The White Sox came home needing their bats to wake up, and for one night they absolutely did. Miguel Vargas turned a marathon 10-pitch at-bat into a 3-run bomb, the kind of swing that makes a guy start campaigning for a Home Run Derby invite.
Miguel Vargas capped a 10-pitch at-bat with a 3-run homer to put the White Sox up early on Cleveland.
It felt like exactly the kind of night Chicago needed after a rough stretch on the road. But Cleveland doesn't roll over, and the Guardians clawed the game all the way back to even, turning a comfortable lead into a white-knuckle finish.
Cleveland tied the game up, turning a comfortable White Sox lead into a nail-biter.
That one ended about as painfully as possible, a 10th-inning walk-off that sent Cleveland home celebrating for the second straight night. It's the kind of loss that lingers, and the frustration showed up all over the timeline afterward, from questionable base-running to a called strike 3 in extras that had people fuming.
The White Sox dropped a heartbreaker on a walk-off in the 10th, their second straight extra-innings loss to Cleveland.
Chicago answered back, though. Kyle Teel got things rolling early with a home run, and the Sox kept it up from there, stacking extra-base hits against Cleveland pitching. Robert Montgomery, whose defensive miscues had been a sore subject all week, made up for it in a big way at the plate. Then Gabriel Arias got involved for Cleveland, ripping a shot that knotted the score right back up and turned another game into a slugfest.
By the time the dust settled on 4 games, Chicago had banked a split instead of a sweep either way, and that apparently counts as a win given how the week had gone. The mood shifted from stressed to fired up fast, with talk already turning to the Red Sox and A's next and a division race nobody expected the White Sox to actually be part of this deep into the summer.
A fired-up reaction clip marked the series split and the pivot to talking division race.