White Sox Grab Game 1 From the First .500 Playoff Team

The Chicago White Sox beat the Houston Astros 6-3 on Tuesday, Sept. 29, in Game 1 of the AL Wild Card Series at Daikin Park. Chicago finished the year 84-78. Houston finished 81-81, the first club in a full season to reach the playoffs without a winning record, and then lost at home to a team that dropped 121 games in 2024.

The Astros’ eighth straight home playoff loss, dating to Game 1 of the 2023 ALDS, leaves them one defeat from a winter after they won the AL West by a game over Texas. Game 2 is Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET in Houston, with Hunter Brown on four days of rest against Sean Burke.

Chicago Scored in Four of the First Five Innings

Rookie left-hander Hagen Smith opened for the White Sox and threw three scoreless innings, two hits, no walks. Houston’s opener, rookie AJ Blubaugh, lasted two-thirds of an inning, walked three, and threw 14 balls and 13 strikes. First baseman Christian Walker’s error left runners on first and third, and Munetaka Murakami’s sacrifice fly made it 1-0.

Bryan King faced five batters in the second and all five reached. He hit Colson Montgomery to load the bases with nobody out, then Sam Antonacci singled in two. Miguel Ullola stranded the rest of that mess, but Montgomery, dropped to ninth in the order by manager Will Venable, led off the fourth with a 432-foot homer to straightaway center. Chase Meidroth’s bases-loaded single in the fifth pushed it to 5-0 before pinch-hitter Nelson Velázquez finally got Houston on the board with a two-run homer.

AL WILD CARD GAME 1 LINE SCORE

Bennett Sousa’s wild pitch in the seventh scored Murakami for a 6-2 lead. In the eighth, Jeremy Peña and Yordan Alvarez singled with two outs, and Peña came home when third baseman Miguel Vargas threw away a ball on Jose Altuve, cutting it to 6-3. Grant Taylor struck out five in 2 1/3 innings and closed it. Jordan Hicks, 1 1/3 scoreless, got the win.

HOW CHICAGO SCORED

• First inning: Murakami sacrifice fly after Walker’s error, 1-0.
• Second inning: Antonacci two-run single after King hit Montgomery, 3-0.
• Fourth inning: Montgomery’s 432-foot homer off Ullola, 4-0.
• Fifth inning: Meidroth bases-loaded single, 5-0.
• Seventh inning: Murakami scores on Sousa’s wild pitch, 6-2.

Smith, in his first playoff game, kept the night simple. “It was cool just to get the opportunity to go out there and do that,” he said. “And, yeah, just try to go out there and compete the best I can for the team and give us the best chance to win.”

An 81-81 Champion Heard Boos by Inning Two

Houston won the AL West at 81-81, one game ahead of the Rangers, and became the first full-season playoff team without a winning record. The 2005 San Diego Padres had held the floor at 82-80. The Astros were 20-31 in mid-May, 11 games under.500, then parted with general manager Dana Brown on Aug. 24 and still backed into October on the season’s last day.

They also finished with a Pythagorean record of 78-84, having scored 734 runs and allowed 766. Alvarez hit.316 with 42 home runs and is the MVP favorite. None of that showed up in the first four innings Tuesday, and the home crowd let the club hear it when the deficit hit 3-0.

HOUSTON’S OCTOBER CARD

• The berth: 81-81, eighth AL West title in 10 seasons, ninth trip to the playoffs in 10 years after missing 2025 by one game.
• The streak: Eighth straight home playoff loss, dating to Game 1 of the 2023 ALDS.
• The house: Announced attendance of 34,011 in a park that holds 40,963.
• The head-to-head: Houston went 5-2 against Chicago in the regular season and still opened this series with a bullpen game.

A division winner that finished even should not need a reminder that October is earned in April through September, but the seats and the noise made the point without a speech. The louder problem in Houston is no longer one bad night from the pen. It is an eight-game home playoff losing streak and a park that did not fill for a club that spent a decade treating October as a habit.

The 121-Loss Roster Barely Overlaps This One

The White Sox lost 100 games three years in a row, including 41-121 in 2024, the most defeats in a 162-game season. They are the first team to reach the playoffs after consecutive 100-loss years, let alone three. They clinched a wild card and finished one game behind Cleveland at 84-78, in the postseason for the first time since 2021.

WHITE SOX YEAR BY YEAR

General manager Chris Getz tore the roster open. Hitters who appeared in both 2024 and 2026 accounted for 19.8 percent of Chicago plate appearances this year. Only four hitters wore the uniform in both seasons: Andrew Benintendi, Tommy Pham, Lenyn Sosa, and Vargas, who hit 33 home runs after a.387 OPS in his first White Sox trial. Murakami, signed out of Japan, hit 35. Antonacci, a 2024 fifth-rounder, drove in two on Tuesday and led the AL with 29 hit-by-pitches during the year. Meidroth arrived in the Garrett Crochet trade and posted 4.5 Baseball-Reference WAR.

