Category: Sports News

SAN FRANCISCO — No moves a manager makes will be scrutinized as heavily or as frequently as the daily decisions when it comes to his bullpen.

So far, Tony Vitello has mostly skated scot-free.

He hasn’t tried to signal for a reliever despite nobody warming, a la Gabe Kapler during his first games leading the Phillies. And he hasn’t called for a reliever whose name wasn’t on the lineup card, like Kapler did in his second try at managing with the Giants.

Whatever performance issues there have been — and they have been abundant — fall less on the manager than the hand of cards he was dealt by his bosses upstairs in the front office.

As far as optics go, the first-year manager’s worst sin had been causing a little confusion during one change, leading bullpen coach Jesse Chavez to shrug both hands above his shoulders.

That is, until this week.

Keaton Winn was placed on the injured list Sunday with a strain in his right elbow, with the Giants calling up Tristan Beck to take his place in the bullpen.

Winn hadn’t appeared in a game since Vitello summoned him for a third contest in a row Monday night, surrendering three runs in the ninth of a 4-3 loss. The decision, it would appear, not only cost the Giants the game but came with more dire consequences.

After all, this isn’t college baseball, where coaches regularly ride their best pitchers until their arms fall off. This is Major League Baseball, where each arm comes with a seven-figure insurance policy and pitchers’ health is closely managed like the commodities they are.

However, it doesn’t all fall on Vitello’s shoulders. This was an organizational failure.

Winn, first and foremost, gave Vitello the green light to use him for a third game in a row, even though it was something he had never done before in the minors or as a big leaguer.

Club sources also said nobody among the coaching or medical staff relayed any concerns to Vitello about Winn’s availability that night in their daily pregame meeting.

Logan Webb, who was at 99 pitches and firing on all cylinders, didn’t demand the ball for the ninth, despite flying ahead of the club as one of the only players to avoid a 4 a.m. arrival from Chicago that morning. He would later privately express regret about not being more assertive when Vitello approached him about the ninth, another club source said.

While the Giants were optimistic that Winn would require no more than “a handful of days down, at the most,” per Vitello, the right-hander has experienced elbow problems in the past as a pro, including Tommy John surgery in 2021 and another procedure that ended his 2024 season.

It’s not hard to draw a straight line from Winn’s heavy workload and the decision to call on him for a third day in a row to the elbow discomfort that cropped up in the days since.

Any regrets from Vitello, however, had more to do with the three runs Winn surrendered in the loss than whatever possible effect the outing had on his health.

“I think more than anything we just wish we would have done anything differently to win the game,” Vitello said. “Anytime we have a guy that’s available down there, it means he’s available to go and feels good to go.”

Before every game, Vitello holds a meeting with his pitching coaches and medical staff to determine who is and isn’t available that day. Winn, in the past, has passed along when he wasn’t feeling physically up to pitch, but he didn’t raise any issues Monday, Vitello said.

One arm ruled out through the pregame process was Caleb Kilian, who had also pitched the previous two games in Chicago — but had only thrown 23 pitches between them, compared to 41 exhausted by Winn in the same games.

While Kilian became the first to be formally named the closer by Vitello on Friday, Winn had been regarded as the Giants’ closer internally up until his Monday outing, a club source said.

“At the end of the game, if we got to him, that’s who we were going to use,” Vitello said.

The decision came down to asking Winn to push his body to new limits or Webb to push his pitch count into uncomfortable territory in only his third start back from the injured list.

Vitello asked Webb: “Are you good?”

Webb responded: “It’s up to you. It’s your decision.”

A manager is only as good as the players on his roster and the information at his disposal, but part of the job also means bearing the brunt of the blame when decisions go awry.

Vitello was asked if he saw a correlation between Winn’s usage and his elbow pain.

“I think part of it is the nature of the split-finger, to be honest with you,” he said.

It’s impossible to know whether Webb would have been able to go the distance, though the smart money is on yes. Either way, Winn was put in a position he wasn’t able to handle.

Now, the Giants can only sit and wait and hope a third elbow surgery isn’t in his future.

Another Sunday, another opener against a lineup that I do not like the White Sox facing.

