Recapping Friday's furious finish

Miss the ninth inning of Friday night's White Sox-Mariners game? Did you just turn off the TV when the Sox entered the ninth holding a seemingly insurmountable 7-2 lead? If you answered yes to either question, it was a furious finish at U.S. Cellular Field, to say the least. For the first time since May 28, 1998, the White Sox failed to hold a 5-run lead in the ninth inning. Phillip Humber, Donnie Veal and Addison Reed allowed a combined 6 runs as a scrappy Seattle club rallied back to take an 8-7 advantage. The crowd at the Cell was stunned, but give the Sox credit for coming right back. Gordon Beckham led off the bottom of the ninth with an infield single, Dewayne Wise walked and Kevin Youkilis followed with an RBI single to tie the game at 8. Adam Dunn was up next, and he just missed hitting his third home run of the game. Dunn flied out to deep left field for the first out of the inning, and Wise failed to tag and advance to third base for some reason. No matter, Paul Konerko delivered a game-winning single on a deep drive to right-center field. Right fielder Eric Thames appeared to make the catch, but the ball popped out of his glove after he collided with center fielder Michael Saunders. Wise scored easily on the single, but he likely would have tagged up from second base and scored if Thames held on to the ball, considering he was on the ground after the collision. One more overlooked note from the final play of the game… The Mariners claimed Konerko passed Youkilis on the base paths and should have been called out. I checked replays and didn’t see anything happening around first base. I asked Konerko and he said Youkilis came back toward first base and nearly went past him. There was a lot going on down on the field at the moment, but first-base umpire Lance Barrett obviously did not see anything illegal. It's not the way you want to win games, but the White Sox aren't about to give back the 9-8 decision. “You would like to think it's a momentum builder,” manager Robin Ventura said before Saturday night’s game vs. Seattle. “There's good stuff that happened and there's stuff you wouldn't want to happen again. It was a good win though. From where you're at you feel pretty good about it and then not so good and then you feel all right going home. You'd like to be a little cleaner than that.”