The White Sox lost another game Friday night, but they may have taken over the league lead in team meetings.
Manager Jerry Manuel held a 45-minute meeting with his players after a 7-0 defeat at the hands of the Cleveland Indians.
“I just didn’t like our effort,” Manuel said. “We’ve played good baseball, but we have to bounce back and play with a little more intensity.”
Bartolo Colon (7-3) scattered eight hits while shutting out the Sox, leaving them only two games above .500 (28-26) for the first time since April 15. Sox starter Gary Glover gave up four runs in the second inning, leading to their season-high fifth straight loss and the postgame clear-the-air session. The players had one in Boston last week without Manuel.
“It was something that has been building, and we addressed it,” Paul Konerko said. “It’s stuff that you can control. It’s attitude, the mental part. There probably are teams out there that don’t have the talent we do that have [the attitude]. And we’re sitting here with the talent and not having that sometimes. That’s unforgivable.”
Playing without leadoff man Kenny Lofton, who sat out with inflammation in his right rotator cuff, the Sox offense was nonexistent against Colon. The Sox grounded into three inning-ending double plays in the first five innings and barely managed to lift the ball out of the infield. Colon recorded 21 of the 27 outs on either ground balls, strikeouts or infield popups and still was throwing 98 m.p.h. after 120 pitches in the ninth.
“We lost to [Roger] Clemens and Colon the last two games,” Frank Thomas said. “Those two will shut down any offense.”
The Sox continue to get little help from the No. 5 starter’s slot. Glover and Jon Rauch are 0-3 with a 9.35 earned-run average in their nine combined starts. Glover will keep his spot in the rotation for now.
“We really don’t have many other options,” Manuel said.
Glover put the Sox behind the eight-ball in the second, yielding four runs on six hits. Jim Thome led off with a 454-foot homer to center, followed by a Travis Fryman double, an RBI infield hit by Einar Diaz and run-scoring doubles by Chris Magruder and Matt Lawton. The extra-base hits by Thome, Fryman, Magruder and Lawton all came with two strikes.
No one stirred in the Sox bullpen until Glover put the first two men on in the third, trailing 4-0. It marked the fourth time in the last 10 games that a Sox starter had put the game out of reach early. The Sox trailed Boston 5-0 after three innings on May 20 with Todd Ritchie on the mound. They trailed Detroit 6-0 in the fourth last Sunday with Ritchie pitching again and trailed the Yankees 6-0 in the first on Monday with Dan Wright as the starter.
The Sox looked like were dozing off at times Friday night.
“Anytime you come off emotional games, sometimes that can happen,” Manuel said. “But if you have a good team, you can’t let that happen. I think we have a good team, so we addressed that.”
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WHITE SOX LEADERS
CAREER BATTING AVERAGE
PLAYER AVG PA
Joe Jackson .340 2797
Eddie Collins .331 7405
Carl Reynolds .322 2024
Frank Thomas .319 6877
Zeke Bonura .317 2375
Bibb Falk .315 4379
Taffy Wright .312 2981
Luke Appling .310 10243
Rip Radcliff .310 3027
SINGLE-SEASON ON-BASE
PLAYER OBP YEAR
Thomas .487 1994
Appling .474 1936
Collins .461 1925
Collins .460 1915
Thomas .459 1996
Thomas .456 1997
Collins .455 1923
Thomas .454 1995
Thomas .453 1991
PA: plate appearances.
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