Rick Renteria gets the heave-ho as White Sox lose at home — again — by shutout

One day after pounding out 18 hits and 10 runs to end an ugly losing streak, the White Sox took any notion of positive momentum and buried it right underneath home plate.

Five hits. Zero runs. A 1-0 defeat against the Mariners, the fourth time already this season — and the third at Guaranteed Rate Field — the Sox have been shut out.

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That’s no way for a “really good team,” as third baseman Matt Davidson referred to the Sox, to go about revising an awful early-season narrative. A winning road trip to kick off the season has turned into a 5-15 record in a blur of bad baseball.

“We’re a really good team,” Davidson said. “It showed the first week of the season, what we were. We had a really bad [second] week. . . . As a young team, we’re going to need to get better as far as just creating momentum out of nothing. But when we get the momentum going, we’re hard to stop.”

Seven consecutive batters got hits to start Monday’s Sox victory. But that game wasn’t played in the late afternoon, when shadows between the pitcher’s mound and the plate made it difficult for hitters on both teams to pick up the baseball. And that game wasn’t marked by the super-sized strike zone of umpire Mike Estabrook, who called a third strike on Davidson with runners at the corners to end the sixth inning.

According to Davidson, the pitch was well outside.

“In a big situation, in a 1-0 game, first and third, and the ball is clearly off [the plate], you know?” he said. “And it’s just frustrating, especially being a guy trying to work on my plate discipline.”

Davidson protested mildly, though Estabrook didn’t like it. Manager Rick Renteria, on the other hand, bounded out of the dugout and earned his first ejection of the season, his eighth with the Sox and the 14th of his managerial career.

Those are pretty impressive heave-ho numbers for a guy who’s considered mild-mannered.

“[Davidson] is not a guy that’s very vocal,” Renteria said. “He lets those [umpires] do their job. I think all of our players, to be honest, allow those guys to do their job. I think when he’s expressing himself — in a very calm fashion, by the way — to the umpire, I just wanted to make sure I got out there in time so that it didn’t escalate.”

Alas, escalate it did, thanks to Renteria. It wouldn’t have taken much for things to have been far more pleasant for the Sox. A timely hit or two might’ve gotten the job done. Then we’d be talking about a real, live winning streak — OK, just a two-gamer — rather than what will be, if the Sox drop the series finale on Wednesday, a second consecutive 1-5 homestand.

For a while, it seemed like a decent bet that we might even witness a victory for Chris Volstad.

The 31-year-old, however, was lifted in the fifth inning and got the loss, having allowed a two-out RBI single by Mitch Haniger in the fourth for the game’s only run.

In the end, not a lot went right.

“A bad call, like anything else, it’s something that’s going to happen,” Davidson said. “We’re going to make errors. We’re going to strike out. We’re all human. There’s going to be tough games [when] you’re going to have to deal with shadows and stuff like that. It’s no excuse, but it’s part of the 162-game schedule.”

Goodness, are there really 142 to go? The first 20 have been rough, even for a young team with time on its side.