Friday night’s game began at the customary convenience store time of 7:11.
By 7:15 p.m., the White Sox were already down a run.
Within 20 minutes, their own fans were booing them.
Television cameras zoomed in on a man in the stands, still in mourning from a three-dog-night Minnesota fiasco. His sign read: “I Cried Myself to Sleep Last Night.”
He wasn’t alone. The sagging Sox were in a mess. Something had begun to smell at the Cell.
Before 8:30 rolled around, the Cleveland Indians were battering the Sox, who were getting booed in every corner of the park. When their wild pitchers weren’t hitting batters, they were giving up 400-foot grand slams.
A sarcastic cheer went up when a Sox pitcher got somebody out. Six runs already had crossed the plate in that fifth inning.
Remembering that this is a team that spent 147 days in first place wasn’t easy to do with all of this booing going on. And repeating the old “it ain’t over till it’s over” maxim does get a little more difficult with each passing day.
On this last weekend of September, though, the White Sox do indeed still have a chance to go to the playoffs.
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But that debacle in the Twin Cities did seem to take its toll on everybody.
A studious-looking Ozzie Guillen, wearing a pair of Sarah Palin-style eyeglasses before the game, said that compared to the Twins, his guys “looked like an over-50 softball team.”
Was the end in sight … the 2008 campaign over?
Not quite yet.
Before the hour of 8 o’clock had struck, the Sox’s situation had become a little less hopeless. Paul Konerko homered in the second. A.J. Pierzynski did the same. A 2-0 Indians advantage vanished in a four-run Sox uprising — four runs these guys could have absolutely killed for in Minnesota.
And speaking of the Twins, a “4” went up on Kansas City’s side of the scoreboard at 7:55. This, too, brightened the Cell’s mood. It gave hope to those who wept over the way the Sox-Twins series went.
Everything would need to go right, though.
“We have to pick up the pieces,” Nick Swisher had put it before starting in left field. “Because some of the pieces fell off.”
To recover, the Sox would have to have the Royals do what the Sox couldn’t … beat the Twins in the Twin Cities. And they would have to do well against Cleveland, which is no pushover.
A lucky break could come Sunday in not having to face 22-game winner Cliff Lee and having the Indians send out the lifetime winless Bryan Burlington instead.
But even then, the Sox might need to stay alive long enough to beat 2005 World Series hero Freddy Garcia and the Detroit Tigers in a makeup game Monday afternoon, a one-day virtual playoff.
“I would love to see Freddy Garcia,” Sox general manager Ken Williams said.
For old times’ sake?
“No, because it would mean our season is still going.”
Williams scarcely could believe that his Sox couldn’t even play .500 ball on a 10-game road trip. That’s all it likely would have taken to have this playoff thing in the bag by now.
He and Guillen had to endure bat stats for players like these on the trip instead: Jermaine Dye (6-for-38), Ken Griffey Jr. (6-for-25), Jim Thome (7-for-31), Konerko (5-for-31), Pierzynski (6-for-33), Alexei Ramirez (8-for-34), Juan Uribe (8-for-30), Dewayne Wise (5-for-33) and Swisher (3-for-15).
A top-to-bottom flameout.
“I look up at that scoreboard up there [in Minnesota], and what do I see for the last 10 days?” Guillen said. “Their guys: Mauer .400, Morneau .390, Punto .375, whatever. And what are the White Sox guys? They’re like .175, .150 … “
No doubt about it, it hurt to lose Carlos Quentin and Joe Crede. More than one pitcher on this team has been injured as well.
But that was no excuse for going 0-for-Minnesota.
“We can still control our own fate,” Konerko said. “Everybody’s capable of doing something good.”
You wouldn’t know it Friday night from all those boos.
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