Carlos Rodón of the White Sox twirled the second no-hitter of the MLB season, and narrowly missed out on a perfect game. Two outs short of the perfecto, he hit Roberto Perez on a misplaced slider. It would have been the White Sox’s fourth perfect game — setting and new record for a franchise — and first since Philip Humber somehow did it in 2012.
So both no-no’s of 2021 were a HBP from perfect, as San Diego’s Joe Musgrove’s only base runner was Joey Gallo, whom he had plunked with a first-pitch fastball in the fourth. So two, no-walk no-hitters in less than a month.
It’s been quite the series on the South Side, after the Giolito-Bieber doing their best Wesley-Inigo impression Tuesday night. Rodón has been a figure of frustration for Sox fans for years now, teasing as a dominant starter, while injuries, inconsistency, and needing a GPS for the strike zone have kept him from even being a competent one. He’s still got a lot of questions to answer as he’s only thrown 160 innings the past three seasons, but it must be affirming for him to have a night like this after all of it.
What might not be, though Rodón certainly won’t mind, is that the moment a lot of people will remember most from the game is Yermin Mercedes disintegrating a baseball:
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That sound. That sound is pure violence. He’s hitting .500 with a slugging percentage of .816 at the moment. That would be a good OPS.
