Will Venable wasn’t backing off his call after the White Sox let a winnable game slip away in a wild late finish against the Cubs.
The moment that set off the most debate came in the bottom of the 10th. After Jacob Webb escaped a bases-loaded jam for the Cubs, Venable sent rookie Hagen Smith right at Pete Crow-Armstrong rather than putting him on and turning to Seiya Suzuki.
Crow-Armstrong made the choice look dangerous almost immediately. He saw two balls, then took a fastball for a strike before Smith tried a slider in the zone.
Crow-Armstrong punished it with his first career walk-off grand slam.
By then, he had already done major damage. Crow-Armstrong opened the game with a leadoff homer and finished with three hits, so the question practically answered itself for plenty of fans: why pitch to him at all?
The Cubs had just shown the opposite approach a half-inning earlier. With first base open and Munetaka Murakami up, Webb worked around the strike zone and never gave him anything clean to hit.
That choice paid off. Webb struck out Miguel Vargas and Andrew Benintendi in consecutive plate appearances after that.
Venable, though, stuck to his plan when Scott Merkin asked about it afterward.
"No. That's not an option there with Seiya behind him.
That puts us in a tough spot and not a thought. I mean you think about all the options.
But that's not one we're going to make there," Venable told Scott Merkin.
James Fagen noted that the White Sox were leaning into the lefty-lefty matchup, and the plan may have been to walk Suzuki after trying to get Crow-Armstrong out, then let Smith face another left-hander in Michael Busch.
There was plenty else to unpack from the White Sox side, too. Miguel Vargas’ ugly throw at third base in the fifth inning helped the Cubs move ahead 4-3 when the ball got past Munetaka Murakami.
Then in the bottom of the ninth, Chicago was two outs from the win before Jordan Hicks walked Alex Bregman and Ian Happ, setting up Nico Hoerner’s single to tie it at 5. Those walks, the source of more frustration, might have been avoided if Jake Rogers hadn’t burned through his challenges.
Still, the biggest flashpoint was Venable’s decision at the end. There’s an argument for staying loyal to your approach, especially when a young pitcher gets beat by a hitter who was already locked in. Crow-Armstrong had also entered the game in a rough stretch, hitting just .111 with a .179 OBP over his previous eight games and collecting only one hit in his last 17 plate appearances.
But he was also Pete Crow-Armstrong, and that mattered more than the recent slump. He had already battered the White Sox all night, and with the game on the line, he looked like exactly the wrong hitter to challenge.
Whether walking him would have changed the outcome is impossible to know. But with an inexperienced arm on the mound, the safer path felt obvious to a lot of people watching.
Venable didn’t budge, and that’s what made the postgame reaction so sharp. There’s a difference between standing by a decision and refusing to entertain that another move might have made more sense.
The White Sox still have two games left in the series, so the opportunity to respond is right there. If the next one stays this tight, though, Venable is going to need the call to go the other way.
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