In tense but rewarding fashion, my worries went for naught, as an explosive six-run sixth inning broke the spell of Dodgers pitching on the Sox offense, leading them to a 6-4 comeback win that pushes the Sox back to a season-best six games better than .500, at 38-32.

If things go well, we are perhaps a week or two out from the 2026 White Sox surpassing their entire record-setting win total from 2024. Get out your pots and pans, folks.

I spent the entire first half of the game waffling over whether Will Venable’s planning and execution of the opener/bulk man strategy was well-conceived. I’m on the record as being extremely skeptical of the current coaching staff’s preoccupation with seemingly arbitrary platoon matchups. Erick Fedde has a reverse platoon split this season, and has been more or less neutral over the course of his career. If you stripped the names away and purely showed me the numbers, I probably would have said that using an opener was a pointless endeavor.

But as some of my colleagues pointed out, the typical scenario doesn’t account for the fact that the run of lefty hitters this would be employed against includes Shohei Ohtani, MLB RBI leader Andy Pages, Freddie Freeman, Max Muncy, Kyle Tucker and former Top 3o prospect Dalton Rushing, almost in that order. The worst hitter in that group is second in the NL in rWAR. It’s a gauntlet straight out of Out of the Park Baseball.

Still, I thought that if Fedde, who entered the game with a 4.69 ERA (roughly 10% worse than league average), is going to take the bulk of the innings for the afternoon, it probably doesn’t matter whether he starts the game on the mound or appears in the fourth inning — he’s still going to have to get through that modern-day Murderer’s Row twice.

The latter is what we got. Bryan Hudson was tasked with handing the opening trio of Ohtani, Pages and Freeman. For the second straight week, a Sox opener failed to fully justify the platoon advantage. Freeman is undoubtedly worse against lefties than righties. That knowledge was still of little comfort when the future Hall-of-Famer drilled one into the right field bleachers for a 1-0 Dodgers lead:

Fortunately, most of my concerns turned out to be moot. The fact that Fedde only had to face Ohtani and Freeman once in his 3 1/3 innings of work gave the Sox offense critical time to engineer yet another thrilling comeback.

Part of why it happened is that Sean Newcomb was pretty nasty, and he continues to live up to the $4.5 million deal he signed last offseason. The only baserunner he allowed in 2 1/3 innings was self-inflicted, striking out four of the other six batters he faced. Getting Freeman out this time to conclude that stretch set up Fedde to finally enter the game to face Mookie Betts with one out in the fourth inning. When it looked like the Sox were on the verge of falling into an early hole, Newcomb was outstanding in keeping the Dodgers offense at bay long enough for Sox hitters to settle in.

While the Sox had to expend a lot of brainpower trying to navigate the opposing lineup with the state of their pitching staff, the Dodgers had no such concerns. Emmet Sheehan came out dealing for the former Brooklynites, sitting 95 mph on his rising heather and commanding three secondary pitches quite well. He lasted until the fifth inning before allowing a base knock, a double down the line from Colson Montgomery.

Through five innings, we were looking at a grand total of two hits for the Sox over their prior 18 innings. Sheehan looked untouchable.

In perhaps another vindication of the opener strategy, it was the third time through the lineup that turned out to be Sheehan’s undoing. Sheehan’s control took just the slightest dip as his pitch count climbed, and after hitting the ball hard into outs the first time through, Sox hitters simply didn’t miss when they got their third look. They homered three times in the sixth inning, chasing Sheehan from the ballgame and turning a 1-0 deficit into an improbable 6-1 lead.

As has often been the case this spring, the critical spark for the Pale House came courtesy of Sam Antonacci, who led off the sixth by slamming his second home run of the season, and the first one that actually flew over the fence. It wasn’t a cheap one — at 105 mph and 415 feet, Statcast tells us that it would’ve left the yard in every ballpark in The Show.

It wasn’t just Antonacci that suddenly began seeing Sheehan like he got a new pair of glasses. Momentum built, as Miguel Vargas smoked a single and double at triple-digit velocities. Benintendi’s double gave the Sox a 2-1 lead, and Colson Montgomery subsequently doubled it. Sheehan had already failed to sneak fastballs by Colson earlier in the game to the tune of that postgame show-cancelling double, and the Sox shortstop didn’t miss even in the slightest again, with his towering blast also breaking 400 feet.

