And just like that, the White Sox are hosting the only game in town.
With the Rays sweeping the Yankees (who never led at any point over three games) and the Brewers and Dodgers both securing clinching victories in their respective Game 4's on Wednesday, White Sox-Guardians is the only Division Series remaining unsettled, so Game 4 will take the primetime slot at 7 CT tonight.
"Unsettled" also describes the Chicago pitching situation, although that's also been the status quo for a lot of the year. We know that Hagen Smith is opening for the White Sox, Erick Fedde is on full rest, Anthony Kay, Jordan Hicks and Grant Taylor are on adequate reliever rest, and Sean Burke would also be theoretically available if the White Sox didn't want to save him for the potential of a Game 5.
A Smith-Fedde combination might not make hitters quake in their spikes, but if the White Sox are concerned about Cleveland's lefties -- and using Sean Newcomb, Bryan Hudson, Smith and Noah Schultz in succession at the start of Game 3 suggests that's the priority -- Fedde seems like a responsible choice.
It seems like lefties should kill him, in large part because they were the source of his biggest problems in 2025, but Fedde managed to reverse his splits this season:
- vs. RHB: .267/.318/.490 over 278 PA
- vs. LHB: .247/.327/.372 over 328 PA
He can point to his sweeper, which James wrote about back in May. At the time, Fedde considered it a strategy that was working for him after so much hadn't, but couldn't count on it being his bread-and-butter pitch the rest of the season since hitters had previously adjusted to other versions of himself.
But because this sweeper is a more dynamic pitch, the league never forced a grand revision. July is the only month where a pitch other than the sweeper led his pitch mix, and he finished the year by throwing his breaking ball more than ever, especially to lefties ...
... and as a result, Statcast said his sweeper produced the second-most value in baseball, tied with Shohei Ohtani and only trailing Jesus Luzardo.
It doesn't seem like the easiest way to make a living, but Fedde posted a 2.87 ERA over the final four months of the regular season, and then pitched two scoreless innings to close out the AL Wild Card Series in Houston. Add it all up, and he seems as sound a bet as the White Sox have for picking up a plurality of the innings tonight.
Figuring out Bryan Hudson
Speaking of reverse splits, Bryan Hudson fared far better against righties (.610 OPS allowed) than lefties (.822 OPS) over the course of the 2026 season, which is the second consecutive season that's been the case.
It certainly played out that way on Wednesday. He entered in the third inning to face the bottom of Cleveland's order retired neither lefty he faced, walking Travis Bazzana to open his outing, and allowing a single to Steven Kwan before giving way to Smith.
Hudson ended up allowing three runs over one-third of an inning, which is the fourth time in his last six outings that the run column is crooked, but the innings total is a fraction. He has not struck out any of the last 21 batters he's faced, resulting in a line that's equal parts ghastly and unusual: 3 IP, 12 H, 12 R, 11 ER, 1 HR, 2 BB, 0 K.
What makes it tricky is that Hudson had a 12-outing scoreless streak before that, and from the start of July until his last outing of the regular season, he walked just two of the last 123 batters he faced (and one of them was intentional).
Basically, Hudson looked great until he didn't, and because his success is predicated on throwing strikes, keeping the ball on the ground and generating unremarkable contact with remarkable extension, you don't really know whether Hudson is going to succeed until he's returning to the dugout after three outs on 11 pitches.
That makes him the biggest individual land mine of any pitcher in the White Sox bullpen, because while Hagen Smith's tendency to lose the strike zone is an established bug, he has the capacity to pitch his way out of it. Hudson leaves a whole lot more up to providence, and that hasn't been on his side. You can turn him off, unplug him, plug him back in and try again, but that's about as far as tech support goes right now.
All those strikeouts
The White Sox set a postseason record by striking out 19 times in a nine-inning postseason game, which means that Jayson Stark went off on all sorts of historic fact-finding tangents at The Athletic, especially since that doesn't represent the team's single-game high this year.
One of those [19+ strikeout games] happened on Aug. 8, 1997. Randy Johnson piled up all 19 of those K’s by himself that day. The other happened way back on … Opening Day this year. A guy named Jacob Misiorowski started that one. He punched out 11 in five innings. His bullpen pals struck out nine more White Sox. That adds up to 20, tying the record for the most in history by any team in a nine-inning regular-season game.
So that means the White Sox now hold both the postseason and regular-season single-game strikeout records. But do we think either of those marks belong on the list of records that may never be broken? Put me down for a vehement “no” on that.
Count leverage played a big part of the way Wednesday unfolded, and then unraveled. Here's an accounting of the number of pitches each team threw when behind in the count:
| Guardians | Count | White Sox |
|---|---|---|
| 12 | 1-0 | 21 |
| 4 | 2-0 | 8 |
| 4 | 2-1 | 11 |
| 2 | 3-0 | 4 |
| 1 | 3-1 | 9 |
| 23 | Total | 53 |
This can be a little bit circular or obvious, if only because the White Sox threw 178 pitches to the Guardians' 152. One way to put it is that Cleveland pitchers only threw 15 percent of their pitches while behind in the count, while the White Sox nearly doubled it. Another way to put it is that while the Guardians threw 26 fewer pitches on the whole, they threw six more pitches in a 1-2 count, and that's kinda how it felt for the majority of the afternoon.
