Baseball isn’t played with mulligans. If it were, Ozzie Guillen surely would have called for a pitchout on that 0-1 offering to Ryan Theriot in the ninth inning Saturday.
If not a pitchout, the next best option for the White Sox would have been one of those snappy curveballs from Bobby Jenks. That was the last pitch Theriot wanted to have to try to bunt with Angel Pagan speeding down from third base, unprotected.
But Theriot got a fastball and did his job, bunting it back to Jenks for a perfectly executed suicide squeeze. It gave the Cubs a well-played 2-1 victory in fitting fashion.
It has been the contributions of unproven guys like Theriot, Pagan, Felix Pie and Mike Fontenot that have set them on a better course than the unraveling White Sox.
Saturday at U.S. Cellular Field, the Sox manager must have wondered if the Cubs were using a 30-man roster while he could count all his options with the fingers on one hand.
Cubs manager Lou Piniella went to his bullpen early and often, getting nine strong innings without even using his closer — Ryan Dempster wasn’t available because of a strained oblique.
He scratched Mark DeRosa from the starting lineup and still had so many parts available that, in a game played with the designated hitter for the second day in a row, he didn’t deem it necessary to get Jacque Jones to the plate.
Guillen welcomed back left fielder Scott Podsednik but still felt as if he were managing while wearing a straitjacket, in large part because Jermaine Dye was unavailable and the other bench choices were uninviting.
“I wanted to pinch run a couple of times, pinch hit a couple of times,” Guillen said afterward. “I didn’t do it. I only had one guy left, [Alex] Cintron.”
For White Sox fans, it must be staggering how the balance of power has swung back toward the Cubs in a little more than a year.
When the City Series came to U.S. Cellular last May, it was, in the words of Comcast’s Dan Plesac, “men against boys.”
Rich Hill, who kept the White Sox from awakening Saturday, was beaten around by a lineup that not only included two key guys currently missing because of injury, Joe Crede and Dye, but had Paul Konerko hitting .312, A.J. Pierzynski at .336 and even Tadahito Iguchi batting .314.
The Cubs, meanwhile, used the DH rule to get the likes of Henry Blanco, Todd Walker (hitting third, no less) and John Mabry into the lineup.
Now it’s the Cubs who seem to have parts to spare.
The difference between guys like Derrek Lee, Aramis Ramirez and Alfonso Soriano playing confidently and what the Sox are getting from Konerko, Dye and Crede accounts for most of the difference in perception. But it’s also significant that the Cubs have become the team in town where newcomers can fit in.
Piniella says his is a team “in a little bit of transition,” and you wonder if that’s such a bad thing. Guys like Pie, Theriot, Fontenot and Pagan not only know there are jobs to be won but don’t have the burden of being monitored by insecure veterans or the pressure of having to fill anyone else’s shoes, as Jeromy Burnitz did when he replaced Sammy Sosa two years ago.
“It’s a pretty comfortable clubhouse,” Theriot said. “We have a good mix of veteran guys and guys just getting started [in the major leagues]. It helps that a lot of us know each other real well, have played on teams together. I’ve played with Felix like, forever. … And Soriano has done a good job helping Felix play well.”
It’s a much different world for White Sox newcomers. They’re surrounded by guys who won a World Series together and now see the window to get back for a second one being slammed on their fingers. The pressure that is put on them, or that they put on themselves, is greater.
That’s one explanation for the huge crowd around the Mendoza Line, anyway. The other is that they simply aren’t very good players.
Between them, Andy Gonzalez, Ryan Sweeney, Brian Anderson and Jerry Owens have split 144 at-bats this year. They’ve delivered exactly one home run (Sweeney) and six RBIs.
Theriot says baseball is “a game of failure,” and these guys are proving it.
Owens, a former Double-A batting champ, was sent back to Triple-A Charlotte on Wednesday after 53 at-bats and zero runs driven in. Gonzalez has one RBI in 29 at-bats.
Gonzalez filled in for Dye in right field Saturday, going 0-for-3 with two strikeouts. Has any hitter ever gotten such regular playing time while being so anonymous? The guy was hitting only .242 when he was promoted from Charlotte.
Guillen was asked late Saturday afternoon if he knew what player he would like to add if Dye has to go on the disabled list. He shrugged off the question, but a good answer might have been Alex Rodriguez, or Magglio Ordonez, or maybe Carlos Beltran.
———-
progers@tribune.com
