A Walk in the Park: Grant Taylor Takes the Last 12 Outs as White Sox Blank Guardians 3-0 in ALDS Opener
By Elle Elena ·
First pitch at Progressive Field came at 12:08 p.m. Central on Saturday. It was 63 degrees and partly cloudy, with a 9 mph wind blowing from right to left. I would order that weather for every ballgame if someone took requests. Cleveland got three hits all afternoon. The White Sox won Game 1 of the American League Division Series 3-0 and have now played 27 postseason innings without trailing once.
Grant Taylor threw the last four innings of Saturday's nine. He came in to start the sixth with a 2-0 lead and faced 13 batters: two hits, no walks, six strikeouts, 42 pitches, 34 of them strikes. His longest major league outing before Saturday was 2 2/3 innings, in August, according to his MLB game logs. In Game 1 of the Wild Card Series in Houston, he needed 54 pitches to get seven outs. In Cleveland he got 12 outs on 42.
He did most of it with two pitches. Taylor threw 19 four-seam fastballs, the hardest at 99.8 mph, and 16 curveballs in the low to mid 80s, with six sliders mixed in. Cleveland swung through the curveball seven times. In the ninth he struck out Angel Martínez, Nathaniel Lowe and Travis Bazzana, all three on curveballs. The one to Martínez bounced, and Kyle Teel blocked it and threw to first.
"We're going into that one not expecting four innings from him," Will Venable said afterward, per ClutchPoints' Benedetto Vitale. "But he was just so efficient and kept going and wanted the ball in the ninth there." The last pitcher to earn a postseason save of four innings or more was Lance McCullers Jr., in Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS, according to a list from MLB.com's Sarah Langs that ClutchPoints cited.
The first half of the game went to the same bullpen plan Chicago used to open the Wild Card Series. Hagen Smith opened again and retired the first eight Guardians on 35 pitches, 23 for strikes. Then, with two outs in the third, he walked Brayan Rocchio, Steven Kwan and José Ramírez on 16 pitches, four of them strikes. Smith walked 16 batters in 28 regular-season innings, so the control was always the part to watch, and it went away all at once. Venable brought in left-hander Bryan Hudson to face Chase DeLauter. Hudson ran the count full and got a line drive to Randal Grichuk in left. That was six pitches and one out, and Hudson was credited with the win.
Cleveland loaded the bases again in the fourth. Jordan Hicks struck out Jo Adell and Martínez with fastballs over 101 mph, then walked pinch-hitter Lowe on five pitches. All four balls were 101 mph or harder. Anthony Kay's first pitch became a Bazzana double down the right-field line, and Austin Hedges walked. Rocchio lined out to Braden Montgomery in right. That made two straight innings with the bases loaded and two outs, and Cleveland scored in neither. The Guardians finished 0-for-3 with runners in scoring position and left seven on base.
The White Sox scored the only runs they needed between those two innings. Miguel Vargas led off the fourth with a line single to left against Parker Messick, the rookie left-hander who had beaten Chicago twice this season. Munetaka Murakami swung at the first pitch he saw, an elevated 93 mph sinker on the inner-third, and hit it 440 feet into the right-field seats at 112.2 mph. It was his first postseason home run. He and Vargas had gone a combined 1-for-17 in the Wild Card Series, MLB.com's Scott Merkin noted. Messick lasted 4 1/3 innings and struck out six.
Cleveland's defense kept the game close for a while. The Guardians turned three double plays, and the best one came in the sixth. With White Sox runners on first and second and one out, Tommy Pham drove a ball 366 feet to left at 106 mph. Martínez made the catch, and the relay through Bazzana beat Vargas back to first. Chicago challenged whether Martínez had held on, and the call stood.
The third run came from the bases. Teel walked with one out in the seventh, Braden Montgomery struck out, and Colson Montgomery hit Erik Sabrowski's first pitch on the ground down the left-field line, a 64 mph roller. Teel came all the way around from first. MLB.com's account has the throw home beating him there and getting away. A catcher scoring from first on a ground ball is one of my favorite lines a box score can produce.
Teel had a full afternoon on the other side of the ball, too. He challenged three pitches under the automated ball-strike system and won two of them. The second win came in the seventh, after Patrick Bailey's pinch-hit single, and moved Kwan's count to 1-2. Kwan grounded the next pitch, a curveball, to Colson Montgomery, who stepped on second himself and threw to first to end the inning.
The whole thing took 2 hours and 49 minutes. It was over a few minutes before 4 o'clock in Cleveland with plenty of daylight left, which is how I would like every October game to end.
Up Next
Sunday is an off day. Game 2 is Monday at 4 p.m. Central at Progressive Field, and MLB lists Gavin Williams as Cleveland's starter. The series moves to Rate Field for Game 3 on Wednesday, with Game 4 there on Thursday if it is needed.
Chicago took the regular-season series 7-6. In the current 2-2-1 Division Series format, teams that won Game 1 on the road have gone on to win the series 35 of 48 times, according to MLB.com's Tim Stebbins.