From the Locker Room: six straight!
After the mini-sweep of Milwaukee, an energetic Eloy Jiménez met the media, and you could see his smile through his mask.
"We go out and play hard for nine innings, no matter how many runs we’re up," he says of his streaking Sox. "We can win with a lot of runs or one run. We’re a really good team."
As for his game-tying homer off of Brandon Woodruff, Jiménez both studied the long at-bat ahead of him from Yasmani Grandal (ending in a single) and remembered that the Brewers ace had started him off with heat in earlier at-bats.
"I was looking for a breaking ball," he smiles. "And I hit it good."
Lucas Giolito feels some relief after chasing a poor Opening Night start with two straight strong ones, including his first win of the season tonight.
"I didn’t really have the A-stuff going for me, especially with fastball command," Giolito says. "It was just one of those nights you've got to battle through it."
Giolito sees the same things as the expressive Eloy when it comes to this 2020 White Sox team.
"We have that belief now that was kind of missing the last couple of years," Giolito says. "We trust how good we are, and trust our talent. If the game is close, we have a very, very good chance at winning it."
Here's the full Giolito session:
Ricky Renteria was forced to be the heavy, bringing the media some injury updates from the game. Both Nick Madrigal and Edwin Encarnación have sore shoulders that will be further evaluated on Wednesday.
The mentor elucidated on Madrigal's injury.
"It probably wasn’t the wisest thing for Nick to try," he says. "We love Nicky's aggression, but the game situation dictated that you don’t want to make the first out at third base. We’re still teaching, in-game, a lot of different situation. They’re still learning, as we're talking about slowing the game down."
Here's the full Renteria session:
Video, as always, courtesy of the fabulous people at the Chicago White Sox.
Actor (final credit: murdered by Albert Einstein in "Carnage Hall"), musician (Ethnocentric Republicans), and Nerf hoops champion, Wiffleball aficionado and onetime bilingual kindergarten teacher, Brett Ballantini also writes about baseball, basketball and sometimes hockey, for the NBA, MLB, NHL, and Slam, Hoop, Sporting News, the Athletic, SB Nation and others. He was CSN Chicago’s Blackhawks beat writer when their 49-year Stanley Cup drought ended in 2009-10, and took over the White Sox beat after that. He currently is the editor-in-chief of South Side Hit Pen and beat writer for Inside the Rays. He also wrote a book about Ozzie Guillén but is running out of space, so follow him on Twitter @BrettBallantini and he'll probably tell you even more about himself than you ever wanted to know.