Juan Soto hits 3 homers in a game for first time in his career to lift Yankees past White Sox

CHICAGO — Nestor Cortes and Juan Soto — especially Soto — saved the Yankees from taking two big losses Tuesday.

Soto hit three home runs in a game for the first time in his career and Cortes threw seven shutout innings as the Yankees rebounded from a grotesque loss to the worst team in the majors with a 4-1 win over the White Sox in front of 21,199 at Guaranteed Rate Field.

“Great night by a great player,” Aaron Boone said of Soto, who upped his homer total to 33, second on the club behind Aaron Judge’s 42.

Soto’s power show aside, it was a tense night until the end as Jake Cousins, with Clay Holmes unavailable a second straight night after throwing 45 pitches Sunday, earned his first career save, striking out Brooks Baldwin with the bases loaded in the ninth to escape a bases-loaded jam.

The Yankees (71-50) took over first place in the AL East by a half game over the Orioles, who lost to the Nationals.

All of that helped distract from the jarring news delivered pregame by Boone: That third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr., who had electrified the lineup in his two weeks since being acquired before the July 30 trade deadline, was “likely” headed to the IL with a UCL injury in his left elbow, an injury the manager couldn’t yet rule out as potentially season-ending.

Soto, who would very much be in the thick of the AL MVP race if not for Judge’s monster season, hit a two-run shot in the third inning off White Sox righthander Jonathan Cannon, took the same pitcher deep again leading off the fifth inning and made it a trio of blasts in the seventh, that one coming off lefthander Fraser Ellard. The first two homers were hit to the opposite field.

“He \[Cannon\] threw me a pitch I should have hammered,” Soto said of the down-the-middle 1-and-0 cutter he grounded to first in his first at-bat of the night, which caused him to take a bevy of dry swings in the dugout. “So I went back to my routine and started thinking \[about\] what I could do to help my swing. I did it and that’s how it happened.”

Of his first career three-homer game, Soto smiled and said: “It means a lot. It’s really fun. It’s even better to get the win.”

Cortes (6-10, 4.20) bounced back from a rough start against the Angels, when he allowed six runs and nine hits. Against the White Sox (29-91), he allowed three hits and matched his season high with nine strikeouts.

Cortes, with an especially sharp changeup and sweeper, was perfect through three innings Tuesday, striking out six of the first nine batters. The lefthander retired the first 11 before allowing a two-out single in the fourth to former Yankee Andrew Benintendi.

Mark Leiter Jr. allowed a run in the eighth to make it 4-1, but Tommy Kahnle cleaned up the mess, stranding two. The righthander created a mess of his own in the ninth, walking Andrew Vaughn and allowing a Gavin Sheets double.

Cousins, an Illinois native who grew up about 45 minutes from Chicago and had some 20 family and friends in attendance, came on. He struck out Korey Lee swinging at a slider, Cousins’ best pitch, before walking Miguel Vargas to load the bases. Pinch hitter Nicky Lopez flied to short center and Cousins fanned Baldwin on a slider to allow the Yankees to exhale.

Judge, trying to become the fastest player in terms of number of games to reach 300 homers, went 2-for-3 with two walks, bumping his batting average to .332 and OPS to 1.165.

Despite Soto’s outburst and Cortes’ excellence, the day’s most significant Yankees headline came before the game regarding Chisholm.

Boone did not offer specifics on what the MRI showed, saying the club wanted multiple doctors to evaluate the imaging.

Could the injury be a tear that would require season-ending surgery?

“I hope not,” Boone said. “We’ll see. We’ll see the extent of it and what the next several days are like, but I don’t know that yet.”

Chisholm started his first game as a Yankee in centerfield but has played primarily at third base, a position the 26-year-old had never played in his professional career — at any level — before doing so for the Yankees on July 29 in Philadelphia.

He had adapted more than adequately and has been a force in the lineup, as well, his lefty bat producing a .316 batting average, seven homers and a 1.062 OPS in 14 games.