Defense and Dingers Do in Diamondbacks, 3-1
And relievers are actually a relief
The White Sox still sit at 98 losses with now just three games to go, thanks to a couple of long balls and a second straight day of stellar relief work — well, either that or the Diamondbacks really were exhausted by all the running around the bases they did Tuesday night.
The defense part began with Andrew Benintendi robbing one from the net with runners on second and third in the first — a foul ball, but still nifty and possibly critical.
Then Andrew Vaughn put a little reverse spin on an old baseball cliché. It's supposed to be that a player makes an excellent defensive grab and then comes up in the next half-inning and gets a big hit. Vaughn instead got the big hit first.
Arizona starter Bryce Jarvis walked Yoán Moncada to open the bottom of the second — the Sox's only walk of the game, but a timely one — then ran 2-0 on Vaughn and fed him a cookie.
Then, in the top of the third, Geraldo Perdomo lashed a ball toward right, and Vaughn did his Vic Power imitation.
That stop was critical because it came just ahead of a Corbin Carroll triple, and what could have been a big inning for Arizona ended with just one run.
The Diamondbacks had the four hardest-hit balls of the game, but they forgot to send them into the stands, something Moncada remembered to do in the fourth when Kyle Nelson hung a slider middle-middle.
Chicago starter Touki Toussaint had just gotten out of a bases-loaded jam in the top of the fourth, thanks in part to some very friendly strike calls, but it had taken him 85 pitches to get through four innings, so his day was done after giving up three hits and three walks,
Bullpen time.
After the pen tossed 6 2⁄3 innings of one-hit shutout ball yesterday, four relievers took it up a notch today with five innings of no-hit, one-walk ball. Tanner Banks, Declan Cronin, and Aaron Bummer all cruised, and Bryan Shaw, appearing in roughly his 123rd straight game, got the save.
The South Side offense didn't get a single hit with a runner in scoring position because they never had a runner in scoring position, except that when you hit one into the seats, everybody's in scoring position. Arizona generously went 0-for-5 in such situations. Actually, the only Sox hit besides the homers was a Benintendi bloop single, but it didn't matter.
With the San Diego Padres coming to town for the final series of the season, the Good Guys will now have to lose two of the three games to make it to 100 losses, and it's even possible Blake Snell will sit out his regular spot in the rotation Sunday to preserve his ERA lead and top Cy Young position. Still, if you lose 98 or 99 games, you're just a really, really bad baseball team. Lose 100, and you earn an extra whole extra column in historical stats.
The Diamondbacks, meanwhile, moved to just 1 1⁄2 games ahead of the Miami Marlins and Chicago Cubs in the Wild Card race.
And, oh, yeah — the whole thing only took two hours and 16 minutes.