Gavin Floyd figured out a way to win a game, even with the anemic White Sox offense behind him:
Pitch 8 1/3 innings of no-hit ball.
Floyd flirted with a no-hitter for a second time this season, not allowing the Twins a hit until Joe Mauer’s double with one out in the ninth inning of Tuesday night’s 7-1 victory that broke a six-game losing streak and pulled the Sox back within one game of first place.
On April 12, Floyd no-hit the Tigers for 7 1/3 innings and was removed from the game immediately. He left after 81/3 this time, but unlike the first time he already had allowed a run when the Twins scored a fourth-inning run on a walk, an error and a sacrifice fly.
After Mauer’s hit eluded Nick Swisher’s desperation in left-center field, the 23,480 fans at U.S. Cellular Field cheered wildly and manager Ozzie Guillen walked out to remove Floyd and let Bobby Jenks close things out.
Floyd didn’t dominate from the beginning, walking back-to-back hitters in the first inning, then limiting the damage with two straight fielder’s-choice ground outs.
The best defensive play came on the last out of the fifth inning when shortstop Orlando Cabrera gloved Carlos Gomez’s grounder behind second base and fired to first base.
Meanwhile, Sox hitters awoke from a weeklong slumber.
By the fourth inning, the Sox had scored three runs, as many as in nine innings of any of their previous six games, all of them losses.
In fact, they scored twice in the first inning alone, and even put the first two men on base when Cabrera walked and Carlos Quentin singled. Both of them scored, one on Jermaine Dye’s single and the other on an error.
When the Sox scored another run in the fourth, that rally also started with a walk. It was Dye this time, who went to second on A. J. Pierzynski’s first hit in 15 at-bats and scored on Juan Uribe’s single.
Dye then made it 4-1 with a leadoff homer in the sixth inning, giving the Sox a league-high 28 solos for the season. Fifteen of the last 16 Sox homers have come with the bases empty.
Quentin, batting second for the second straight game, drove in two more runs in the seventh inning.
The offensive woes — the Sox had hit just .189 over their previous 10 games that included an 0-6 road trip — prompted calls for a change in personnel, most notably the head of hitting coach Greg Walker.
“We don’t need [new] hitters, we don’t need a [new] hitting coach, we just need to swing at better pitches,” Guillen said. “That’s all we have to do.”
Guillen was asked if the Sox could use the new look that speedy leadoff hitter Jerry Owens might provide.
“We don’t know yet,” he said. “We talked about it. … Is Jerry Owens the one to solve our problems? Maybe.”
“Once Jerry Owens gets a few more at-bats underneath him,” GM Ken Williams said, “we can slide him into the mix in some way, shape or form and then Ozzie has another weapon to use. But you’ve got to understand Jerry didn’t have much of a spring training, so you don’t want to bring someone up too soon and then if he’s not playing every day, he loses his stroke.”
And what about other changes?
“Over lunch, I asked Ozzie a very simple question,” Williams said. “What kind of team do you have, what do you think you have, what to you think you need to win this thing? He said: ‘I think we can win this thing with what we have. We just need to play better on both sides of the ball and pick up the pace defensively as well.'”
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dvandyck@tribune.com
