CHICAGO -- Brandon Nimmo landed at the warning track Monday night at Rate Field, dropping to a knee before emphatically pumping his fist as he ran off the field.
The Rangers' right fielder had just sucked the air out of the South Side crowd, robbing Andrew Benintendi of a game-tying, two-run homer in the bottom of the first inning of Texas' 11-2 win over the White Sox.
Rangers starting pitcher Kumar Rocker left a 1-0 sinker over the heart of the plate, which Benintendi hit at 96.4 mph, per Statcast. The ball went a projected 353 feet, and would have been a homer in eight ballparks.
“Nimmo with a huge rob of a home run, which is one of my favorite plays in the game,” manager Skip Schumaker said. “I’ve said it before, I think every fence should be like five feet, so there would be more of those, but that was a big play at the moment. … It was big because it would have been 2-2 then. If that's a home run, they put up a crooked number, and all of a sudden it doesn’t feel as good. It was just a really, really good play. Luckily, it stayed in the park and momentum stayed on our side."
Nimmo, who has -3 outs above average and -4 defensive runs saved, made the catch of his life to prevent Benintendi's 14th home run of the season.
“It wasn't hit so hard that I wasn't able to kind of get a beat on it,” Nimmo explained. “A few steps into it, I knew that I probably was going to have to make a play at the fence. I was able to time it up for the robbery. … There is a little bit of [an art to robbing homers]. Experience always helps with that, but you never really know. You’re trying to be prepared for whenever that situation might arise, because it doesn't happen very often.”
Rocker did give up a homer Nimmo couldn’t rob, a two-run shot by Tristian Peters in the second inning, but the first-inning catch preserved a solid night for the Rangers’ second-year starter. Rocker allowed just two runs in 5 2/3 innings of work, allowing five hits and three walks, but locking in when Texas needed it most to keep Chicago from closing the gap any further.
“I missed that sinker, pulled the sinker and he got a piece of it,” Rocker said. “I don't know, the way Nimmo was tracking it down, I was like, ‘Maybe there's a chance.’ And I mean, it would’ve just been an average outing without him catching that.”
Though the Rangers eventually won by nine runs, saving those two was a huge momentum swing early in the game.
Had the ball flown over, the White Sox would’ve tied the game, 2-2, in the first inning. Instead, the Rangers held a 2-0 lead and the momentum.
“The momentum was going to go big one way or the other,” Nimmo said. “For us to be able to keep the runs off the board and finish the inning, and then go tack on two more was huge. Huge momentum shifts there at a really big point in the game. You never know when that point in the game is going to happen. For us, it happened really early in the game. There usually are a few plays in a game that you can point to, and that was definitely one of them.”