The Loop

The Chicago White Sox hit back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs on Sunday

August 17, 2020

I don’t care if it’s 3-0 with the bases loaded, if you’re hot, you gotta swing the bat. No one was hotter on Sunday afternoon than the Chicago White Sox. In the bottom of the fifth inning with Cardinals reliever Roel Ramirez on the mound for his major league debut, the South Siders jacked not one, not two, not three, but FOUR straight homers to turn a one-run lead into a seven-run blowout in the blink of an eye. Ladies and gentleman, enjoy the fireworks.

The synchronicity here is also uncanny—two lefties going deep to right to get it started and two righties smacking line-drives to left to finish it up. This is the kind of spooky ghosts-in-the-cornfield strangeness that keeps us coming back to baseball year after excruciating year.

Making things even weirder is the fact that dinger-splosion cemented the White Sox as one of just two teams (along with Expos/Nationals) to ever hit a quartet of back-to-back homers TWICE in MLB history, the first instance coming back in the pre-HD halcyon days of 2008.

It is worth asking, however, about the asterisk on all this. The Cardinals called up Ramirez as a COVID-19 replacement following an outbreak that put their season on hold for two-and-a-half weeks. After winning their return doubleheader on Saturday, the cracks in their depth showed on Sunday. We’ll take back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs wherever we can get ‘em, but who knows what counts and what doesn’t these days.