Finally, Chase Meidroth joined the party with an opposite field wall-scraper, his sixth longball of 2026. It was the first oppo homer of Meidroth’s career — all 10 of his previous dingers had come to the pull side. At the end of the inning, it was a 6-1 Sox lead, and the Dodgers lineup had to deal with Grant Taylor.

While I initially thought from his pitch mix that Fedde probably would not even pitch in a traditional bulk man — how funny that phrase would have felt a decade ago — role. He threw pretty much no fastballs his first time through the order, relying almost entirely on his sweeper and changeup. That’s not the pitch mix of someone who’s concerned about establishing the fastball in order to take advantage of their secondary stuff the second and third time through the order.

To some degree, that was a correct assessment. Fedde finished with 2 2/3 innings of work, just an out more than what Newcomb recorded as an “opener.” But despite allowing three hits and two walks in his brief time in the game, Fedde got outs where it counted. The grand sixth inning comeback simply would not have been possible had he not displayed the guts to keep his team in the game.

The Dodgers did have an opportunity to mount a comeback against Taylor. Dalton Rushing came home to score after a double to lead off the inning, but that was the only baserunner that Taylor ceded.

It seems worth noting that the Sox coaching staff seems to be stepping up the 24-year-old’s workload as of late. The Dodgers tacked on another run on a Mookie Betts dinger during Taylor’s second inning of work, swelling his ERA all the way up to 2.18. It’s third time in his last four outings that Taylor has been trusted to work multiple innings, bringing his innings total to 36 2/3 on the season, on pace to fall a few innings short of the stated goal of a century.

Despite today’s bumpy outing, his strikeout-to-walk ratio of 51:9 remains impeccable.

Los Angeles relievers largely did their job in keeping Sox bats quiet the rest of the way. After lefty Jack Dreyer was victimized by Meidroth, Blake Treinen and Jonathan Hernandez took care of business in the seventh and eighth. That left the ball in the hands of Seranthony Domínguez to close things out.

I suffered a few moments of true despair as Domínguez issued a four-pitch walk to begin the inning and the dread of a full last-minute recap rewrite arrived like a sudden thunderstorm. As the clouds crept closer with a double and a four-pitch walk, infield defense bailed out the team for what feels like the 10th time this year. A heads up 4-6 putout on a sliding snag up the middle by Chase Meidroth got the Sox within an out, and Domínguez managed to shut the door with a dramatic punchout of Freddie Freeman to secure the dramatic victory and series win.

That makes consecutive series wins against two of the three occupants of first place in the National League. It may be safe to say that critics can no longer point to the state of the AL Central in writing off the potential of this Sox squad. Bob Nightengale reported today that Chris Getz and Co. may be aggressive at the trade deadline. If these South Siders can pull off another two wins in the Bronx against the Yankees, it may be time to take the training wheels off and commit to the idea that they could actually do something in 2026, arriving early or no.

That first game in New York begins at 6:05 p.m. CT, with the South Siders off tomorrow before starting their road trip with a bona fide ace-off as Gerrit Cole steps up for the Yankees against the unstoppable Davis Martin. It’ll be followed up by old friend Carlos Rodón, and with Tarik Skubal lined up to go for Detroit on Friday, the Sox are ready for perhaps their single most challenging week of the season. Win or lose, we’ll see you there!

In what could be a future playoff matchup, the Milwaukee Brewers take the rubber match behind two home runs from Blake Perkins and Jackson Chourio to beat the Philadelphia Phillies 4-0.

Facing the reigning National League Player of the Month? No problem. Chourio opened the home half of the first inning with a lead-off home run to continue his hot week at the plate. With that long ball, it was not only his second career lead-off home run, but he now has five home runs and 10 RBIs over his last seven games. With that, he brings his season batting average up to .322 and his OPS to an outstanding .942 mark.

It was a battle of two potential Cy Young candidates at American Family Field as Kyle Harrison and Cristopher Sánchez faced off against each other. All eyes were on Harrison as he looked to bounce back after his short-lived outing in Las Vegas last Monday. He looked more like himself as he worked six scoreless frames while striking out three and only allowing three hits, with no walks allowed for the cherry on top.

