White Sox hold Cubs to two hits, avoid sweep with shutout win in Crosstown series finale

No bats? No brooms.

The Cubs learned that the hard way Wednesday, with White Sox pitching silencing the second highest scoring offense in baseball in a 3-0 win that prevented a Crosstown sweep at Wrigley Field.

Led by six nearly perfect innings of relief from righty Jose Urquidy, Sox pitchers kept the Cubs to just two hits.

The Sox got the game’s first run in the sixth inning, finally breaking through against Cubs starter Clay Holmes with back-to-back hits from Miguel Vargas and Andrew Benintendi.

They struck again in the eighth, when outfielder Braden Montgomery doubled off Michael Busch’s glove at first base, bringing home a pair and creating some late-inning breathing room.

The Cubs mustered only a single scoring chance, and that was immediately erased. Outfielder Tyrone Taylor, who had both hits, doubled to start the Cubs’ half of the sixth inning, but he belatedly tagged on a Pete Crow-Armstrong lineout to right field, with Montgomery throwing him out at third base by a wide margin.

“It’s a mental mistake,” Taylor said after the game. “Kids watching this: No outs, when you’re on second base, your job is to get to third on a fly ball and tag up. Don’t do what I did.”

“He got a little bit of a bad read. He was a little late tagging,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “But there wasn’t much offense coming, it didn’t look like.”

Urquidy, acquired in a July trade, was excellent, retiring 17 of the 19 hitters he faced and striking out eight.

The Cubs played their typical brand of terrific defense, with third baseman Alex Bregman, in particular, shining in the field a day after he drove in the tying and winning runs Tuesday night. But good pitching and good defense wasn’t enough on a quiet day for the bats.

The Sox salvaging a victory Wednesday gave them a seventh win in their last 11 games.