Forget the final score for a second. The real story from Comerica Park on Friday night is Miguel Vargas going 4-for-5 with two home runs in a game Chicago trailed twice. That's a guy locked in at the exact moment his team needed him, and if you're the White Sox, it's the kind of performance you build a stretch run around.
Vargas's homers were the fireworks, but the fourth inning is what should actually worry Detroit. Down 3-1, Chicago strung together a sequence where Chase Meidroth singled, Tristan Peters tied it with a homer, Munetaka Murakami went deep to give the Sox the lead for good, and Braden Montgomery tripled home two more. Sox Machine pointed out that group basically hit for the cycle in that one frame. Five runs in one inning, and a game Detroit controlled was suddenly over.
Detroit had won nine of its last 12 games entering this series, and the front office had reason to feel good about the pitching after selling at the deadline and resetting around younger arms. Then one bad inning from a bullpen game unraveled it. Jackson Jobe got roughed up for six runs on nine hits in under four innings, and even Chicago's own pitching plan (an opener who lasted four outs before José Urquidy came in and got hit early) still turned into a laugher. If a pitching staff can get cracked open that easily by a lineup playing opener-bullpen roulette, that's a real problem heading into a long stretch of contested baseball.
Give credit where it's due: Ben Malgeri capped his first career multi-homer game and gave Detroit a real answer in the seventh, pulling the Tigers within three before Vargas's second homer shut the door. Doesn't change much. This White Sox lineup has the depth to survive a shaky start and the top-end power to erase deficits fast, and that combination is going to be hard for anybody in the AL Central to handle over a full series.
Manager A.J. Hinch struck a patient tone afterward: "It's been a steep climb and we're not at the peak of the mountain yet... but we are loving every minute of this... I know we've taken them on a little bit of a journey this season, but we have a chance." That's the right attitude for a team playing better baseball than it was a few months ago. But attitude doesn't fix a rotation that just got shredded for six runs before the fifth inning. One loss in a series opener isn't a crisis, but it's a preview of exactly how this Tigers team gets beaten if Chicago keeps swinging like this.
