest to sum it up as a win for the offense, and less so for a pitching staff in disarray.
Spencer Strider came into this game having allowed 13 runs over 8 ⅔ innings over his two August starts, so facing a White Sox offense that scored a total of five runs over its last four games presented the best get-right opportunity available. Instead, the White Sox started figuring him out as they turned the lineup over a second time, and Strider failed to record an out in the fourth.
Brooks Baldwin led off the third inning with an opposite-field homer, and while Strider was able to get out of the inning without further damage thanks to a fantastic sliding catch by Matt Olson on a foul pop-up near the on-deck circle, Strider would have no such saviors in the fourth. He failed to retire any of the first six batters he faced, as the White Sox tormented him with hits of all shapes and sizes.
Luis Robert Jr. followed Andrew Benintendi's leadoff single by yoinking a rolling slider out to left, but the White Sox had far more in the tank. Kyle Teel singled on a line drive to right, Chase Meidroth's weak grounder didn't escape the infield, but rolled too far into the hole on the left side for Nick Allen to do anything with it. Baldwin walked to load the bases, and then Mike Tauchman unloaded on a hanging slider, lasering it just out of reach of a leaping Ronald Acuña Jr. in right field. Two runs scored on the double, and although Snitker went to his bullpen for Austin Cox, the Sox cashed in the remaining two runners as well.
Miguel Vargas wasted no time seeing what the new pitcher had, turning a first pitch into a sac fly. Colson Montgomery's groundout to a drawn-in infield didn't score Tauchman -- no point in running the contact play with a guy who has twice hurt himself on the basepaths -- but Lenyn Sosa's scalded grounder on a 1-2 fastball did the job.
That was the first time the White Sox let a rally get to Sosa, and twice he rewarded their patience. Two innings later, Vargas kept the sixth alive with a two-out double, and while Colson Montgomery fell behind 1-2, he survived a high splitter in the zone and ended up drawing a seven-pitch walk to bring Sosa to the plate, and Sosa crushed a 3-1 fastball 439 feet out to left field to put the Sox into double digits at 10-1.
Sosa drove in four, and his night was among the many triumphs. Kyle Teel and Andrew Benintendi both had four-hit games, with Teel launching his third homer of the season in the seventh inning. Baldwin reached four times from the ninth spot, drawing three walks for the first time in his major league career.
Even a guy like Robert who went 1-for-6 found a way to max out his unremarkable line. His only hit was a homer, and he ended up scoring twice because he ran out a grounder to the left side and forced a throwing error from Allen with one out in the eighth. Teel and Meidroth followed it with singles to make it an eight-run game, and that's what allowed Snitker to use utility infielder Luke Williams to pitch for the sixth time all season.
Even though Snitker went back to using a real pitcher in the ninth inning, Williams himself didn't pose any obstacles to winning. He ended up stranding the bases loaded by getting Tauchman to fly out, and then locked up Vargas on an eephus on the uppermost, innermost part of the zone. But if the eight-run margin is what inspired Snitker to officially start thinking about Tuesday and pull Harris from the game in the bottom of the eighth, then that run counted for two.
On the pitching side, Yoendrys Gómez met the minimum requirements for holding down a spot in the White Sox rotation by completing five innings, which is something Sean Burke and Jonathan Cannon both struggled with before the Sox sprung their surprise options on them.
But Gómez started getting hit as the lineup turned over a third time in the fifth. Jurickson Profar reached on a one-out single and scored after a double and a groundout to get the Braves on the board, and then the sixth opened with a Marcell Ozuna single and a Harris homer that made it a 10-3 game. Sosa then got eaten up by an Ozzie Albies grounder, and that's when Will Venable went to the bullpen for the first of five times, or three more times than he hoped.
Mike Vasil gave up a two-run shot to Profar before he could close out the inning, but he did get the game through six. Brandon Eisert then pitched a 1-2-3 seventh to restore order, setting up White with an eight-run margin to get the game home. The fresh arm instead ended up taxing two others.
Bullet points:
*Every starter in the White Sox lineup scored a run. Colson Montgomery was the only starter to go hitless, and departed the game after the top of the sixth with what the White Sox called left side soreness.
*His spot in the lineup didn't go hitless, because Curtis Mead replaced him and went 1-for-2 with an RBI single.
*The White Sox totaled 19 hits, four homers and five walks to just eight strikeouts.
