First, this was a bonus TV game. MLB Network was carrying the White Sox feed for the game, and as such I was able to watch this one on TV. They talked to Buddy Bell, who is involved in some advisory capacity with the White Sox now. Wasn’t that bad, actually for watching the other team’s announcers – they knew our team, they had a lot of nice things to say about our big prospects, especially Justin Smoak & Max Ramirez.
Matt Harrison started this game, and looked quite good. Four innings, four hits, one walk, four strikeouts, and just one run. And that run was a solo home run. In fact, home runs were pretty much the order of the day for the Chicago offense. They had four home runs off of four different Ranger pitchers. Three of them were solo shots, but the big one was the last one, which came on the last pitch of the game. Brian Anderson jacked a walkoff grand slam to end the game. That was Anderson’s second home run of the afternoon, actually. But that’s the crappy end of the game spring pitching.
The guys who count for the regular season were better than that. Derrick Turnbow pitched “OK”. His line doesn’t show it, but he seemed to labor a bunch. Josh Rupe gave up two walks and a hit (with a run) in his inning. Jennings had two innings, but four hits and a run. Meh on the last couple of guys.
Offensively, I’m surprised we had as many runs as we did, because we had just six hits, and three of those were by Joaquin “En Fuego” Arias. Arias was 3-4 today after going 3-4 the previous game. If he keeps this up for another week or so, it might make the final cuts difficult. But outside of Arias, we managed just a double by Marlon Byrd, a bloop single by Omar Vizquel, & a single by Chris Davis.
This loss now drops us to three in a row in the loss column, and drops us one game under .500 for the spring.