CHICAGO _ Did the Upside Down descend on Guaranteed Rate Field, the White Sox version of the "Stranger Things" alternate universe?
How about James Shields dealing like vintage James Shields, giving up just four hits and two walks with five strikeouts in seven innings during a 6-1 victory over the Twins on Wednesday night, just his second home win all season?
Call a balk on Shields' fake-out to first followed by a pickoff attempt at third in the sixth inning? Nope. Rewind and reverse it.
That reversal got Twins manager Paul Molitor lathered up enough to get tossed _ and he wasn't even the first Twins coach to get ejected. Third base coach Gene Glynn got his walking papers from third base umpire Gerry Davis just minutes before.
To top it all off, in the Sox half of the inning Charlie Tilson dropped a beauty of a soft liner in the middle of three chasing defenders in right-center field to score Tim Anderson and raise the Sox advantage to 5-0.
Forget "Stranger Things," call the "X-Files."
Jose Abreu pulled Kyle Gibson's 2-1 slider 382 feet into the left-field stands in the Sox's three-run fifth for his 12th home run of the season and Avisail Garcia homered on a 2-2 pitch to make it 6-0 in the eighth.
Sox manager Rick Renteria has talked about Shields, the senior member of the rotation at 36, finding relevance on a team that's undergoing a youth movement, one that eventually will get even younger before the makeover is complete. But on this night Shields found the fountain of youth.
Sixty-four of his 100 pitches were strikes and he overcame a Yoan Moncada error to pitch out of a bases-loaded jam in the second.
Facing a 2-1 count against Bobby Wilson, he sneaked a fastball by him for a called strike, then came back with a knuckle-curve to get him to ground into a forceout at third.
After that morass of ejections and other mayhem in the sixth, Shields caught the outside corner with a funky looking 70 mph curveball to ring up Max Kepler for strike three looking.
"I don't think he sees himself (as on his way) out," Renteria said before the game. "I think he sees himself as an individual who needs to make adjustments, who knew he needed to make adjustments. He did. He has been very, very effective. We were just talking a little while ago. For me the wins and losses for him are irrelevant. It's the way he's performing that's the most important."
Now, back to Moncada, who has been plagued by fielding errors to the point Renteria has called him out about it publicly on more than one occasion.
In the first, Moncada couldn't field Eddie Rosario's grounder cleanly, but knocked it down and picked it up in time to throw to first for the out.
Then in the second, he flat-out flubbed Jake Cave's bouncer and misfired with a low throw to Abreu for the error, his 12th of the season.
