There are bad days at the ballpark and then there are days where your team's ace is throwing a perfect game against you and the home crowd is reduced to chanting for a single base hit like it's a charity ask. Saturday at Rate Field was the second kind. Yamamoto walked to the mound, the Dodgers spotted him a lead, and the White Sox lineup spent 7 innings looking like they'd never seen a baseball before.
Yamamoto walking off after retiring his 21st straight White Sox hitter with the Dodgers up 5-0.
You could feel the South Side mood shift in real time. The same fan base that rolled into the tailgate convinced Burke was going to spin gold and the lineup was going to rake spent the middle innings watching Yamamoto's splitter disappear under bats. By the 8th, the bar had been lowered from "win the game" to "please, baseball gods, one knock."
The mid-game vibe check from the White Sox corner of the internet.
Okay fellas we’re at the let’s just get one hit part of the game
Enter Mookie Betts, future Hall of Famer, owner of multiple Gold Gloves, and on this particular afternoon the guy who couldn't squeeze a ground ball up the middle with 2 outs in the 8th. The perfect game died on a routine play, the kind Betts makes in his sleep, and the Spectrum SportsNet graphic flipped from "Perfect Game Thru 7.2" to "well, there's always the no-no."
The Betts error in the 8th that ended Yamamoto's perfect-game bid.
The no-hitter didn't last much longer. One inning later, with the Dodgers cruising 7-0 and the broadcast still flashing the No-Hitter Alert, Tristan Peters yanked one into the seats to make it 7-1 and give the White Sox the only thing they were going to leave the ballpark with: a souvenir.
Peters' 9th-inning solo shot finally cracking the no-hit bid.
So Yamamoto doesn't get the perfecto, doesn't get the no-no, doesn't even get the shutout. What he does get is one of those starts that quietly tells the rest of the National League exactly what the Dodgers paid for. The Sox got their hit. They just had to wait until the game was already over to celebrate it.