Munetaka Murakami about to demolish Parker Messick’s pitch for an ALDS Game One home run Saturday. (MLB TV capture.)
Just think. A few more days, and there just might be a pair of League Championship Series lined up with nobody involved except four division winners. Among the division series contenders who didn’t win their divisions, let’s be honest. The most likeable of the group is the White Sox.
Come to think of it, the White Sox did edge the American League Central champion Guardians by one game in their regular season series. Considering where they’d come from only too recently, beating the Guards 3-0 in their division series Game One must have been a confidence builder for which you couldn’t forge a special order.
Back to them in a few.
The National League Central-winning Brewers are a lot closer to that all-champ NLCS after slipping past the wild card Padres from the NL West in division series Game Two Sunday. From a whacky-finish 3-2 Game One win, the Brewers overcame an early fielding mishap and a two-run deficit to win it, 4-3, on a walkoff single.
Game One’s whacky finish involved a ninth-inning American Family Field ricochet roof catch that prevented San Diego’s Ty (Viva la) France from hitting a two-run homer that would have yanked the Padres up and ahead off a one-run deficit. The ball bumped a roof rail and sank into Brewers left fielder Jackson Chourio’s glove.
The ground rules in the park say balls hitting the roof or its cabling in fair territory are in play and catchable for outs as long as the ball stays fair. That’s what an appeal told the Padres, who tried arguing to no avail that the ball was foul.
Maybe the last thing the Friars needed was Chourio in the middle of their Game Two loss. Especially with their best relief pitcher, Mason Miller, out to work the bottom of the ninth on assignment to make their 3-2 lead hold up. Miller didn’t exactly make things simple for himself, either. After a leadoff groundout, he walked Christian Yelich (who stole second as soon as he knew it to be available, practially) and Sal Frelick. He got pinch hitter Andrew Vaughn to fly out to right, but then he walked pinch hitter Gary Sanchez and the pillows loaded.
Enter Chourio, who’d helped make the Padres’s lives miserable enough in Game One. Before he caught the Ricochet Heard ‘Round the World (social media argued about the play almost an entire day to follow), he’d tied Game One in the third with a hefty two-run homer, his fifth bomb of this postseason thus far.
He wrestled Miller to 2-2. Then, he shot a low liner beneath diving Padres second baseman Jake Cronenworth, sending Yelich and Frelick on a frolic home with the tying and winning runs, Frelick coming in a dive Olympic swimmers might have envied.
You might start getting the idea that the Padres may believe their survival chances now depend on having Chourio kidnapped and hidden away on some remote island in sub-Antarctica. Clearly, the guy has no respect for the team that won twenty out of its final 23 regular-season games. To him, and to his fellow Crew members, the Padres are the guys one loss from wait till next year.
Now, back to the White Sox. Well, let’s look big picture first. Didn’t the Braves look unintimidated for having lost their NL division series Game One by two to the Damn Dodgers, with Tarik Skubal manhandling them and Teoscár Hernández, Kyle Tucker, and Max Muncy taking them over the Dodger Stadium fences? Of course not.
Don’t the Rays feel a little more than confident leading their AL division series 1-0, after Drew Rasmussen got close enough to no-hitting the Yankees—before Austin Wells got a little greedy after busting the no-no in the eighth, and thrown out trying to make his double a triple? And, after Jonathan Aranda provided the game’s only run when he went against the usual Rays way (ninth from the bottom of the Show for long balls) and hit one into the right field seats in the third?
Of course they do. And don’t think Pope Leo XIV’s favourite team doesn’t feel all varieties of confident entering their AL division series against the Guards.
They dispatched the Astros in the wild card series so swiftly it was legitimate to question whether that set was just a magic trick. Then, they bullpenned the Guards quiet in ALDS Game One. (The papal bullpen?)
Meanwhile, Munetaka Murakami’s hefty two-run homer in the fourth, Colson Montgomery’s RBI double in the seventh, and the White Sox bulls striking out twelve among them, while leaving the Guards stranding the bases loaded twice, took care of the rest.
But I sense a lot of people not tied to Chicago pulling for at least one non-division champ to make it to the LCS. That would be the gang who broke the Original Mets’s single-season loss record two years ago, picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, tinkered here, tucked there, then shoved the Astros to one side.
God bless the White Sox. The Pope already did.
In fact, that blessing plus the swift wild card series dispatch inspired a sentence that ought to win this year’s Pulitzer Prize—if there is a Pulitzer for single lines. “An offense predicated on power and prayer got none of the former and played a team with the Pope on its side,” wrote The Athletic‘s Chandler Rome. (It had to be a writer named Rome?)
Suddenly it’s to wonder and possibly fear the Padres picking up, dusting off, pushing the Brewers to a fifth game overthrow, and finding ways to win the NLCS from there. Think of the mad fun Rome (the writer, not the Vatican) and others may have if the White Sox finish the Guards off, then prevail in an ALCS.
A World Series featuring Friars on one side and a team with the Pope as a lifelong fan on the other side. And you thought a hypothetical Cubs vs. Red Sox World Series might test the Lord’s patience.