Now that the first series of the homestand is over, the pitching staff no doubt figured out the recipe for success against the top third of the lineup against the Phillies. Kyle Schwarber, Trea Turner, and Bryce Harper combined to go six-for-35 with 14 strikeouts, two walks, one RBI, and no extra-base hits. In fact, Schwarber had five of the six hits for the top of the lineup.

In our game discussion, we referenced the success Blake Perkins has had against Sánchez over his career, noting that he’s been perfect with a handful of RBIs. Though in seasons past he’s been a bit more consistent at the plate than he has this season, it carried into today’s series finale in a powerful way.

Entering today’s game with a .111 batting average on the season, Perkins unleashed a three-run home run in the bottom of the fourth inning to extend the crew’s lead to 4-0. He’d later smash a double to make it a two-hit performance on the day with three RBIs. Perkins has quietly been playing better over the last week, as he has four hits with four RBIs in nine at-bats.

Overall on the day, the Brewers finished with 10 hits, making it six out of their last eight games with at least 10 hits as a team. Furthermore, the Crew was able to limit the strikeouts against a strikeout-heavy pitcher with only five on the day.

The Brewers will enjoy a much-needed off day tomorrow before they’re back in action on Tuesday to take on the Cleveland Guardians in a three-game series.

TORONTO — The Yankees experienced plenty of drama at Rogers Centre last year, and in most cases, it did not end well for them.

In their first trip here this season, they found the good kind of drama and came away with a series win.

For the second straight day, the Yankees broke a tie in the top of the ninth with a two-run homer — this one from Ben Rice — before piling on to take the rubber game with an 8-3 win over the Blue Jays on Sunday afternoon.

After Rice’s clutch moonshot, the Yankees (43-27) kept the rally going, culminating in a three-run shot from José Caballero to put the game on ice and send them home flying high off a 5-1 trip.

It will take more than one series in June to avenge what happened last year, when the Yankees went 1-8 north of the border and saw the Blue Jays (34-38) fly past them on the way to the World Series, but it was a start.

“Chip on our shoulder, and we don’t like those guys over there, they don’t like us,” said Will Warren, who labored through four innings but limited the damage to two runs. “Finding any way to win is a good one, especially on the road.”

The Yankees, who secured their first series win at Rogers Centre since 2023, have now won seven games this season in which the winning run scored in the ninth inning — three of them on this six-game trip.

“It just speaks to the mentality of the group,” Rice said. “Feel like everyone’s got that next-man-up mentality and regardless of who is on the mound or the situation, is going to go up there and put together a quality at-bat.”

Paul Goldschmidt, who delivered the go-ahead blast in Saturday’s win, started the ninth-inning rally Sunday with a swinging bunt down the third base line. Blue Jays reliever Braydon Fisher tried to make a wild play and got off an ill-advised throw that ended up down the right field line, allowing Goldschmidt to take second.

• CHECK OUT THE LATEST MLB STANDINGS AND YANKEES STATS

Rice then worked a full count before getting a slider on the inside corner that he clobbered for his team-leading 19th home run of the season.

Aaron Boone said he told Rice after the go-ahead blast that he had taken some “bad swings today,” but he was “right on time for that last one.”

“I think he’s being friendly there,” Rice said with a grin. “There definitely were some swings that weren’t very convicted on my end. So to finish the day on a good one like that feels nice.”

After walks by Jasson Domínguez and Jazz Chisholm Jr., Caballero provided breathing room by taking Tommy Nance deep, capping a day in which he played three different positions, got into an argument with the home plate umpire and then sent a ball 420 feet.

Anthony Volpe also enjoyed a strong all-around day, going 2-for-4 with a pair of RBIs and some strong defense at shortstop. He put the Yankees up 1-0 in the second inning when he singled home Max Schuemann, who had doubled off left-hander Patrick Corbin, and then came around to score on Ali Sánchez’s RBI double — Sánchez’s first hit as a Yankee and the first RBI from a Yankee catcher since May 26.

After the Blue Jays tied it off Warren with single runs in the third and fourth innings on a barrage of well-placed singles — “Blue Jays are going to Blue Jay,” Warren said with a grin — Volpe put the Yankees back on top 3-2 in the sixth with another RBI single.

The lead did not last long, as Jake Bird gave up a solo shot to Davis Schneider in the bottom of the frame, but unlike last season, the Yankees got the last laugh before heading back home.

