For seven innings on Tuesday night at Rate Field, this looked like the kind of game that keeps a surprising season pointed in the right direction. Sean Burke was carving. Chicago had staked him to a 4-0 lead on three home runs, the crowd of 38,113 was decked out in papal-style giveaway hats, and the White Sox were sitting on a night that should have moved them one win closer to their best season in years.
Instead, Cincinnati walked out with a 5-4 win in ten innings. The bullpen is why.
Burke gave Chicago exactly what a team fighting to hold first place needs: one run on three hits over seven innings. That's a start you win nine times out of ten. The White Sox lost it in the eighth, plainly, when the bullpen couldn't hold a three-run lead against a lineup that had just been swept and outscored 20-6 by Washington.
Brandon Doyle opened the scoring with a leadoff homer in the first, Edgar Quero went deep in the second, and Miguel Vargas homered in the fourth, with Sam Antonacci's RBI double the same inning pushing it to 4-0. Elly De La Cruz's fifth-inning solo shot off Burke was the only crack in the wall for most of the night. Then the eighth arrived and the wall came down. Bryan Hudson gave up an RBI single to De La Cruz to make it a two-run game, and Grant Taylor loaded the bases before Tyler Stephenson lined a single that scored two and tied it. Burke's line went from a near-shutout to a no-decision in the span of a few outs he had no say in.
Chicago gift-wrapped this one. You can survive a bad night from the bats or a short outing from a starter. What you can't survive over a full season, if you actually intend to play meaningful baseball into the fall, is a setup crew that turns a comfortable lead into a coin flip. The White Sox have been the feel-good story most people didn't see coming. Nights like this are the reminder that the margins get thinner the deeper a team goes.
And then there's De La Cruz, easily the best player on the field. He hit the homer off Burke, then the single that trimmed it to two, then in the tenth, with Matt McLain standing on second as the automatic runner, lifted the sacrifice fly that won it. He drove in two runs, started the comeback and finished it. Eugenio Suárez chipped in a homer of his own, and Emilio Pagán slammed the door in the bottom half for his 14th save, a clean inning to protect a lead his teammates had clawed back from nothing.
Context matters here, and it cuts in opposite directions. Entering the night, the White Sox sat atop the AL Central, having already topped their entire 2025 win total with their most recent victory. Manager Will Venable called the recent stretch "progress for us... we've gone through some stuff and continue to push through and just get better and better." One loss doesn't undo that. Cincinnati, meanwhile, came in buried in the NL Central cellar and reeling from that Washington sweep, with Milwaukee running away with the division at 74-46 through August 12. These are two clubs in different leagues heading in opposite directions, not a division showdown.
For the Reds, call it flickering hope rather than a turning point. A win over a first-place team snaps a three-game skid and proves the bats can still land a punch late. It doesn't erase the ground they've lost. But it does show what this lineup looks like when it stops chasing and starts grinding out at-bats, and De La Cruz is the reason to keep watching regardless of where Cincinnati finishes.
Nick Lodolo, back from the injured list roughly a month after his last outing and hoping a new curveball grip would keep the blisters away, was the one who surrendered those early homers to Doyle, Quero and Vargas before departing. That's a footnote to a night that belonged to two bullpens, one that held and one that didn't.
Burke deserved better. His own relievers made sure he didn't get it.
