As long as Robin Ventura and Mike Sirotka showed up, it almost didn’t matter whether the rest of the White Sox or too many fans showed up Friday at a chilly Comiskey Park.
A crowd of 13,563 saw a 3-0 Sox victory that included Ventura posting his second four-hit game in eight days against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and take away three hits with his glove.
Sirotka made up for a six-run thrashing he suffered in his last outing at Texas by shutting out the Devil Rays and their league-leading .341 average on four hits through eight innings.
The left-hander, who was allowed to throw only 92 pitches before giving way to Matt Karchner for the ninth, struck out a career-high eight batters, retired the last seven men he faced and allowed no Tampa Bay runner past second base.
He tried briefly and unsuccessfully to talk manager Jerry Manuel into letting him finish what would have been his first major-league complete game.
“(A complete game) would have been nice, but hopefully in the long run it’ll be better,” said Sirotka, who had not thrown more than 90 pitches the last several weeks.
“I thought I could have done it, but it’s OK I didn’t.”
Second was a reach for Tampa Bay. It was the average for Ventura every time he got a bat in his hands.
The Sox third baseman tripled and scored in the second to end an 0-for-13 stretch, doubled and scored in the fourth and doubled in the fifth, then finished with a single in the eighth. All four of his hits were off lefties.
“I wasn’t seeing the ball very well when we got home,” said Ventura, who moved into eighth place on the Sox’s extra-base hits list with 352. “To go through an 0-13 streak, I was bound to break out of it.”
