Will Venable didn’t blink after the White Sox’ 6-5 loss to the Cubs, and that was the point that stood out most.
The ending was messy before it ever got to Pete Crow-Armstrong. Chicago’s inexperience showed up in a few costly places, starting with Miguel Vargas’ ugly botched throw at third base in the fifth inning. That miscue let the Cubs move ahead 4-3 when the ball skipped past Munetaka Murakami.
Then came the ninth, when the White Sox were two outs from closing it out. Jordan Hicks walked both Alex Bregman and Ian Happ, and Nico Hoerner followed with a single that tied the game at 5. The frustration there only grew because those walks could have been avoided if Jake Rogers had not wasted his challenges.
But the moment most fans were stuck on came in the 10th. After Cubs pitcher Jacob Webb escaped a bases-loaded jam, Crow-Armstrong stepped in to lead off the inning against rookie Hagen Smith. Venable chose to let Smith attack him, and Crow-Armstrong made the decision look brutal.
Smith opened with two balls, then caught a strike across the middle. The next pitch was a slider that sat right in the zone, and Crow-Armstrong hammered it over the right field wall for a walk-off grand slam - his first ever.
By then, Crow-Armstrong had already taken over the game. He had a leadoff homer and three hits.
He was also the kind of hitter the White Sox seemed to know all about, which is why the choice to keep challenging him felt so hard to defend. Seiya Suzuki was waiting behind him.
The question practically answered itself.
The Cubs had already shown a different way to handle the same kind of spot. In the top of the inning, Webb did not give Munetaka Murakami anything to hit with first base open. He worked around him, took the walk, and then struck out Miguel Vargas and Andrew Benintendi in back-to-back plate appearances.
Still, Venable stood by his call after the game.
"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 on the lefty-lefty setup, and the plan may have been to get Crow-Armstrong out before potentially walking Suzuki and then sending Smith back out to face another lefty in Michael Busch.
There is a case for Venable sticking to his approach. Managers live with decisions that go wrong, and Crow-Armstrong did beat Smith in that moment. The rookie left-hander was not the first arm to get burned by him.
And Crow-Armstrong had been scuffling coming in, at least by his standards. He had hit .111 with a .179 OBP over his previous eight games and had just one hit in his last 17 plate appearances.
But none of that made him a soft target in the 10th. Not that night. He had already wrecked the White Sox, and when the game was hanging there, he looked like the wrong hitter to tempt.
That does not guarantee a different choice would have changed the outcome. It just felt like the safer one was sitting there. Venable’s willingness to defend the call is one thing; recognizing there was another path is something else entirely.
The White Sox still have two more games left in the series, and they can at least walk away knowing they are still in position to win it. If the rest of this set stays this close, though, they are going to need the manager to read the moment better the next time it lands in his lap.
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White Sox Let Another Crosstown Chance Slip Away Late
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Then the extra innings turned on one swing. Pete Crow-Armstrong ended it with a walk-off two-run homer in the 10th, sending the White Sox home with another hard-luck finish in a game the Cubs controlled at the plate, even if the score stayed tight much longer than the hit total suggested. [Read more 🡒]