A fast Cub came charging down the third-base line. In his way was every baseball player’s friend, A.J. Pierzynski, waiting at home plate for the White Sox.
Wham.
Juan Pierre, you missed your chance.
You could have run right over the catcher.
The ball might have gone flying out of Pierzynski’s glove so he couldn’t tag you with it.
Or Pierzynski himself might have gone flying while you happily slapped home plate with your hand.
Or, because he outweighs you, Juan, you could have been the one to go flying, like Jack “Nacho Libre” Black, out of a wrestling ring.
However it turned out, what a wild Wrigley Field moment that would have been.
I would have paid to see it. A crowd of 40,720 did pay to see Friday’s game on Chicago baseball’s poor side of town.
A moment like that might have sent the whole place up for grabs.
Pierre missed his chance, however, and so did the Cubs–yes, again.
It is only July 1, but this loss was the Cubs’ 50th of the season. Since May 1, their record is a ridiculous 15-40.
They now are halfway to the humiliation of a 100-loss season. No move, no trade, no motivational speech, no managerial change, no miracle seems plausible enough to pull the Cubs out of this ridiculous three-month funk.
So desperate are the Cubs for anything to feel upbeat about they are beginning to sound glad simply to be able to give the White Sox a game.
“We didn’t roll over,” Pierre said at his locker after the 6-2 loss. “Early in the season we would have just rolled over and taken our beating.”
That’s why if Pierre perhaps would have come running full speed into Pierzynski and flattened him, the Cubs might have at least had some fun.
Instead, in the seventh inning, after Andre Dawson sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and urged the Cubs to get some runs, Pierre tried to slide around the Sox catcher and was called out.
It was close, very close.
“I thought I got in there,” Pierre said. “It probably could have gone either way.”
A run there might have served as a wake-up call for the Cubs, cutting their deficit to 4-3 with Todd Walker on base and Derrek Lee up next.
It also might have awakened Dusty Baker, who sat Sphinx-like in the Cubs’ dugout. He didn’t bother to come out and let umpire Mike Reilly know that perhaps Pierre beat the tag.
I guess it was a day of peace and love in Wrigleyville, beginning with Iron Mike Barrett apologizing to Pierzynski for May’s love tap to the cheek.
An appreciative Pierzynski said, “It takes a man to come up and say what he said.”
Just as it took a man to turn the other cheek in the fifth inning, when Pierzynski didn’t bat an eye after Cubs rookie Sean Marshall plunked him with a pitch.
There were plenty of opportunities for mayhem in Game 1 of this series and that was one of them. Luckily, I think everybody on both sides realized that Pierzynski leads the Sox (here’s a big surprise) in getting hit by a pitch.
So nothing came of it.
Nothing came of Pierre’s three hits either. I thought he might get an inside-the-park home run when his triple got by a diving Scott Podsednik, but the ball didn’t exactly speed its way to the left-field wall.
“That’s the Wrigley Field grass for you,” Pierre said.
The game came to an end with Sox shortstop Juan Uribe providing an encore of the play that ended the World Series. Uribe got to a ground ball near second base in time to throw to Konerko and retire Walker for the final out.
Everything for the Sox seems to be going the same way it has since last year.
The same cannot be said of the Cubs.
They are so out of it, they no longer seem to have enough strength left to knock anybody down.
———-
mikedowney@tribune.com