Venable liked the way the young ones handled a building that has hosted a lot of October baseball. “We came here to win the series and the first part of that is getting this first win, which is great,” he said. “A bunch of young guys that haven’t been in this situation before, they didn’t back down at all.”

Montgomery is the sharpest picture of this club. He hit 31 home runs and also finished with an MLB-record 227 strikeouts, passing Mark Reynolds’s 223 in 2009. Venable still wrote him ninth, and the first swing of his night left the park. That is the trade this roster makes, over and over: swing through it, then run it out.

Houston Needed Eight Pitchers and Still Trailed

Both clubs ran bullpen games. Combined they used 13 pitchers, five for Chicago and eight for Houston. The Astros had burned arms down the stretch to clinch the West and would not start Brown on short rest, so Blubaugh, who led all major league relievers with 96 innings, opened a playoff game and never recorded three outs.

Joe Espada said using two pitchers that early made the rest of the night a scramble. “It puts you in a tough spot for sure,” he said. Ullola actually calmed it, three innings, four strikeouts, the one run the Montgomery homer. Josh Hendrickson, Logan VanWey, Sousa, Bryan Abreu, and Josh Hader followed. By the time Hader threw a clean ninth, the deficit was three and the series was already on the brink.

Chicago’s chain held. Smith, Hicks, Sean Newcomb (the Velázquez homer), David Sandlin, and Taylor. Taylor’s five strikeouts in the last 2 1/3 innings were the night’s last argument that this staff, patched together the same way Houston’s was, had more answers with a lead.

Espada reached for the version of this franchise that has spent a decade coming back from worse. “Our backs have been against the corner before and I think that’s when we are our best, when we fight back,” he said. “We know it’s a do or die and we’ve been here before.” Alvarez, speaking in Spanish through a translator, put a shorter clock on it. “Tomorrow we have to come out here and win or there’s no tomorrow after that.”

The Last White Sox Playoff Win Was Also in This Matchup

Chicago’s last playoff victory before Tuesday was Oct. 10, 2021, a 12-6 Game 3 in the ALDS against these Astros. Houston then closed that series the next day, 10-1, and the White Sox lost the 2021 ALDS in four games. They have not won a playoff series since the 2005 World Series, when they swept Houston and took Game 1 by 5-3.

A Chicago native sat in Section 140, Row 19, Seat 2 for that 2005 opener. Robert Prevost later became Pope Leo XIV, and on Tuesday a letter from him, dated Sept. 9 and addressed to chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, arrived at Rate Field before first pitch. It answered an Aug. 11 promotion when the club handed out miter-shaped White Sox hats. Venable said the backing meant a lot. The letter did not pick a winner. It still read like a South Side note.

Sport can truly become a school of life, where all can learn that abundance does not come from victory at any cost, but from sharing, from respecting others and from the joy of walking together. In this spirit, it is my hope that the White Sox will continue to foster bonds of friendship and solidarity among people, and thus bear hopeful witness to the possibility of living and working together in peace. With these sentiments, I willingly invoke the Almighty’s abundant blessings upon you and your loved ones.

Pope Leo XIV, letter to Jerry Reinsdorf, Sept. 9, 2026

The White Sox scored in the first inning anyway. History in this pairing runs through Houston more than through anyone else, from that 2005 sweep to the 2021 ALDS to a wild-card night in a renamed park where the home club could not fill the seats.

Hunter Brown Gets the Ball With the Season on the Line

Brown is 6-4 with a 3.19 ERA. Against Chicago this year he is 2-0 with a 1.38 ERA in 13 innings, 14 strikeouts and two walks. “I know that they’re a really good lineup,” he said. “They got a lot of power throughout the order. They can make you work. I’ve faced them twice this season, so at least I’m familiar with the lineup a little bit.” Burke, the White Sox ace, went 11-7 with a 3.34 ERA and is the other half of Wednesday’s game.

In the best-of-three format, the club that took Game 1 has gone on to win 21 of 24 Wild Card Series, 17 of them in a sweep. Visiting teams that went up 1-0 have won 12 of 15, nine by sweep. The last home club to lose Game 1 and still take the series was the Yankees against Boston in 2025. Those are the numbers Houston has to live with for one night, with Brown on the mound and a Game 3 on Thursday only if he gets them there.

Chicago has two chances to win a playoff series it has not won since 2005, on the road, against a club that beat it 5-2 from spring through September and then opened October with eight pitchers and a restless house. Alvarez already said what Wednesday is. Brown has to make it true, or the first.500 playoff team in a full season will last one game.