Sorry, Ernie. What a crummy day for baseball. Let’s play none.
And I caught the early plane back from Newark for this.
A columnist’s whim, like the last thought before the hangover, can seem like a good idea at the time. Playing two in Chicago, day-night, crosstown, Sox first, then Cubs, Ripken and Thomas, Wood versus McGwire.
Carpe diem. Anything is possible if you skip sleep and are willing to pay the airline ticket change fee.
Five active players have hit 50 home runs in a season, and three of them are in Chicago on the same day. Albert Belle, Brady Anderson, Mark McGwire. (The other two are Cecil Fielder and somebody named Griffey).
This is like finding the whole box of mints on your pillow, or to give the metaphor the proper muscle, the whole box of lug nuts.
And this day’s particular frill is that McGwire will face the Cubs’ much admired young pitcher, Kerry Wood, a meeting fraught with wonder, nothing quite like it at Wrigley Field since . . . well, not since any kid pitcher has come to the Cubs.
Dwight Gooden does come to mind against Ryne Sandberg, but that is backwards to the point, never mind that Sandberg never knocked a chunk out of a building across Waveland Avenue with a batted ball as McGwire has.
But first, the Sox.
I am in time for the game, but too late to catch Belle in batting practice. This is when Belle is most at his ease. There is no noise quite as indelible as the sound of the ball when it gets all of Belle’s bat.
Even McGwire cannot wrench as much sweet, raw protest from both wood and hide. And Belle is being Belle, finally. The night before Belle hit the longest home run at Comiskey this season, 421 feet, only about 60 feet shorter than where McGwire hit one last year.
No such thing with Anderson, who, unlike Belle, has measurable disabilities as alibis. In fact, instead of Anderson, I see his chart: “sternoclavicular joint strain coupled with muscle strain in right neck and trapezius area.”
Anderson has a right neck and a left neck? Singles hitters only have one neck. The point is, there is no Anderson, and only minimum Belle, though Belle does go double, single and drives in the only Sox run in a 4-1 loss to Baltimore.
I leave Comiskey for Wrigley not with that impression, but with this one: While Sox players are in their clubhouse playing video games, the greatest Oriole of them all, Cal Ripken Jr., is signing autographs for Chicagoans for 20 minutes beside the Baltimore dugout. And Sox management wonders why fans don’t like this team.
The weather waits at Wrigley. Mark Grace examines the wretched sky leaking all over the Friendly Confines.
“I was supposed to hit at 5:05,” he says.
Yes, I tell Grace, that’s why I’m here early. To see you take BP.
“Sure,” Grace says, “and that is why all those folks are on top of those houses over there.”
Grace motions beyond right field. All the roofs are empty.
Had there been batting practice, roofs would have been clogged for McGwire, and the street beyond left field would have been clogged with kids with gloves, anticipating souvenirs.
McGwire is a show just warming up. Everybody gawks.
“It’s kind of like that slam-dunk contest in an NBA All-Star Game,” says Cubs manager Jim Riggleman.
The Cubs game is delayed for 2 hours 17 minutes by rain, or just about the same amount of time it took the Sox to lose. So, on the clock at least, it has been possible to play three.
It is the latest any game has ever started at Wrigley Field.
Wood finally faces McGwire for the first time, already a run down, with one on and no outs. Wood fires three straight pitches, all on the outside corner. McGwire flinches back from each of them, never getting the bat off his shoulder and is called out on strikes.
More than eight hours have passed since the first pitch at Comiskey Park. Dinner is cold.
