Randal Grichuk sparked a ninth-inning rally, but the White Sox left nine runners on base and fell 5-4 to the Mariners to drop the rubber match.
SEATTLE — The White Sox had the inning they wanted, the ball they needed, and still couldn’t push it across.
In the ninth. Randal Grichuk came through with a pinch-hit home run that again flashed the kind of late surge Seattle didn’t want to face. But the rally fizzled with the White Sox unable to produce another hit off Mariners reliever Jose Ferrer. and it left the day’s strangest detail hanging in the air: nine runners stranded. one too many moments that ended just short.
Seattle struck first through small but relentless swings of momentum. In the second inning. the Sox drew three straight walks to load the bases against Mariners starter Emerson Hancock. yet Hancock responded by striking out Tristan Peters and getting Drew Romo to ground into a double play to end the threat.
Sean Burke added another run-scoring wrinkle, hitting Randy Arozarena with a pitch in the second inning, and Arozarena scored on Dominic Canzone’s double.
The Sox answered in the third. Rookie Sam Antonacci singled, stole second, and came home on Andrew Benintendi’s two-out single to tie the game. Arozarena then helped tilt it back for Seattle in the fourth: he walked to open the bottom of the fourth. stole second. and came home on Patrick Wisdom’s double. The steal nearly became the Sox’s protest point. but after umpires ruled that Sox shortstop Luisangel Acuna blocked the base. play stood.
By the fifth, the game had the feeling of a tug-of-war. Three straight singles capped by Munetaka Murakami’s RBI tied it again for the Sox. But the Mariners quickly turned the table in the fifth against Burke, loading the bases with no outs. Antonacci made a sliding catch on a shallow fly to slow things down. Arozarena popped out. and when manager Will Venable called in reliever Sean Newcomb. Newcomb drew a groundout to escape the jam.
Burke finished after 4⅔ innings with two runs allowed on four hits, three walks, and two hit batters, while recording five strikeouts.
Even after the late innings started to loosen, the Sox couldn’t convert. In the sixth, they had runners on second and third, but Seattle catcher Jhonny Pereda caught Chase Meidroth lingering off third on a bunt attempt by Romo, who then grounded out to end the threat.
In the seventh, Pereda turned that defensive stop into offense. Pereda took Newcomb deep for a solo home run to put the Mariners ahead, and Arozarena piled on with a two-run blast later in the inning off reliever Jordan Hicks.
The White Sox did fight back again. In the eighth, Peters hit a would-be double-play grounder with two runners on, and Mariners shortstop Colt Emerson threw the relay wide to first. Meidroth scored on the error, pulling the Sox within a run.
There was one more messy moment for Seattle to absorb before the final out. Emerson, Seattle’s prized rookie, was picked off first by Sox reliever Brandon Eisert to end the eighth inning—an error in execution that underscored how close the Sox sometimes were to flipping the game entirely.
By the end, the story wasn’t just that the Sox fell short. It was that so many opportunities came with runners left on base, and that the dramatic ninth inning they earned through Grichuk’s pinch-hit homer still ended without the tying or winning swing.
White Sox Mariners Seattle Randal Grichuk Emerson Hancock Sean Burke Sam Antonacci Andrew Benintendi Jose Ferrer rubber match MLB