Eloy Jiménez got hit in the knee by a line drive while sitting in the dugout during the third inning Tuesday.
The Chicago White Sox left fielder remained in the game and two innings later raced home from second to score the go-ahead run on a single by Gavin Sheets.
The Sox scored three runs in the fifth and beat the Oakland Athletics 6-3 in front of 4,556 at the Oakland Coliseum.
Jiménez exited before the bottom of the fifth with a bruised right knee. Andrew Vaughn moved from right field to left and Brian Goodwin entered to play right.
X-rays were negative and Jiménez is day to day, the Sox said.
“He got hit right on the kneecap there, or a bit below it,” Sox manager Tony La Russa said. “It’s sore. We’ll have to see how he feels (Wednesday), but they X-ray’d him and he’s OK, nothing broken or anything, just a bruise.
“But it’s a sore bruise, so we’ll see how he comes back.”
Jiménez was on bench in the third when he got hit by Vaughn’s liner into the dugout. He immediately fell to the ground and received attention from the training staff.
“That one was really fast,” said Yoán Moncada through an interpreter.
He was standing near Jiménez at the time.
“Unfortunately, the ball hit Eloy, but fortunately enough, it just hit him on the leg and it wasn’t in the upper body,” Moncada said. “That was a crazy and a scary moment.
“It was a crazy moment, but fortunately enough, it wasn’t anything serious.”
When the bottom of the third started, Jiménez was back in left field.
Jiménez began the fifth with a single and moved to second on Yasmani Grandal’s single. Sheets hit a third consecutive single, and Jiménez slid in just ahead of the tag to give the Sox a 2-1 lead.
César Hernández extended the lead to 4-1 with a two-run single. Goodwin had a two-run single in the eighth, making it 6-1.
The Sox had 15 hits. Moncada and Leury García both had three hits while Luis Robert, Sheets and Hernández each had two.
“We had a lot of opportunities, and there’s two ways to look at it,” La Russa said. “My preference is to applaud the offense that got 15 hits and created all those opportunities. And give a pat on the back to the pitchers on the other side, they got the outs that prevented the game from getting away.”
Sox starter Jimmy Lambert earned his first big-league win a day after he was recalled from Triple-A Charlotte.
“I definitely feel like I settled in there and I threw a lot of strikes, I was getting ahead more,” Lambert said. “And it worked out.”
Lambert allowed one run on three hits with two strikeouts and two walks in five innings.
“He came out in the first inning, and he was nervous, which he should be,” La Russa said. “And what’s so impressive was once he got into the flow, he showed his reputation. He has a reputation for being a closer: He can finish innings, he can pitch deep into the game. And that’s exactly what he did. He got, actually, sharper and better and better as he relaxed and just pitched. So a very impressive game.
“He’s smart. He knows what we’re trying to do. So he put pressure on himself, you could tell. Just the way he warmed up and when he came into the dugout for the first inning, you could tell. So to come through like that was a lift for us, and it really bodes very well for him going forward.”
He was making his third big-league start and sixth appearance.
“In a lot of ways today felt like my first start because, in my first start I was limited, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get to five innings and kind of similar to the last start I had,” Lambert said. “Whereas going into today it was kind of my game in a way. So it felt good to through five.
“It’s definitely special.”
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