Perhaps there won't be such a thing as an easy White Sox victory the rest of the season, but they came awfully close tonight.
Miguel Vargas hit his 30th homer of the season in the first inning, Colson Montgomery joined him in the 30-homer club with a two-run shot in the fourth inning, and Braden Montgomery added a solo shot in between to give the White Sox a 4-0 lead that nearly lasted the entire game.
Grant Taylor had other ideas, giving up a solo shot to Josh Bell and later bringing the tying run to the plate, but he was able to record his three outs in three runs or fewer to preserve a well-earned victory for Erick Fedde.
Zebby Matthews held the Sox hitless through 5 ⅔ innings and scoreless into the ninth inning the last time he faced them, but Miguel Vargas ended both bids two batters in, rolling with a low-and-away fastball and shooting it out to right field for his 58th career homer, but just the fourth to right field.
An inning later, Braden Montgomery dropped the bat head on a down-and-in cutter and sent a screamer into the right field seats for his sixth homer of the season.
Colson Montgomery completed the set two innings later, following Andrew Benintendi's one-out walk by extending his arms on a fastball away and launching it into the Miller Lite Landing for a 4-0 White Sox lead.
For the first eight innings, that margin was never meaningfully threatened. Fedde dealt with the usual drawbacks of being a contact-oriented pitcher, but he never yielded more than one base at a time, to the point where the two jams he faced both required the Twins to have a third productive plate appearance to make something of it.
Fedde bent, but he never broke. In the second, he speared Walker Jenkins' comebacker to strand both runners with a 1-3 putout, and while Royce Lewis extended the fourth inning with a bloop single that put runners on the corners with two outs, Fedde got Kaelen Culpepper to popout to add two more to the LOB total.
He completed five by watching Brooks Lee's blistered liner find the glove of a spinning Braden Montgomery in right, and if that foreshadowed the Twins figuring him out, Will Venable didn't allow them to explore the possibilities. Hagen Smith came in for two innings of zone-pounding excellence, and Bryan Hudson did the same with an 11-pitch eighth around a weak infield single.
It seemed a little excessive to use Taylor with a four-run lead, and he introduced the evening's first discomfort when Josh Bell crushed a hanging curveball some 460 feet to right field, coming up a few rows short of finding the concourse. That only made it 4-1, but Lewis doubled with one out, and Walker Jenkins worked a six-pitch walk with two outs by taking four noncompetitive misses to bring the tying run to the plate in the form of Luke Keaschall. Taylor went after him, and while he didn't have his bat-missing stuff, the last contact of the night produced a routine flyout to right that brought a successful evening to a close.
Bullet points:
*The White Sox are now 10-4 in Fedde's starts, and three of his last four outings have been scoreless, resulting in just two earned runs over a stretch of 18⅔ innings.
*That's just the second time in Taylor's career where he faced at least five hitters without striking out a single one.
*Munetaka Murakami went 0-for-4 in his quest to join Vargas and Colson Montgomery in the 30-homer club. It would've been sweet, because that also would've set the record for the most times three teammates homered in the same game in one season.
*Kyle Teel was 0-for-3 in his return to action, although one of his outs reached the warning track in right.
*Chase Meidroth committed an error trying to Iguchi a throw in the eighth inning to prevent that infield single on Hudson's tab, but he ended up giving up an extra 90 feet instead.
