Team Effort, II

What’s the saying? Oh, right—Baseball is a game that will humble you. That goes for opinionated fans as well as players, I might add. Last night’s 3-2 White Sox win over the Yankees left me duly humbled and reminded why you just have to love baseball. I mean, Dallas Keuchel with his 6.86 ERA started against a Yankees’ team that scored 25 runs in the first two games of the series. And what did Keuchel do? He shut down the Bombers for five innings. And what did manager Tony La Russa then do? Why, he had the sense not to send Keuchel out for another inning, unlike Sunday in Boston, when Keuchel tried to go six shutout innings only to give up two runs. But last night with nearly 33,000 raucous fans in the house, La Russa went with the much-rested Kendall Graveman for two innings, after which he rolled the dice on Joe Kelly in the eighth. Kelly gave up a run on three hits in .1 inning before Liam Hendriks bailed him out with two strikeouts; that kept the score at 2-1, good guys. Hendriks yielded the tying run in the ninth—no win for you, Dallas—but the Sox reached Aroldis Chapman for the winning run in the bottom of the frame on a run-scoring single by Luis Robert. The Yankees still have eight more wins than the Sox, who can do no better than a split if they win today behind Michael Kopech. But I will say this, the Sox have youth on their side. New York’s lineup featured six starters north of thirty, and Chapman’s no spring chicken (34), either. The core of Anderson; Moncada; Robert; Vaughn; Jimenez; Giolito; Cease; and Kopech is all under thirty and still intriguing. We’ll—humbly, of course—see what happens today.