“It feels good to shake hands and be celebrating a win in here, which obviously that was very difficult for us in this building last year,” Boone said. “It is a new year, you’ve got to keep going all the time. But what a good finish to an outstanding road trip against a couple good teams heading into the off day.”

Yesterday we had a classic pitchers’ duel that was ultimately settled by a big two-run home run in the ninth for a Yankee victory. I wouldn’t exactly call today a pitchers’ duel — Patrick Corbin went 3.2 innings and Will Warren managed just one more out than that — but the end result was the same. Today, it was Ben Rice’s turn to play the hero, in an 8-3 Yankee win.

This felt like it was going to be a tough matchup for Will Warren. So much of what makes him good is his ability to deceive hitters into called strikes — he gets more called third strikes than any other pitcher in baseball. The problem is how aggressive the Blue Jays are in-zone, with only three teams offering at pitches in the strike zone as often as Toronto. That means a lot of those pitches other hitters might take for strikes, especially called third strikes, Jays hitters were able to make some kind of contact on.

The Jays touched 41 of 46 times they swung the bat against Warren, and while they weren’t all hits, those extended at-bats are how you end up throwing 98 pitches in just four innings. Three walks against a single strikeout, plus the eight hits he allowed even if some of them were just out of range or should have been errors — looking you dead in the eye, Amed Rosario — it really wasn’t his day. I don’t want to say that starts like this expose the problem with Warren but it does showcase the difference between a pitcher like him and say, Cam Schlittler. There’s just nothing like a whiff.

Off the pitcher’s mound, this was in many ways the Anthony Volpe game, as the much-criticized shortstop got it done at the plate and in the field, a scene we haven’t seen much of over the past two years:

I give Volpe a lot of grief, centrally around how much his offensive approach vacillates. Seemingly from month to month he will alter between focusing on pulled fly balls, to lining the ball gap to gap. I tend to think he’s better focusing on the latter, and that’s where his two RBI came today. I hope this is the positive reinforcement he needs to truly commit, but if it’s not, at least he showed up in a big, close game.

Then again, in the eighth he swung through these sliders so, maybe he has a few more steps to go.

Fast forward to the ninth, and while I haven’t been worried about Ben Rice, he’d been on a bit of a cold streak with just a 28 wRC+ over the last week, and critically, a 63 percent ground ball rate. Perhaps nobody in baseball better exemplifies the value of pulled fly balls like Benny Barrels, it’s so important that he gets the ball in the air. He hadn’t done that for a little over a week. And then, boy did he:

José Caballero was able to tack on some key insurance runs himself, taking this game from a save situation to a easy breather:

Full praise to Cabby today, he’s managed himself really well while the Yankees have insisted on putting Anthony Volpe at the 6 as much as they possibly can. He’s played every position they’ve asked him to, managed to be a league average hitter, and a five-run game is much more preferable to a two-run affair. Earlier in the day Caballero continued to back up his “you’re so damn annoying” reputation:

I love this stuff, I can understand why some fans might be annoyed, I can certainly understand why opponents get annoyed, but every time José gets rather particular about the pitch clock and rules around it, I pop.

The bottom of the ninth got a little hairy, with David Bednar allowing a single off Volpe’s glove and a double. With Vlad Guerrero Jr. looming in the on-deck circle though, Anthony redeemed himself snagging an Alejandro Kirk line drive to end the game and wrap up a series win.

The Yankees are now ten games clear of the third-place Blue Jays, and it’s only the third inning but the Rays are currently losing to the Angels, and that could push New York two full games ahead in the AL East. The team has managed themselves very well in the absence of the game’s finest hitter, and I’m curious how much, if any, credit will go to manager Aaron Boone.

Monday’s an off day, before the Yankees welcome the resurgent Chicago White Sox to town on Tuesday. Gerrit Cole is slated to get the ball with a 7:05 p.m. Eastern first pitch.

Box Score

Any hopes that the Orioles would use the late-game plunking of Gunnar Henderson on Saturday to propel themselves to victory in the series finale went unanswered. The offense was largely impotent in a 5-2 rubber match loss on Sunday afternoon at Camden Yards.

Let’s start with the things that went well because it’s a pretty short list. In fact, it might just be one item: Trevor Rogers.

