Castillo Dominates, White Sox Blank Reds 5-0

Luis Castillo threw 7.0 innings of near-perfect baseball — 1 hit, 0 earned runs, 10 strikeouts — and the Chicago White Sox offense did just enough to make it comfortable. Cincinnati never had an answer for either.

The story of the night was Castillo. One hit over seven innings, two walks, ten punchouts — that's a performance that shuts a conversation down before it starts. The Reds managed nothing against him, and by the time he handed the ball off, the game was long decided. Hagen Smith then came on for the eighth and added 3 strikeouts over a clean inning of his own, giving Cincinnati hitters absolutely no reprieve from the first pitch to the last.

Offensively, Chicago built the lead methodically and then put it away with some help from Cincinnati's bullpen. Drew Romo got things started in the third, launching a solo shot 403 feet to right to make it 1-0. The game stayed there until the sixth, when Chase Meidroth hit a two-run homer 360 feet to left — Colson Montgomery scoring ahead of him — and that's when this one effectively ended. The win probability swung from 79% to 93% on that swing, and it's hard to argue with the math. In the eighth, Romo singled to center to score Montgomery again, pushing it to 4-0, and then a pair of wild pitches from Cincinnati's Marinaccio let Tristan Peters score to cap the scoring at 5-0. Sam Antonacci went 3-for-5 and Romo finished 2-for-4 with a homer, 2 RBI, and a run scored. Meidroth matched him: 2-for-4, a homer, 2 RBI, a run. Montgomery crossed the plate twice without needing a hit to do it.

For Cincinnati, Sal Stewart's 2-for-4 night was the lone bright spot in an otherwise bleak offensive showing. Rhett Lowder gave up 7 hits and 2 earned runs over 5.1 innings — not a disaster on paper, but the White Sox kept finding ways to put runners in motion and eventually made him pay. The Reds finished with a goose egg, and it looks like a night where nothing went right on their side of the ledger. When your opponent's starter is dealing like Castillo was, you need something to go right early — and Cincinnati never got it.