Nobody told me that becoming a fan of the Chicago White Sox meant that I would have to suffer humiliating losses!
Wait. Actually, everybody told me that. But I didn't listen. I arrived at Yankee Stadium for the first game of the White Sox series, full of optimism. Even if the star sluggers, Aaron Judge and Munetaka Murakami, were out injured, we were still getting a treat of a pitching matchup: Chicago's breakout potential Cy Young candidate Davis Martin, and New York's recently reconstructed ace Gerrit Cole. I expected a tight, low-scoring game that the White Sox would pull out because they were fun, and because they'd just handled both the Dodgers and Braves last week.
Instead, I hear they're still finding scraps of Martin's uniform scattered amid the abandoned French fries in the bleachers, after the Yanks blasted Chicago 12-2. The Sox ace seemed his normal self in the top of the first, surrendered a solo home run to Spencer Jones in the second, and then in the third looked like he was pitching with a 50-pound weight on his back. He walked three guys as the Yanks scored four runs, and when Will Venable made the decision to bring Martin back out for the fourth, it was a free-for-all. Martin's final line was 3.1 innings with eight hits and nine earned runs, mercifully exiting the game only after Paul Goldschmidt banged one into left for his 382nd career dong.
"Things kind of unraveled pretty quickly," Martin said after the game.
I can grasp for a few tiny misfortunes to try to partially excuse the performance—he got ABSed on a called third strike that eventually became a walk early in the third, after his defense had allowed Anthony Volpe to reach base because nobody covered first—but the reality is that Martin simply did not have it for the second time in his last three starts. Through the first two months of the season, he was a near-automatic win for the Sox. But he's also a 29-year-old who has yet to put together a great full season on the mound, so maybe it's premature to put him in the same class as a veteran heavyweight like Cole, even with Cole still getting comfortable after Tommy John recovery.
The White Sox have some work to do, and they'll need to improve on their 14-21 road record if they want to pull away from Cleveland in the AL Central. The Yankees, meanwhile, profile as far and away the best team in the junior circuit, with Ben Rice among the hitters making up for the loss of Judge and Cam Schlittler leading all AL pitchers in a whole bunch of categories in just his second season. While I'm sure the White Sox will pummel the Yankees when they meet in the playoffs, watching this particular game felt more like 2024 than 2026. At least the weather was nice.