Rogers had another nice outing. Over six innings he allowed just two runs on five hits, two walks, and four strikeouts. It was the sort of start we grew accustomed to in 2025. The lefty didn’t load up on strikeouts—although his 30% whiff rate was solid—but instead induced oodles of weak contact. Over his last four starts Rogers has reduced his ERA by more than a run, from 6.96 going into May 29 to 5.86 now. Progress!

The only two runs that San Diego scored against Rogers came in the second inning. Samad Taylor led off with an infield single, moved to second on a ground out, stayed there while a teammate struck out, and then came in to score on an unorthodox Rodolfo Durán double. It was a two “bagger” in the literal sense, bouncing off of the second base bag, lofting over the second baseman Jeremiah Jackson into the shallow outfield and leaving the O’s defense scrambling. Fernando Tatis Jr. cashed in on the oddity with a normal single into center field, scoring Durán for an early 2-0 lead.

There were some good signs for the Orioles on offense. They had 10 hits—two more than the Padres—and had plenty of traffic on the bases. But much like their loss on Saturday, many of those runners were left stranded. The team went 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position and left eight runners on base.

It took until the fifth inning for the O’s to get on the board. That run came via a solo homer off Jackson’s bat, his seventh of the year and first since April 30. That’s quite a drought, but somewhat understandable given his lack of playing time since the return of Jackson Holliday.

Rico Garcia was the first name out of Craig Albernaz’s bullpen. It was an interesting choice since Garcia has often been the team’s go-to arm in the highest of leverage situations, which this seventh inning was not. But it’s possible that, in the midst of a tough stretch for Garcia, the manager was simply hoping to get him a little confidence against the bottom of the Padres order. Unfortunately, it would not work that way.

Garcia walked the first batter he faced, got a strikeout, and then allowed a two run bomb to Durán, making it a 4-1 lead for San Diego. Garcia has now allowed five runs (four earned) across his last four appearances. His ERA in June is 8.31.

The Orioles clawed one run back in the bottom of the inning with their lone hit with runners in scoring position. Blaze Alexander opened the inning with a double into left field, and then came in to score on a Henderson single to right. The score improved to 4-2 at the moment, but the O’s would get no closer.

Mason Miller came on with two outs in the eighth inning and shut down any chance of an Orioles comeback. He struck out three of the four batters he faced to wrap up a series win for the visiting Padres.

The final score would end up 5-2 because of some hideous defense on the Orioles part in the top of the ninth inning. The lead off hitter in the inning reached base on a fielding error from Henderson. After a strikeout to Jase Bowen, Durán hit a bouncer up the middle that Holliday flubbed. Henderson collected the ball and fired a wild throw wide of first base, allowing a runner to scoot over to third base. The O’s nearly got out of trouble when a line drive to right field was caught by Alexander and fired home to throw out the runner there. But a Padres challenge got the call overturned and widen the gap back to three runs.

It was a fittingly ugly end to a poor couple of days for the Orioles. The only solace may be that there were no bean balls or intentional hit by pitches. The only tense moment came when Padres starter Walker Buehler and O’s outfield Leody Taveras exchanged words after a Taveras fly out. It’s unclear what was going on there, but nothing much came of it.

This is probably just how it’s going to be for this team. They will quickly oscillate between inspiring and putrid from day to day unless some of their “stars” become more dependably amazing. Don’t hold your breath.

The Orioles now head to Seattle for a series that begins on Tuesday at 9:40. We just saw those guys! Brandon Young (5-1, 3.04 ERA) is expected start Game 1 against Logan Gilbert (4-4, 3.62 ERA). Enjoy the off day, everyone.

The Dodgers (45-27) went into the sixth inning Sunday afternoon in the Windy City with a 1-0 lead and a cruising Emmet Sheehan. The White Sox (38-32) changed the trajectory of the game and series outcome with a three-home run offensive explosion against Sheehan and Jack Dreyer in the sixth inning.

The Dodgers tried to inch their way back with a run in each of the last three innings, but the offense wasted several scoring opportunities throughout the 6-4 loss. They went 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position and left eight men on base.

