They got George Bell, the White Sox said, mostly because they wanted a No. 5 hitter to protect Frank Thomas.
Hitters sympathize. Important?
”I think it is,” Kirby Puckett of the world champion Minnesota Twins said Tuesday. ”I mean, Frank-what did he walk last year?”
Answer: 138. But the real question: Did he walk that many times because there was nobody there behind him? No, said the Twins` Kevin Tapani.
And Tapani said he wouldn`t work Frank Thomas differently simply because of who`s on deck.
”I don`t think too many guys do,” Tapani said. ”There`s a couple of guys who don`t throw the ball around the plate, but I don`t think people pitch around Frank Thomas. He`s just got a good eye.
”Kind of like Chili (Davis). Look at all the walks Chili had.”
Davis had 95, which is a lot.
”You had Herbie (Kent Hrbek) behind him,” Tapani said. ”People weren`t pitching around Chili to get to someone else.”
Reliever Rick Aguilera agreed. Bell would make no difference, not to him. ”There`s times, if you were a starting pitcher and you find yourself in a jam and there`s a weak hitter behind Thomas, you would probably do that,”
Aguilera said of pitching around him.
”But that wasn`t the case last year. They had a quality lineup, one through nine.”
