The Boston Red Sox desperately wanted to send this message Wednesday night in Game 2 of the American League Division Series: It wasn’t going to be as ridiculously easy as the White Sox made it look in their 14-2 Game 1 victory.
It wasn’t. The White Sox had to rally from a 4-0 deficit, and they did, taking an imposing 2-0 lead in the best-of-five series with a taut 5-4 triumph in Game 2 before a disbelieving sellout crowd of 40,799 at U.S. Cellular Field.
Japanese import Tadahito Iguchi clubbed a three-run home run to cap a five-run fifth-inning after ex-White Sox Tony Graffanino made a costly one-out error. That meant defeat for old friend David Wells and a win for Mark Buehrle.
Bobby Jenks, the husky 24-year-old rookie, saved it with two innings of cold-blooded, scoreless relief.
The crowd, again, was hopelessly into it on each pitch, and when shortstop Juan Uribe gloved Edgar Renteria’s bouncer and flipped it to first for the final out, the roar was audible in far suburban Mokena.
Wells, a 42-year-old with a beer leaguer’s body and a sturdy left arm, earned enduring enmity on the South Side in his lone season with the White Sox in 2001, dismissed as a disloyal slacker who questioned Frank Thomas’ want-to and then appeared in only 19 games himself, never mind that the back injury that limited his workload eventually required surgery.
He has since won 63 games for three teams and showed that form in blanking the White Sox on 48 pitches through four innings. But it came apart on him in the fifth, and the “na-na-hey-hey” chant that accompanied his departure in the seventh was simply gleeful.
So it’s on to Boston, where Red Sox Nation clings to the memory of the Olde Towne team coming from 0-3 down to the Yankees in last year’s ALCS. But this is not a well-armed Red Sox squad, and the White Sox know it.