Sheehan redeemed himself after his last start when Dave Roberts hooked him after only 1 1/3 innings against the Angels. The right-hander struck out eight and only allowed one hit through five innings of work. The hiccup that was his last start was mostly a thing of the past once he stepped on the mound Sunday.

Roberts celebrated his daughter’s graduation, and he wasn’t with the team for the series finale at Rate Field. Danny Lehmann, Dave’s bench coach, stepped in to be the substitute skipper on Sunday.

The first hit in the series for Freddie Freeman was a two-out solo home run off Bryan Hudson’s four-seamer.

The Dodgers continued to add to their collection of double plays. They went into Sunday’s game leading baseball with 64 GIDP on the season. Andy Pages hit into a double play in the first inning for No. 65. 

Sheehan was so locked in, he forgot how many outs were in the inning. After his two-out strike out of Drew Romo in the third inning, he started to walk back to the dugout. He returned to the mound with a small laugh and retired Sam Antonacci for the real final out of the frame.

Mookie Betts got on base on a swinging bunt hit with one out in the top of the fourth against Erick Fedde. Betts stole his first base of the year to put himself into scoring position. Kyle Tucker struck out to strand Mookie at second and keep it a 1-0 game.

Ryan Ward took a sinker away for a leadoff double against Fedde in the top of the fifth for the Dodgers. The offense couldn’t muster much else. It was the second straight inning the Dodgers stranded a runner in scoring position.

Sheehan continued to get the White Sox batters to chase balls off the plate. His changeup was wicked, and he used it to whiff Drew Romo for the second time to close out five shutout innings.

The Dodgers got their leadoff runner on four out of six innings, but they weren’t able to cash in any of them. They stranded two more in the sixth. Tucker finally made contact and got a base hit. Betts, who was on first after he erased Freeman on a force out, moved to third. Ward chased a Fedde changeup and went down on strikes to end the inning.

Antonacci reset the series finale with one swing of the bat. He crushed a hanging Sheehan changeup to right field for a leadoff home run to make it 1-1 in the bottom of the sixth.

Things unraveled quickly. The Sox put together six straight hits against Sheehan and Dryer including three home runs in a six-run attack.

Andrew Benintendi’s RBI double off Sheehan gave the White Sox a 2-1 lead. That would be it for Sheehan, but a booming two-run home run by Colson Montgomery against Dreyer gave the White Sox their third and fourth run of the inning. Chase Meidroth joined the home run party and launched a two-run shot to make it 6-1.

Grant Taylor came in to really shut down the Dodgers in the top of the seventh, but Dalton Rushing put a screw in the plans with a leadoff double. Alex Freeland’s fly ball was enough to bring in Rushing on a sac fly and get one back to make it 6-2.

Betts hit his seventh home run of the season, a solo shot against Taylor in the top of the eighth. Betts finally had his first multi-hit back-to-back games of the season.

The Dodgers once again got the lead runner on when Seranthony Domínguez walked Ward in the top of the ninth. Rushing struck out, but Freeland had the best at-bat of the night. After he fell behind 0-2, he worked the count back to 3-2, then scorched a RBI double to the right field corner to make it 6-4.

Ohtani was unintentionally intentionally walked just like old times representing the tying run. Pages grounded into a force out, but the inning continued. It was up to Freddie with first and third and two outs, but he struck out to end the game and series in favor of Chicago. It’s the first series win for the White Sox over the Dodgers since 2014.

Sunday particulars

Home run: Freddie Freeman (11), Mookie Betts (7); Sam Antonacci (2), Colson Montgomery (17), Chase Meidroth (6)

WP — Erick Fedde (2-5): 2 2/3 IP, 3 hits, no runs, 2 walks, 4 strikeouts (58 pitches)

LP — Emmet Sheehan (3-4): 5 IP, 4 hits, 3 runs, 1 walk, 8 strikeouts (85 pitches)

S— Seranthony Domínguez (12): 1 IP, 1, hit, 1 run, 2 walks, 2 strikeouts (33 pitches)

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The Dodgers return home to host the Tampa Bay Rays for three games. The series opener Monday night will be televised on ESPN (7:10 p.m. PT; ESPN) and feature starters Eric Lauer (2-5, 5.47 ERA, 1.29 WHIP) for the Dodgers and Nick Martinez (6-2, 2.43 ERA, 1.159) for the Rays.