CHICAGO — Mookie Betts was almost the new Hanley Ramirez. Instead, Tristan Peters is the new Jackson Holliday.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto came within four outs of a perfect game and three outs of a no-hitter but gave up a leadoff home run in the ninth inning as the Dodgers beat the Chicago White Sox 7-1 on Saturday afternoon.
It is the second time Yamamoto has carried a no-hitter into the ninth inning only to give up a home run. He held the Baltimore Orioles hitless for eight innings at Camden Yards in September before giving up a two-out home run to Holliday.
He took it to another level this time.
This gem was nearly the 25th perfect game in major-league history but Betts booted a ground ball with two outs in the eighth inning. That ended a run of perfection stretching back to Yamamoto’s previous start when he retired the final 22 batters he faced. The 45 consecutive batters retired over two games is tied (with Mark Buehrle in 2009) for the second-longest streak in MLB history. Giants reliever Yusmeiro Petit holds the record at 46 (over eight games).
Yamamoto did all of his work Saturday with a multi-run lead.
Back in the lineup after missing one game with a sore left knee, Shohei Ohtani announced his presence with authority, hitting the second pitch he saw from White Sox starter Sean Burke into the right-field seats.
Having touched the stove, the White Sox learned quickly. Ohtani walked in each of his next three times up, the most understandable chunk of 10 walks issued by Sox pitchers in counterpoint to Yamamoto’s precision.
Betts beat out an infield single with two outs and Max Muncy hit one over the visitors’ bullpen in right field for a two-run home run – the first of two home runs he would hit in the game without anyone noticing.
That gave Yamamoto a 3-0 door prize just for showing up.
The right-hander picked up right where he left off in his start against the Angels last weekend. Yamamoto retired the final 22 batters he faced in that game and he started setting down White Sox hitters with the same efficiency.
He struck out four of the first seven batters and didn’t allow a ball to be hit out of the infield until the ninth hitter, Edgar Quero, flew out to center field.
The closest the White Sox came to a base hit in the first five innings was a ball Chase Meidroth pulled foul down the third-base line in the fifth inning. He wound up striking out on a slider.
There was a brief interruption in Yamamoto’s march to perfection when he took the mound in the bottom of the sixth inning. Yamamoto had a problem with the area in front of the rubber and the grounds crew came out to address it.
On it went from there. He struck out Jacob Gonzalez and got Tristan Peters on a ground ball to Freddie Freeman – the first baseman went to his knees to smother the 95.3-mph grounder near the line.
Alex Call came up with the best defensive play of the day, banging into the side wall to catch Quero’s fly ball in foul territory to end the sixth.
That came on just the 72nd pitch of Yamamoto’s day. He retired the Sox on fewer than a dozen pitches in three of the first six innings.
He struck out Sam Antonacci to start the seventh inning (the last of his seven strikeouts in the game) then got a called third strike on Miguel Vargas – but Vargas challenged the call and it was overturned (by 0.1 inches). Yamamoto’s next pitch was a fastball at the top of the zone and Vargas lined it to left field at 103.2 mph, the White Sox’s hardest-hit ball of the day to that point but just another out.
Colson Montgomery topped that with a 110.3-mph liner leading off the eighth inning – right at Freeman. Braden Montgomery grounded out for the second out of the inning. But Betts couldn’t handle Meidroth’s grounder to his left – recalling the error by Ramirez that kept Clayton Kershaw’s only career no-hitter, on June 18, 2014, from being a perfect game.
Yamamoto got another grounder to end the eighth inning, but his second pitch of the ninth was a fastball over the heart of the plate that Peters did not miss, sending it 388 feet into the right-field seats to ruin everyone else’s day.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts pulled Yamamoto one batter later and Alex Vesia closed out the win.
More to come on this story.