Major league teams always appreciate late-August off days, but the Texas Rangers especially relished their rest ahead of Tuesday’s road series opener against the Chicago White Sox.
That’s because Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said a 4-2 loss at Cleveland on Sunday “probably was our worst game fundamentally” this season.
Texas pitchers committed two errors and the team had a runner picked off first base. Corey Seager smacked a solo home run in the eighth inning to bring the Rangers within 3-2 but Texas gave the run back in the bottom half.
“If you don’t score a lot of runs,” Bochy said, “you need to play clean baseball. … We didn’t play good, clean baseball. This is what bothers a manager more than anything. We’re good fundamentally, but we had an off day.”
As the Rangers enjoyed an open date Monday, the White Sox toiled to their latest loss, the club’s 101st this season and eighth in the past nine games.
Spencer Torkelson blasted a three-run home run among his three hits to help the visiting Detroit Tigers record a 6-3 victory. The triumph capped a four-game sweep of Chicago, which boasts one victory at Guaranteed Rate Field since the All-Star break.
The White Sox led 2-1 entering the seventh but Jared Shuster allowed four runs in the Tigers’ five-run inning.
“Shu has been great for us, you know,” White Sox interim manager Grady Sizemore said. “That’s just what happens, you know. We haven’t had a lot of things go our way. They just put together a good inning.”
Chicago enters Tuesday on a 15-series losing streak, a slide that includes four straight losses at Texas from July 22-25 — three by one run.
Andrew Vaughn has driven in two runs in each of the past three games for Chicago.
The White Sox are just the fourth team to lose at least 100 games before September. Chicago must win 12 of its remaining 30 games to avoid matching the 1962 New York Mets’ modern record for most losses in a season (120).
The Rangers, whose 60 wins are seventh fewest in baseball, will turn to left-hander Andrew Heaney as the team aims to stop a two-game losing streak.
Heaney (4-13, 4.04 ERA) regrouped Wednesday from two straight rough starts, pitching five shutout innings in a no-decision against the visiting Pittsburgh Pirates. Heaney scattered five hits, one walk, and one hit batter while collecting eight strikeouts for the second outing in a row.
In nine career starts against the White Sox, Heaney is 5-1 with a 4.56 ERA and 60 strikeouts in 51 1/3 innings.
All-Star lefty Garrett Crochet (6-9, 3.64) gets the call for Chicago. Crochet, whose workload is being monitored amid previous injury concerns, hasn’t pitched into the fifth inning since June 30, a span of eight straight starts.
He took a no-decision at San Francisco on Wednesday, allowing two runs and four hits in four innings. Crochet lost at Texas on July 23 after yielding two runs and four hits in four innings. He’s 0-1 with a 2.35 ERA in three appearances against the Rangers covering 7 2/3 innings.
–Field Level Media
