The White Sox treated Thursday’s game against the Cubs as if it were the annual visit to the wacky in-laws. They made sure they spent as little time as possible inside the Friendly Confines.
The Sox’s team bus pulled up on Sheffield Avenue a little more than an hour before game time, with the players and coaching staff in full uniform and ready to go. About a half-hour after the 5-1 loss, the Sox made the 8.1-mile trek back to Comiskey Park wearing the same dirty uniforms.
Because no one was wearing the sweet smell of success, manager Jerry Manuel joked that the more pungent Sox players would be riding home on the second bus.
“The good-smelling guys will be on the first bus,” he said.
So do the Sox dislike Wrigley Field so much that they couldn’t stand to spend a few extra minutes taking showers there?
“No,” Manuel insisted. “I like Wrigley Field.”
Manuel said the Sox came to Wrigley in full uniform because they decided to work out at Comiskey Park before the game. He compared it to a high school team on a Friday night going across town to play its archrival. The Sox not only avoided abusive Cubs fans but also the awaiting media horde.
“We only have the visiting field for 40 minutes [before the game],” Manuel said, “and after three days off, we needed more than 40 minutes to get ourselves back to playing good hard, solid baseball. We won’t do that [Friday]. We’ll come here as visitors. Because of the [All-Star] break, we can’t have a mandatory workout, so we felt that we’d take advantage of the fact we’re at home and use our facilities.”
It didn’t work out as planned, in keeping with the Sox’s season as a whole. They finished with only six hits off Jason Bere and three relievers, and they drew only one walk.
The play that typified the game, if not the season, occurred in the fourth inning with Chris Singleton on first and one out. When Magglio Ordonez grounded out to Cubs third baseman Ron Coomer, Singleton tried to catch first baseman Matt Stairs napping by continuing to third. Shortstop Ricky Gutierrez moved over to third to take Stairs’ throw and Singleton was an easy out.
“I thought I’d have a chance with Coomer coming in like that, that no one would be over at third,” Singleton said. “Gutierrez did a good job of getting over to third. A play like that, the first baseman doesn’t make a lot of throws in a ballgame. It would’ve been good if he’d bounced it or thrown it away to give us a little lift.
“As you can tell, we’re kind of having a hard time with guys in scoring position. Typically, it’s not what you want to do, but sometimes you’re aggressiveness gets the best of you.”
Singleton added some drama to the cross-town series with a hard slide into Gutierrez, only an inning after Eric Young had made a similarly hard slide into Sox shortstop Royce Clayton on a stolen base.
Although the Cubs were upset with the slide and the umpires warned Manuel and Sox pitcher Kip Wells not to retaliate, the Sox played it down as “part of baseball.”
“It’s like a hard foul in the NBA,” Manuel said. “You give a hard foul to someone coming down the lane and the opposition does the same thing. That’s kind of what he did.”
Manuel doesn’t believe the play will lead to any shenanigans in the final two games of the series.
“[The players] work those things out among themselves,” Manuel said. “We’d like to win the ballgame more than anything. We don’t like to make the third out at third base, either, but that’s something that happened. I don’t think it will be a carryover for the next couple of days.”
