It's usually premature to call a regular-season series a "playoff preview," especially before the trade deadline, but based on the way the Yankees ground down the White Sox after Noah Schultz ran into sudden trouble in the fourth inning, there'd be a reason to treat the postgame postmortem like a postseason readiness audit.
Whether or not a pressure got to them, they played like the pressure got to them with a wide array of mistakes. There were physical errors, lapses in execution, and an abundance of mental miscalculations, either playing the game too fast or too slow.
In the end, it still came down to a couple of misplaced two-out, two-strike fastballs. Bryan Hudson had a chance to strand the go-ahead run despite having a runner on third with nobody out, but a third plate-splitting fastball was two too many, and Rice rifled it to the right-center gap to put the Yankees ahead 5-4.
One inning later, Sean Newcomb opened by yielding three singles and a throwing error to make it a 6-4 game, but had a chance to keep it there after Munetaka Murakami cut down a runner at the plate on a contact play for the second out. He attacked ninth-hitting Ali Sánchez with fastballs, but missed with enough of them to get into a full count, and when Newcomb tried a fifth heater on six pitches, the journeyman catcher opened up and lined it over the left field wall for his first career MLB homer in his 75th career game spanning five different seasons.
You could say the energy was a little bit off from the start, as Randal Grichuk should've been thrown out on a seemingly hopeless attempt to stretch a leadoff single into a double, except Jazz Chisholm Jr. dropped the ball before applying the tag.
However, the Sox parlayed it into a three-run ambush of Max Fried. Murakami singled Grichuk to third, a Colson Montgomery bouncer eased through the right side to score Grichuk, a Chase Meidroth sac fly scored Murakami, and then Braden Montgomery followed his nameplate around the bases for an RBI triple that bounced off the top of the left field wall for a 3-0 lead.
Schultz, meanwhile, faced just 10 batters over three scoreless innings, but perhaps there were some warning signs. A 23-pitch first inning put him behind the 8-ball, although the average pitch count came down over the next two frames. He needed diving catches from Grichuk in left and Montgomery in right for a 1-2-3 third, and maybe that foreshadowed the sense that the Yankees were on him.
Or maybe Schultz did it to himself by issuing walks to Rice and Paul Goldschmidt to open the fourth, with all four balls well out of the zone. Jasson Dominguez hammered a grounder through the left side that would've been an RBI single had Rice not broken the wrong way, but Rice ended up scoring on an Anthony Volpe groundout for the game's first run.
Will Venable pulled Schultz for Chris Murphy, further lending an October feel to the proceedings, and that's when the mistakes began piling up. Murphy hung a 2-1 sweeper to Chisholm, who split the right-center gap for a two-run double that tied the game at 3. Then Chisholm stole third on Edgar Quero, noticing that his throws back to Murphy were a little too deliberate, and those 90 feet mattered when Spencer Jones grounded to a drawn-in Meidroth, whose dive could only produce an out at first, which put the Yankees ahead 4-3.
The White Sox were able to tie it up in the fifth off old friend Tim Hill. Vargas doubled with one out to atone for an error that Trevor Richards pitched around in the top of the inning, and then he came home on a Colson Montgomery single to knot the score at 4. That chased Hill from a game, but the White Sox sustained pressure against Fernando Cruz with a two-out walk from Braden Montgomery that allowed Venable to pinch-hit Tristan Peters for Everson Pereira in an ideal situation with two outs and two on, but Peters grounded out to end the threat.
Though they reset the score to make it a brand-new ballgame, they couldn't stop the trickle of mistakes. Will Venable pinch-hit Sam Antonacci for Grichuk with two outs and nobody on in the sixth, which seemed like a suboptimal use of resources, and Antonacci lined out. Amed Rosario then led off the seventh with a double, and although he offered Quero a chance to throw him out at second when he leaned heavily toward third on a missed bunt attempt by Sánchez, Quero's throw sank into Rosario's slide back to second and Luisangel Acuña couldn't block it, allowing Rosario to take third. Hudson struck out Sánchez and got Max Schuemann to hit a fly too shallow for tagging, but a string of misplaced fastballs to Rice eventually bit him.
The Sox nearly got that run back in the seventh, at least depending on who you ask. Colson Montgomery kept the inning alive with a two-out single, after which Meidroth lined a double into the left field corner, with Schuemann shaded toward the gap. A lot of runners would've been able to score, but "Colson Montgomery with a bad leg" seemed like a big ask, and even a three-hop relay beat him by multiple steps to end the inning.
Newcomb was then tasked with preserving the one-run deficit in the eighth, but Domínguez reached on an hot-shot infield single that Vargas snared, but needed too long to collect himself and throw across the diamond, followed by a Volpe single and a perfect Chisholm bunt. Compounding problems, Newcomb tried to get the out at first despite the odds, and Murakami's diving attempt to stop it trickled far enough away from him for Domínguez to score. Sánchez's homer then kicked it out of range.
If there's a silver lining, Aaron Boone ended up pitching David Bednar after Volpe dropped Colson Montgomery's sky-high popup behind second base for a run-scoring error instead of the 27th out. It was just for one batter, as Bednar fanned Meidroth to keep the tying run on deck.
Bullet points:
*Severe storms delayed the start of the game by 20 minutes, and helped the Sox in the first when Schuemann slipped on the warning track in left on Montgomery's triple. It allowed a laboring Colson Montgomery to score easily, which perhaps planted the thought in Jirschele's mind for trying it again.
*White Sox righties Richards and Seranthony Domínguez combined for three scoreless innings, allowing just one hit between the two of them. Lefties Murphy, Hudson and Newcomb combined for an uglier line: 3.2 IP, 7 H, 6 R, 6 ER, 1 BB, 1 K.
*Colson Montgomery looked better at the plate than he did on the basepaths, finishing 3-for-4 with a walk and driving in two.
