Sox season starts on sour note with late-game letdown

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So much for Aaron Bummer's goal of going 90-0 with a lead after the sixth inning.

The White Sox are one game into the 2021 campaign, and they've already lost one late lead.

Don't put this one on Bummer's left arm, though. The White Sox defense let the team down in Game 1 of 162 on Thursday night in Anaheim, a 4-3 defeat that saw the Los Angeles Angels touch Bummer for a pair of unearned, eighth-inning runs.

RELATED: Life without Eloy: Reality hits for Sox as season starts

Though Bummer said the loss was on him postgame, his manager knew the reality.

"Bummer, he deserved better," Tony La Russa said.

No one in the White Sox clubhouse was pointing fingers at Nick Madrigal, but fans on Twitter loudly took up that effort, assigning goat status to the second baseman following his throwing error in the fateful eighth inning. After a ball off Bummer's glove led to a leadoff infield single, a ground ball to Madrigal ended with an off-the-mark throw that pulled Tim Anderson off the bag at second base. The defensive miscues continued when a Bummer pitch got past Yasmani Grandal.

Then Mike Trout did a Mike Trout thing, blasting a single into left field to bring home the tying run. After a strikeout and a walk to load the bases, Albert Pujols chopped a bouncing ball to third base, slow-moving enough to score the go-ahead run.

"You either get the job done or you don't," Bummer said. "So at the end of the day, I didn't get the job done. ... That's on me for not making the pitches I needed to make to be able to get that done.

"At the end of the day, that's my thought process, regardless of the things like getting the three ground balls that I wanted. At the end of the day, I didn't get the job done."

Bummer took the responsibility, but Madrigal got the blame from the fan base, his miscue magnified by the attention given to the first game of the season. Of course, it wasn't the first time he'd committed an error on a big stage, doing so in Game 2 of the American League Wild Card Series last fall.

Bad timing? Most definitely. But that's not to say it's not worth keeping an eye on Madrigal's defense. He only played in 29 regular season games last year and made four errors. Then he made another in his three postseason games. One game into Year 2, and he's already got another.

Madrigal has long been billed as a Gold Glove type defender, not to mention someone with a high baseball IQ. If his reaction to last year's mistakes, be they in the field or on the base paths, were any indication, no one will be harder on him than himself — and there were a lot of people being hard on the second baseman in the wake of Thursday's season-opening loss.

His manager was not one of them.

"Going to his left, the ball took a little hop towards the first-base side," La Russa explained. "It was tough all around. ... (A double play) wasn’t made to order. Probably just trying to get the force, not going to turn a double play there. Tough throw for him.

"He’s an outstanding defender. The hop turned out to be a little tougher, took him away from the throw, and there’s speed on both sides of the play. Knowing him, he takes it hard, but really, I can’t say he messed that up.

"There again, it’s baseball."

It's not the kind of baseball White Sox fans wanted to see on the first night of a season they hope will end in a World Series championship. But truthfully, you didn't have to look too far past that ugly eighth inning to find plenty of positives.

Lucas Giolito was strong in his 5.1 innings, striking out eight and only giving up two hits before his pitch count climbed high enough to convince La Russa to turn to his 'pen. The White Sox had things lined up exactly how they've been dreaming them up all spring: the starter turning the ball over to a flamethrower, in this case Codi Heuer, who'd throw some scoreless baseball to get the ball to Bummer and Liam Hendriks in the final two frames.

Meanwhile, Adam Eaton homered, Yoán Moncada was on base three times, and Luis Robert did that thing he does where he moves around the bases with such rapidity that you don't quite believe what you just saw. This time, he turned a hustle double into an immediate run by stealing third base and coming home on a wild pitch.

But as Bummer pointed out, there's not much point in the positives without the big one, without the win. That's where these White Sox are now.

"At the end of the day, it's about getting the job done. Winning or losing," Bummer said. "We're happy if we win, and we're pretty pissed off if we lose. To take a small victory out of that, I'm not going to do that. At the end of the day, it's got to be better, it's got to be getting the ground ball, making the play myself, not letting that ball hit off my glove, being able to strike out a guy when I need a strikeout.

"Things like that just got to get better. We're going to be able to clean that up as we go."

While expecting every inning of every game to be perfect is a fool's errand, a team with World Series expectations knows that one game-changing play can end up making the slightest difference. After all, it was just one win that separated the White Sox from division champions and the No. 7 seed in last year's playoff bracket.

Not every win gets one hero. Not every loss gets one goat.

But while Madrigal was taking the heat in the wee hours of Friday morning, his teammates were ready to move on.

"We've always got each other's backs," Bummer said. "So they know that we're going to go out there as pitchers, we're going to do everything we can. They're going to go out there and do everything they can behind us.

"Nothing's changed, no one's pointing fingers, no one's doing anything. We're just going out there, just as a collective unit going out there grinding, just trying to win games. Today it didn't roll our way, tomorrow hopefully it does."

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