Jonathan Cannon pitched into the sixth inning, and the Chicago White Sox hit three home runs to end their 12-game losing streak with an 8-1 win over the Baltimore Orioles on Wednesday night.
Nicky Lopez, Andrew Vaughn, and Dominic Fletcher all homered for the White Sox, who improved to 32-109 for the season. They need to go 11-10 in their remaining games to avoid tying the post-1900 record of 120 losses held by the 1962 New York Mets.
This was their third losing streak of at least 12 games this season—no other team had ever done that since 1900—but Lopez started the game with a homer, and the White Sox played much better than they did while losing the first two games of this series by a combined score of 22-3.
Cannon (3-9) allowed one run and five hits over 5 2/3 innings.
“Good offensive game, great pitching,” said Chicago interim manager Grady Sizemore. “It was a fun one.”
Albert Suárez (7-5) gave up six runs and eight hits over 4 1/3 innings for the Orioles, who are still half a game ahead of the New York Yankees at the top of the AL East.
Gunnar Henderson hit a homer in the bottom of the first to tie the game at 1, but the Orioles did not score again.
“We struck out way too many times,” said Baltimore manager Brandon Hyde. “I thought they forced the action offensively much better than we did. So, it was not a good night offensively.”
This was the second time this season that both teams led off a game with home runs, according to Sportradar.
The first instance was last weekend, when Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers homered in the top of the first and Corbin Carroll of the Arizona Diamondbacks hit an inside-the-park home run to start the bottom of the inning.
