This White Sox season has been a long, grinding exercise in patience. Last place. Small moments of hope buried inside bigger stretches of disappointment. But something has felt slightly different lately, and a big reason for that has a name: Randolph Grichuk.
Sox might be 3-4 under without Grichuk, man what a pickup
That kind of quiet "what if" appreciation is earned, not given — especially on a team that hasn't given fans a lot to work with. So when the 9th inning of Tuesday night's game arrived and the Sox were staring down a 2-run deficit with 2 outs and nobody on base, it felt like just another entry in a very long ledger of tough nights.
And then, somehow, the White Sox didn't quit. Back-to-back home runs. In the 9th. Down 2. With nobody on. The kind of sequence that makes you jump off your couch whether you've followed this team all year or just stumbled onto the broadcast. It tied the game and it was genuinely electric.
The back-to-back shots that knotted the game in the 9th.
The problem with pulling off something that stunning is what comes after. The White Sox couldn't hold it, and the game slipped away in the kind of soul-crushing fashion only baseball can manufacture. It's a loss that will hurt more than a regular blowout ever could — because they earned the right to feel it. You have to actually believe to get your heart broken, and for a few minutes on Tuesday night, this team made you believe.