For a moment, it looked as if Sean Burke was really going to be the star of the show again.
To an extent, he was. A six-inning performance yielding just two earned runs is nothing to sneeze at. But when you put up an offensive performance like the White Sox did in tonight’s 4-1 loss to the Astros — eight shutout innings followed by an ultimately meaningless scratch run in the ninth — it was never going to matter.
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It’s an especially heartbreaking result considering how genuinely lights-out Burke was for most of the night. He induced 19 swinging strikes, which is tied for the second-most in any game this season for a Sox starter, and wound up with 10 punchouts, the second time this month he’s reached double digits. He threw almost 70% of his pitches for strikes. Of the 12 balls that the Astros put in play against Burke, just three broke the “hard hit” threshold of 95 mph.
Just like yesterday, the Sox starter was absolutely cruising through five innings. Just like last night, an impeccably timed series of walks and ground balls finding holes turned the sixth inning into a multi-run nightmare that proved to be the difference in the ballgame.
The elevated stuff that Burke has shown lately, and continued to show tonight, can’t be faked. But when I noted in today’s gamethread that Burke has also been the beneficiary lately of extraordinarily good BABIP and LOB% luck, I was thinking that it was only a matter of time before some things like this happened.
The luck turned first when Jeremy Peña helped get a rally going by hitting a weak ground ball on a great pitch that nonetheless resulted in a single:
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That was followed by a walk to Yordan Alvarez, because of course you walk Yordan Alvarez: He has 34 homers before the last week of July. I wouldn’t want to mess around with him, either. But then things happen like this Isaac Paredes single, which was hit a little bit harder than Peña’s but also came on a pretty good pitch that probably results in an out eight or nine times out of 10, if you played it over and over again — much less the extra two runs scored on a brutal misplay from the typically-solid Braden Montgomery in right field:
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Unfortunately, that’s all there really was to it. For one of the first times this season, Astros starter Hunter Brown showed the form that earned him a top-three finish in Cy Young balloting last year, completely blanking the Sox offense over a season-high seven innings of work. After allowing more than a walk per inning over his last three starts, Brown didn’t issue a single free pass tonight, aggressively staying ahead in the count and forcing hitters to swing at more pitches out of the zone than they’d ever be comfortable with.
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Tristan Peters landed a single to lead off the third inning, and Munetaka Murakami did the same in the fourth. Nobody else was able to do anything at all, much less drive them in. Those were the only baserunners the Sox saw until the latest stages of the ballgame.
The Sox did actually manage to get on the scoreboard, but it wasn’t until the ninth inning, when Miguel Vargas singled, advanced on an error, and scored on a Colson Montgomery single to cut the Astros lead to 4-1, with the extra Houston tally coming courtesy of another RBI single from Paredes. Reliever Trevor Richards allowed that extra run but was otherwise solid in his two innings of work, while Tyler Schweitzer completed an uneventful ninth inning to close out the Sox pitching line for the evening.
It’s not yet prevalent enough to be a point of concern, but the growing volume of lackluster offensive showings since the All-Star Game is noteworthy. These are the kinds of games that, at their best, we know this team finds a way to win. Burke wasn’t perfect tonight, but he did more than enough to keep them in the game. The scratch-and-claw scrappiness that won these imperfect games and set the tone for this season is certainly still there, but it simply hasn’t made itself felt as much over the last week or two as it’ll probably need to be if they want to hold their first place lead deep into the season.
It’s the first time they’ve lost a Burke start since he began his red-hot run on June 18, and it’s officially their first series loss since their three-game sweep at the hands of the Red Sox a week before the All-Star break. Avoidance of another sweep will be in the hands of Erick Fedde on Sunday, which is not as confidence-inspiring as we might like. But Fedde has been serviceable enough, and Houston’s Ronel Blanco should prove a vanquishable opponent in just his second start of the year. It’s a matinee battle, with first pitch at 1:05 p.m. CT, and we’ll see you there!
MVP
Sean Burke: 6 IP, 4 H, 3 R, 2 ER, 1 BB, 10 SO
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Runners-Up
Tristan Peters: 1-for-2, BB
Andrew Benintendi: 1-for-4, RBI
Cold Cat
Braden Montgomery: 1-for-4, 2 K, E that cleared the bases
Runners-Up
Andrew Benintendi: 0-for-3, 3 K
White Sox offense: five singles, one walk, 10 Ks
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