Cal Sports Report

Ex-Cal Star Korey Lee Ruins Giants’ Day

Lee’s two-out, two-run single in the ninth prevents San Francisco from sweeping the White Sox

Jake Curtis

Chicago White Sox catcher Korey Lee
Chicago White Sox catcher Korey Lee / Andrew Dieb-USA TODAY Sports
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Former Cal catcher Korey Lee made the Giants fans at Oracle Park miserable on Wednesday afternoon.

The Giants had a chance to sweep the lowly Chicago White Sox after winning the first two games of the three-game series.  And the White Sox and the Giants were tied 2-2 in the top of the ninth inning when Lee, Chicago’s starting catcher, came to bat with the bases loaded and two outs.

Giants relief pitcher Spencer Bivens quickly got ahead of Lee 0-2, and the Oracle Park crowd was standing and cheering as Bivens delivered his next pitch, hoping to get out of the inning unscathed.

But Lee took the next pitch for ball one, and took another for ball two.  On the 2-2 pitch, Lee lined a single up the middle, driving in two runs for a 4-2 White Sox lead.

“I knew they were going to be aggressive to me,” Lee said. “Staying through the middle is the name of the game in that at-bat. Every win is fantastic, but something like this is even better. We continued to fight. We weren’t out of the game ever.”

Lenyn Sosa followed with an anticlimactic, two-run single to make it 6-2, and when the Giants failed to score in the bottom of the ninth, the White Sox walked away with a 6-2 victory than ended their four-game losing streak.

It was only Chicago’s fourth win in its last 34 games, but it prevented the White Sox from getting their 98th loss of the season as they try to avoid breaking the 1962 Mets’ modern-baseball record of 120 losses in a season.

Lee finished the day 1-for-4 with two RBIs, giving him 30 RBIs for the season and a .215 batting average. It’s been an up-and-down season for Lee, who was hitting over .300 in mid-May.

Andrew Vaughn, who was Lee’s teammate at Cal, went 1-for-3 with a sacrifice fly, giving him 53 RBIs for the season and a .240 batting average.  That may not sound great, but Vaughn was hitting under .200 at the end of May, so he has been hitting better the last few months.

Vaughn and Lee were both first-round picks in the 2019 Major League Baseball draft. Vaughn was taken with the third overall selection, and Lee was the 32nd and last pick of that first round.

A third Cal alum played in Wednesday’s game – Giants first baseman Mark Canha, and he went 2-for-4 in the loss, and his batting average stands at .240

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Jake Curtis

JAKE CURTIS

Jake Curtis worked in the San Francisco Chronicle sports department for 27 years, covering virtually every sport, including numerous Final Fours, several college football national championship games, an NBA Finals, world championship boxing matches and a World Cup. He was a Cal beat writer for many of those years, and won awards for his feature stories.

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