ST. LOUIS — While losing nine of 12 games, matching a season-high four-game skid and seeing their division lead over the Guardians shrink to a half-game, White Sox players and coaches insisted that vibes remained high.
They believed their brand of baseball —their slugging-reliant offense, their piecemeal pitching staff and the loose clubhouse atmosphere that carried them to this point — would pull them out of a mid-September dive before they crashed into the ground.
Then Randal Grichuk, 35, improbably hit a two-out, two-strike, two-run, go-ahead, opposite-field home run over the right-field wall at Busch Stadium, where he began his career 12 years ago.
After Bryan Hudson pitched a perfect ninth to complete a theft of a 6-5 victory Saturday, the Sox admitted how much they needed the moment that Grichuk provided.
Grichuk postgame pic.twitter.com/jPtoykAwxQ
— James Fegan (@JRFegan) September 13, 2026
“It was something that we really needed,” Grichuk said. “Hopefully now we can keep playing our game and be in a lot better place.”
“I think [the victory] can do a lot,” manager Will Venable said.
It wasn’t mentioned, but it helps that the Guardians lost earlier in Minneapolis, and the Sox are 1½ games up again and will land in Cleveland on Sunday night still in possession of the American League Central lead.
“Momentum is a powerful thing,” said Kyle Teel, who came back from an 0-2 count against Cardinals closer Riley O’Brien to walk ahead of Grichuk.
A momentum shift would be good because the Sox certainly didn’t receive any assurances that all is in working order.
The 28-man roster surely is not that consumed with the club’s amateur scouting director resigning while under internal investigation.
The more pressing issue is trade-deadline acquisition Luis Castillo, whose struggles got worse, if anything.
Pitching behind an opener, Castillo lasted only 2⅔ innings and yielded three runs.
The damage could have been worse had he not snuck a fastball by Cardinals RBI leader Alec Burleson with the bases loaded to end the fourth inning, a feat nearly as miraculous as Grichuk’s blast given that Castillo’s velocity had flagged into the low 90s, with no easy answers as to why.
“I don’t know why because I felt that my mechanics were good, my body feels good,” Castillo said.
It’s a bit late for another skipped start in order to keep working on his delivery.
“I don’t know if we have time to do that again,” Venable said.
“The No. 1 thing is to make sure that he’s healthy.”
Venable appeared to shake up his lineup, moving a resurgent Teel near the top of the order and sliding the struggling Colson Montgomery and Braden Montgomery down.
But he insisted that he was just playing matchups and not making a reactive late-season switch.
After second-guessing his own deployment of pinch hitters in recent days, he was back to his aggressive ways, calling Grichuk off the bench to face a lefty in the top of the fourth.
When it meant that Grichuk wound up in a righty-righty matchup with O’Brien with two outs in the ninth, another constantly preached element of Sox baseball emerged: Stay on the fastball, even after four consecutive sliders put him behind in the count 1-2.
“He took advantage of a mistake,” Venable said.
“We all thought that there was another offspeed coming down below the zone.”
Sometimes an opponent’s mistake can be the difference, and the Sox were bound — they insisted — to get one eventually.
“Luckily, he left a sinker over [the plate],” Grichuk said.
“Haven’t been able to get that big hit to push us over the top, and I know we all feel it. Luckily tonight, I was able to come through.”