It is not yet time to stop taking the daily White Sox temperature, though a few more four-hour losses and it will matter to few whether Albert Belle is sulking or Frank Thomas is flinching. The whole bunch of them can go back to the hush of indifference.
“You don’t win too many games giving up 15 runs,” manager Terry Bevington said, combining understatement with quick math.
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And yet, there stood the tying run in the on-deck circle Saturday in the person of Belle as Thomas took on ball four and turned it into a game-ending groundout against the Detroit Tigers.
“When you score 12, you feel pretty good about your chances,” Bevington said, combining a grasp of the obvious with a flair for the conspicuous.
And when you lose 15-12, you’ve usually missed a field goal or a two-point conversion.
It was not just one of those days, it was another one of those days, and there have only been four of them so far, though this one came with a severe-weather warning, winds up to 70 m.p.h.
“I expected somebody’s car to go flying past,” Chris Snopek said.
The P.A. announcer advised fans to be ready to dash into the concourses for protection.
He might have advised them to hide in Snopek’s glove. Nothing ever gets in there.
Despite another error at third, Snopek was allotted play of the game for a bases-clearing double in the fourth inning, a contribution lost in the general addition.
“A wacky day,” Snopek said.
This is how wacky. Starting Sox pitcher Doug Drabek gave up nine runs in four innings and was taking compliments later.
“Of their nine hits,” Bevington advised, “five were ground balls.”
“If you are making the pitches you want to be making and they are still getting hits,” Drabek said, “it is better than them making hits from pitches you don’t want to be making.”
Lewis Carroll could not have said it better.
Best pitching work of the day was from 41-year-old Danny Darwin, who, unlike Charles Darwin, did not write but actually is the origin of the species.
And wackier still is the production from the last two batters in the Sox order, as far from fear as it is possible to get, even in a league with the designated hitter.
Ron Karkovice’s home run trot needs a little work. He circles the bases like he’s trying not to step in something, an apology in motion. And this is a man who is on pace to hit 81 home runs this year.
Ozzie Guillen, likewise. He might try showing a little less astonishment and a little more assurance when the baseball lands 390 feet from home plate.
Forget Thomas Belle or Frankie Albert, however morphed into one back-to-back menace is all that expensive Sox muscle.
We offer instead Kark and Ozzie. The KO boys. Batting eighth and ninth in the order.
“So far, we’ve gotten some big hits,” Karkovice conceded.
More bases each in one inning than Thomas in his first 36. Until a superfluous seventh-inning double in the Sox’s interminable loss to Detroit, you could have added all of Thomas’ bases together for the season and he would have been standing on third.
As for Belle, the other half of the hero sandwich, he managed to make Tiger pitching look like it had just arrived from Atlanta.
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“Frank and Albert will get it rolling, and this should be a lot of fun,” Karkovice said.
This is not the formula to make the Sox more consequence than promise and not the sort of epic exploits needed to fill the other half of Comiskey Park.
It is wacky when the biggest cheer of the day is for the sun, which, like the Sox, shone too briefly. Both will be back, but I am only guessing.