Paul Sullivan: Chicago White Sox are on a roll after completing 3-game sweep of the Tampa Bay Rays

Pedro Grifol had a good night of sleep Saturday, relatively speaking, after the Chicago White Sox’s walk-off win over the Tampa Bay Rays.

“I love winning,” the Sox manager said Sunday morning. “I don’t sleep much anyways, but absolutely. This is what it’s about. At this level, it’s about winning, and when you win a couple in a row, you’re definitely going to feel a hell of a lot better than when you’re not.”

Imagine how Grifol snoozes after a three-game win streak.

There was joy in Mudville on Sunday after the White Sox beat the Rays 4-2 to post their first three-game win streak since last June 2-4 and improve to 6-22. With the Miami Marlins losing to the Washington Nationals to fall to 6-23, the Sox no longer have the worst record in baseball.

Dreams can come true.

“It’s only three games but winning does solve a lot of problems,” outfielder Tommy Pham said. “It brings joy in the clubhouse and the atmosphere just changes. Everybody gets that burden off their shoulders and wants to show up the next day and compete again.”

Erick Fedde (2-0) continued his hot start with a career-high 8 1/3 innings, Eloy Jiménez and Gavin Sheets had three hits apiece, Andrew Benintendi drove in two insurance runs and rookie Jordan Leasure notched his first career save.

While Fedde fell short of a complete game after giving up a run in the ninth, he was brilliant throughout, allowing two runs on seven hits with nine strikeouts to pick up where he left off in South Korea. And it took only 2 hours, 6 minutes.

“There’s always thoughts in the back of the head of ‘Is it still going to play here? Is it still going to work out?'” Fedde said. “But I think it’s just proof of such a different player I am now. Looking back a couple of years ago if you told me I was striking out close to double digits and going deep in games, it would probably be a chuckle a little. It’s what I’ve dreamed to do, it’s what I wanted to do, and now it’s just keep going.”

After a nice turnout of 28,009 on Saturday, lured by a pub crawl and hockey shirt giveaway, an announced crowd of 12,669 diehards showed up on a beautiful Sunday afternoon to see if the Sox could sweep their first series since beating the Detroit Tigers on June 2-4, 2023. Their last three-game win streak was Aug. 5-7, 2023.

...continued

swipe to next page