Good Luck, Bad Luck, Good Team, Bad Team

Bad teams have bad luck, it’s as simple as that. The White Sox are a bad team who were done in by a bad home-plate umpire. The pity of it is that Sox starter Garrett Crochet was “on,” with stuff as good as Dylan Cease ever showed. Crochet yielded two hits over five innings; unfortunately, one was a two-run home run that shouldn’t have been. That’s where luck comes in. The Sox actually jumped to a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the first against the visiting Twins. After striking out the first batter in the second, Crochet walked the second, only he didn’t. I mean, the at-bat pitch chart for Manuel Margot on MLB Gameday shows two of the four pitches called balls were clearly in the strike zone. The Twins should send a thank-you note to Jonathan Parra for his strike zone. By this time, Crochet had already retired two of the first four Minnesota batters on strikeouts, so it’s not as if Parra wasn’t expecting the Sox lefty to be around the plate. Carlos Santana followed Margot with a homer, which tied the game at two, where it stayed until the ninth. That’s an inning where things often go bad for bad teams, and it was no exception here. The Sox give up a run in the top of the ninth, put two runners on in the bottom but don’t score in a 3-2 loss. The only way for a team to change its luck is to get good. But how?