Luis Castillo attempt to help the White Sox salvage a split looked good early. Or at least through two batters.
But after a pair of strikeouts, Castillo lost a 10-pitch battle to Isaac Paredes with a two-out walk, then watched Jose Altuve send a head-high fastball over the Crawford Boxes for a 2-0 hole that better summed up the innings that lay ahead.
The White Sox were able to counterpunch once, but Castillo had another inning snowball on him with a four-run third, and the Sox had no answer for that one.
Paredes was at the center of that one, too. He came to the plate with runners on first and second with one out and shot a double off the left field wall to put the Astros ahead 3-2, and although Altuve struck out for the second out, Daulton Varsho provided the fatal blow with a two-run triple off the right-center wall (in a role reversal from Wednesday, Tristan Peters got caught too close to the fence to allow an extra 90 feet). Christian Walker's single to center made it 6-2, but the insurance was unnecessary.
The White Sox offense seemed to have a sense of Hunter Brown early. Miguel Vargas turned a two-out single into a mild threat with a stolen base during a 20-pitch first, and then the Sox strung together a sequence of good-enough singles in the second. They traded singles and outs through four batters, but Jake Rogers' grounder up the middle forced Jeremy Peña to dive in order to stop it, resulting in an RBI infield single, and Sam Antonacci shot a grounder through a vacancy at third base to tie the game at 2.
When Vargas singled and Andrew Benintendi walked to lead off the third, it looked like Brown could've been on the ropes. But then he struck out the Montgomerii and Chase Meidroth, and Brown ended up retiring nine in a row to finish five, and erased a leadoff walk with a double play to face the minimum once more. The Astros bullpen offered nothing for the White Sox offense either, as Chase Meidroth's two-out single in the ninth innig was the White Sox's only hit after the third inning.
The good news is the White Sox bullpen calmed the game down. Tyler Schweitzer posted two scoreless innings, Trevor Richards snapped his slump with a scoreless seventh, and José Urquidy made an appearance in where it all began for him to post a zero in the eighth. Combined they allowed just two hits and a walk over four scoreless innings, striking out two.
Bullet points:
*Castillo got just five swinging strikes on 78 pitches, and only 12 called strikes. Few pitches made it home.
