Morning Box Score

By Marcus Gilmer in News on Sep 19, 2009 3:30PM

Royals Roll Sox
There's not a whole lot Sox fans can take away from last night's 11-0 loss to the Kansas City Royals. Nothing, in fact. No bright spots. Even Ozzie seems to have finally thrown up his hands, saying after the loss, "My motivational speech before the game, it didn't work at all...I wasted 25 minutes of my time to try to motivate those guys." The White Sox offense only manged three hits off of Royals pitcher Luke Hochaver, who pitched a complete game. Meanwhile, all four Sox pitchers who saw action gave up at least one run. Starter Mark Buehrle gave up the most - five runs over six innings. The Sox remain 6.5 games out of first with 14 games left (meanwhile, the Twins have closed the gap to 3 games). The Sox try to muster...something in an attempt to make one last run at first starting tonight at 6:05 p.m. (WGN).

Cubs Drop Close One To Cards
A 2-0 lead. A quality start (again) from Ted Lilly. Neither of these mattered much as the Cubs dropped another game, this time 3-2 to the rival Cardinals, effectively killing any hopes at making a miracle run at the Wild Card (as if that wasn't dead anyway weeks ago). Lilly pitched 7.2 innings, striking out six and responsible for two Cardinal runs. The Cubs got their runs in the first off of back-to-back-to-back doubles from Fukudome, Lee, and Ramirez. But it all went down the drain as the Cubs failed to score anything else the rest of the game. The nail in the coffin was a walk-off homer from Matt Holliday off of Aaron Heilman. Always one to capture the essence of being a Cubs fan, Sweet Lou said afterwards, "Ifs, coulds, buts, whats -- what else?" The two rivals tangle once more today at 3:10 p.m. (FOX).