The unusual happened Monday afternoon in the White Sox`s 6-1 loss to Toronto.
Tom Seaver made an error, Harold Baines didn`t play, a Blue Jay left-hander won a complete game and more than 40,000 fans showed up at Exhibition Stadium.
But not everything that happened was unusual.
Toronto`s Jesse Barfield continued to hammer Sox pitching, and the Sox`s Ron Kittle, starting in left field, failed to reach a ball that some other left-fielders would have caught.
Now for some details:
The error by Seaver (4-2), the Sox`s starter and loser, was his first in 44 games with the Sox and led to the Blue Jays` first three runs.
An upset stomach forced Baines to sit out, breaking his string of 55 straight starts.
Jimmy Key became the first Toronto left-hander to win a complete game since 1980, when Paul Mirabella beat Boston at Fenway Park. Changing speeds nicely, Key (3-2) held the Sox to just four hits and lowered his league-leading earned-run average to 1.96.
Canadian fans showed an interest in a sport where the only ice is what`s in their drinks. The Victoria Day crowd of 44,715 was the second largest at a Jays` home game in the franchise`s nine-year history. The all-time high is 45,102, set in August of 1983.
So much for the unusual. In a more typical vein, Joliet`s Barfield knocked in three runs, two on a second-inning homer off Seaver. His career totals against the Sox now look like this: 9 homers, 30 RBIs and a .311 average.
Then there was Kittle. His limited speed kept him from reaching George Bell`s two-out, third-inning fly ball near the left-field line. The ball dropped for an RBI single, capping a two-run inning that raised the Jays` lead to 5-0.
”Rudy Law or Luis Salazar make the catch,” Sox manager Tony LaRussa said of Bell`s fly. ”You need a good play to get the ball. Kittle will make the routine play in left, but his speed wasn`t enough to make this play.”
At least everything happened so fast you had no time to take a nap, as you do in some Sox games. This 2-hour 12-minute sprint, the Sox`s fastest game of the season, turned back the clock to memories of how baseball once was played.
If Seaver could only have turned back the clock, some of the pitches he put down the middle Monday might not have hurt him. But, at 40, he has to succeed with location and movement and can`t rely on overpowering the batters. ”Those days are gone,” he said. ”Maybe 10 years, eight years ago, I might have gotten away with pitches like that. But I made a bad mistake by putting two pitches down the middle, and they scored three runs off that in the second inning.”
With two outs in that inning, Seaver dropped first baseman Greg Walker`s throw for an error, allowing Len Matuszek to reach base. Then came the mistake pitches: Ernie Whitt hit a change-up for a run-scoring double and Barfield ripped a fastball for his eighth homer of the season.
Seaver blamed the fielding error on a late start off the mound. ”I didn`t break quick enough to get to first like I should, and when I got there for the catch, I was running on my heels and my hips were bouncing wrong and the ball bounced off my glove fingers. Walker made a great play getting the ball, and I messed it up.”
Walker had a good all-around performance. He not only dived to his left to field Matuszek`s ball, but his two-out, sixth-inning homer to left-center kept the Sox from enduring their first 1985 shutout. The homer was his sixth of the year but only his first off a left-hander.
LaRussa thought Seaver hadn`t possessed such a ”live” arm all season. But after Matuszek`s one-out single in the sixth, LaRussa went to reliever Bob Fallon. The final run of the six charged to Seaver scored because Fallon gave up Whitt`s third hit of the game–a single–and Barfield`s sacrifice fly.
LaRussa had to open with an outfield set-up he preferred not to have. Because Baines was scratched shortly before game time, LaRussa sent Tom Paciorek from first base to right field and moved Walker from the bench to first.
On an artificial surface, LaRussa said, he`d rather not start Kittle and Paciorek in the same outfield because of their limited speed. But he played the two right-handed hitters to go with the percentages against a lefty.
