The White Sox and Mets spent most of Sunday trading nothing but ugly at-bats. Both lineups looked allergic to hard contact for stretches, the kind of game where every strikeout looking feels like a small mercy just to move the innings along.
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It stayed that kind of afternoon for a while — sloppy, low-scoring, the type of game where fans start joking that both offenses must have shaken hands beforehand and agreed to swing at everything. That's basically what whitesoxdave was getting at when he posted the Spider-Man-pointing-at-Spider-Man meme, needling both sides for stacking bad at-bats on top of bad at-bats.
Then it got tense. New York tied the game late, and the broadcast caught the Mets dugout erupting as a run crossed to even the score in the top of the ninth.
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That was Jared Young tying it with a single off Chicago's bullpen, and for a second it looked like the White Sox were about to let another one slip. whitesoxdave summed up the vibe in real time — half frustration, half nerves — with a blunt "clean this shit up fellas". But the bottom of the ninth belonged to Tristan Peters, the 26-year-old Canadian centerfielder who's quietly having one of the best rookie seasons in baseball. Peters turned on a Kodai Senga pitch and sent it 406 feet into the center-field seats for a walk-off, sealing a 2-1 win and Chicago's 11th walk-off victory of the season.
Peters gets into one and the White Sox go home winners! https://t.co/5cPNDK9UGU
It was Peters' third walk-off hit of the year and Chicago's second in this series alone against New York — a series the Mets will want to forget fast, having also blown a four-run lead earlier in the set. For Peters, it's just the latest chapter in a season nobody saw coming: acquired from Tampa Bay for essentially nothing, he hit for the cycle in July, made his first All-Star team days later, and has been a steady force in center field ever since. whitesoxdave, watching it all unfold in real time, put it about as plainly as anyone could: "I don't need dramatics allllll the time but goddamn this team is fucking fun!!!!".
That's the story of this White Sox season in a nutshell — a team that wasn't supposed to be in first-place conversations, riding a bucket-of-baseballs trade acquisition into one walk-off after another. If Chicago keeps finding ways like this to end games, the Mets won't be the last team leaving the South Side shaking their heads.