Everybody is extremely excited about the White Sox living to play another day.
“Talk to you a minute?” Orlando Cabrera was asked after Sunday’s win-or-die-trying game as soon as a Spanish-speaking TV crew was done with him.
“No,” he said and walked away.
Short and sweet, that’s our shortstop. He’s kind of like Ernie Banks in his own way. Always a delight. OK, O.C., see you Monday … and maybe Tuesday … and, hey, how about Thursday in Tampa Bay?
Let’s play three!
Sunday could have been Cabrera’s last day in a Chicago uniform. Could have been Ken Griffey Jr.’s too. Could have been no tomorrow for quite a few of these Sox if they hadn’t beaten Cleveland 5-1.
“Did I think about that?” Griffey asked. “No. You just go out there and you play baseball.”
Good plan, Junior.
So let’s do it again. Bring on the Tigers next for U.S. Cellular’s new-caller-every-24-hours plan. Cleveland one day, Detroit the next day, Minnesota a day after … line ’em up, and let’s see if the Sox can knock ’em down.
I bet those Tigers must be overjoyed to come here Monday to play Game 162.
“No, they’re basically [ticked] off they’ve got to come here,” Sox first baseman Paul Konerko said.
Going for the bad guys, hey, look — it’s none other than White Sox 2005 World Series hero Freddy Garcia.
“Get Ready for Freddy,” fellow Venezuelan and old Chicago manager Ozzie Guillen dubbed it, like Don King giving a nickname to a fight.
Freddy and Ozzie are still as close as Felix and Oscar. So close that somebody asked Guillen if Garcia might be an overnight guest Sunday at the Sox manager’s house.
“Who knows? Maybe,” Guillen answered, but I assume he was kidding, since Major League Baseball might frown on such an arrangement before a big game.
It would be weird if an entire Sox season boiled down to being ready for Freddy.
After all, who came through Sunday when the South Siders needed them most? Why, it was your 2005 World Series heroes themselves.
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Mark Buehrle pitched his heart out. A.J. Pierzynski caught him and delivered a key hit. Juan Uribe knocked in a run. Jermaine Dye drove home a pair. Konerko clubbed his fourth homer in three days. Bobby Jenks sealed the deal.
Felt like old times.
“Things happen for a reason,” Pierzynski said. “Those are guys we count on, but we count on all of our guys. We’re going to find out what this team is made of.”
For a week or more, what the Sox were made of was unprintable for this newspaper.
Heroes didn’t step up. Pitchers gave up 30 runs in three days. Hitters couldn’t get clutch hits or even lay down bunts. Big leads were blown. The whole season was nearly blown.
“You run into slumps here and there,” Dye said. “We happened to run into ours in the last week of the year.”
Relief pitcher Matt Thornton set down the Indians 1-2-3 in the eighth, and Jenks allowed a harmless single in the ninth. But other innings hadn’t gone so smoothly in previous games.
“We stretched it as far as you can go,” Thornton said. “That was a rough five-game stretch … or 10-game, or whatever it was.”
Felt like 20.
Tortured fans wondered where their team had gone. Why the hits had stopped dropping. What had made their sweet White Sox go so sour.
In the clubhouse a few hours before the make-or-break game, Konerko tried to come up with a reason for a good team to go so bad. He couldn’t.
“Not that it can’t happen to anybody,” Konerko said. “It’s just the timing of it. I think teams go through stretches similar to this where everything just falls apart. It’s a shame that ours had to happen in the last week.”
Were he and the guys worried? Would they play 51/2 months of good ball only to go out a joke?
“I can tell you we’re not tight,” Konerko said.
They sure didn’t look it. A country-music station blasted happy tunes. Jenks and John Danks played a baseball video game. Dye fraternized with a couple of friends from the Indians.
And when game-day starter Buehrle strolled in, Pierzynski greeted him with: “Come on in. We’re all waiting for you.”
Nope, no one sounded too worried.
“We have guys in this room who have played in World Series games,” Konerko explained. “This is nothing compared to that.”
Besides, the right guy was on the mound.
“Mark is Mark,” said Dye, who was the 2005 World Series Most Valuable Player. “He wants the baseball, whether it’s the first game of the season or the last game of the season.”
This next one could be the last Sox game of the season.
Of course, that was the case Sunday.
And they’re still here.
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