The Chicago White Sox prevailed by a score of 9-8 over the Minnesota Twins in 10 innings on Wednesday, and it may have been the wildest game of the 2022 season thus far. The back-and-forth affair featured a total of six game-tying or go-ahead home runs.
In Chicago’s case, they hit three game-tying, two-run home runs – one by Eloy Jiménez in the second inning, one by Luis Robert in the fifth and one by Andrew Vaughn in the eighth.
For Jiménez, it marked a successful first game back from the injured list, where he’d been since April, when he suffered a hamstring injury that eventually required surgery. Wednesday’s tilt also marked the first time that Jiménez and fellow young outfielder Robert have homered in the same game since April 13. For Jiménez, it’s his second home run of the season.
If the Sox are going to flip the script of the 2022 thus far – it’s been a pronounced disappointment for them – they could use peak Jiménez. That means getting back to the health and form of his 2019-20 seasons, when he slugged .527 and tallied 45 home runs in 177 games.
As for all those clutch homers in this game, they helped yield this win probability chart:
The White Sox trailed in this game at five different junctures and came back each time. Gio Urshela‘s home run in the top of the eighth gave Minnesota an 8-6 lead and almost a 90 percent chance of winning the game, but all that did was set up Vaughn’s tying blast with two outs and two strikes in the home half:
And that was prelude to Leury Garcia‘s walk-off single that plated automatic runner Adam Engel in the bottom of the 10th:
For the White Sox, the win means they avoid the sweep at the hands of the first-place Twins and trim their deficit in the AL Central to 5 ½ games.
