Tigers rout White Sox 18-2 to finish sweep

DETROIT — Miguel Cabrera homered and drove in four runs, and the Detroit Tigers finished a three-game sweep of Chicago in emphatic fashion, routing the White Sox 18-2 on Sunday night.

Max Scherzer (14-8) allowed five hits over seven scoreless innings, and Alex Avila had a career-high four hits for Detroit, which leads the AL Central by 6½ games heading into a three-game series at second-place Cleveland. Chicago is 8½ back.

Mark Buehrle (11-7) allowed seven earned runs in 3 1-3 innings.

The Tigers trailed 8-1 in the fifth Saturday before rallying to win 9-8. They'd scored 26 consecutive runs and led 18-0 Sunday when the White Sox finally scored two in the ninth.

It was the second-biggest blowout in the major leagues this season, according to STATS, LLC. Cleveland beat Kansas City 19-1 on May 16.

Cabrera's two-run homer into the bushes behind the center-field wall highlighted a seven-run sixth inning.

Although Justin Verlander is making a bid for the Cy Young Award, the depth of Detroit's rotation has been an issue. Scherzer allowed seven runs in three innings against Kansas City on Monday, but he was much sharper against Chicago, striking out the side in the third and facing the minimum 12 hitters through the first four innings.

Not that Detroit needed a dominant pitching performance.

Austin Jackson led off with a double in the bottom of the first and eventually scored on Victor Martinez's single. The Tigers scored three runs in the third. Martinez and Avila hit RBI singles, and when Jhonny Peralta hit a grounder to short for a potential inning-ending double play, second baseman Gordon Beckham's throw to first skipped away for an error, allowing Martinez to score.

The White Sox compounded their poor pitching by making three errors on the night.

Delmon Young made it 5-0 with an RBI single in the fourth, and Cabrera's double to left-center brought home two more runs and ended Buehrle's night. It was his shortest outing since June 6, 2010, when he pitched three innings against the Indians.

Reliever Addison Reed, making his major league debut, allowed RBI singles by Avila and Peralta later in the fourth to make it 9-0.

With the game out of hand, both teams began substituting liberally, although White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen left right-hander Shane Lindsay out on the mound for the entire sixth inning. Lindsay, whose mother managed to travel from Australia on short notice to see her son's major league debut Friday night, allowed seven runs and eight hits in his only inning of work Sunday.

Peralta hit a two-run double, Brandon Inge added an RBI single, pinch-hitter Andy Dirks hit a two-run single, and Cabrera made it 16-0 with a towering, 425-foot homer, his 26th of the year.

Dirks added a two-run homer in the eighth.