Mudville Magazine: In the October Country

Maybe the Houston Astros have secured the point that this is supposed to be the decade in which baseball teams rich in extraterrestrial frustration are supposed to bury their curses, actual or alleged, at long enough last. If they have, the 2005 World Series is going to send the nation's Valium bill even higher percentage wise than mine was sent thanks to the 1986 Series.

Entrants to no World Series in the life of the franchise, the third of the first four expansion teams to get to the mountaintop, the Astros meet the Chicago White Sox, winners of no World Series since the Bolshevik Revolution, alumni of only two Series since. And already the Astros have a spiritual edge on the White Sox.

Never mind the Four Marksmen of the Apocalypse who shut down what proved to be a band of feeble Angels, the White Sox didn't have to overcome what precedent called the insurmountable shock. The 21st Century's first decade is becoming one of doing what you are not supposed to do to get to the mountaintop, of turning sacred cows into the one thing they are truly worth—steak.

Roy Oswalt must have hungered for the biggest sirloin he could slice Wednesday night. Already at one in the land of the giants with his back-to-back 20-win seasons, Oswalt merely started by making sure he had a full can of Raid to keep the human cockroach, David Eckstein, at his distance, and he continued by doing everything in his power to keep the St. Louis Cardinals from hitting more than four balls out of the infield.

In truth the Astros began such doings at just about the moment they fastened their seat belts on the team flight to St. Louis Tuesday. It turned out that catcher Brad Ausmus found the perfect way to shake off the Monday night shell shock: mischief. He slipped to the pilot's cabin and prevailed upon the pilot to make an in-flight announcement, something to the effect of takeoff clearance awaiting the passage of Albert Pujols's bomb through and out of the local airpsace.

Even Brad Lidge had to laugh.

Now wait a minute, fer Crissakes, as Casey Stengel would have said. Was Pujols not supposed to have pronounced the Astros' death sentence? Do teams arising from a strike away from wait till next year not go on, normally, to finish what they restart? Do teams upended from a strike away from the mountain top not, normally, take what is coming to them meekly enough?

So said precedent such as the 1985 Los Angeles Dodgers. They were an out away from the World Series when Tommy Lasorda in the top of the ninth decided he had nothing to lose letting Tom Niedenfeuer pitch to Jack Clark with first base open. The Dodgers had nothing left come the bottom of the ninth. Did they ever think about hunting Stengel's old backyard in nearby Glendale in search of the ball Clark hit over the 110 Freeway?

The California Angels got closer than the Dodgers a year later, a strike away from the World Series, when Donnie Moore sent Dave Henderson the same pitch the barely-known Seattle reject had been fouling off, a nasty, knee-high, away enough splitter. And this time Henderson sent it away enough over the left field fence. The Angels managed to tie it up again in the bottom of the ninth, and that bought them only the honor of Henderson in the top of the eleventh re-breaking the tie, this time for keeps, with a sacrifice fly off Moore. The Angels made for Fenway Park to play two listless games sending the Red Sox to their own one-strike-away calamity.

That was last century, this is current century, and if its first decade has been nothing else it has been the Age of Precedents Overthrown, not to mention the Age of Curses (Actual or Alleged) Overthrown.

Those formerly star-crossed Angels started it, plunging magnificently enough through the 2002 postseason and inflicting a little transdimensional shock en route, for a change. Now a near-forgotten, castaway utility man, cut from the sinking Mariners at mid-season, Scott Spiezio three years ago was the Angels' angel of mercy, five outs from a San Francisco Series triumph, when he fought Felix Rodriguez a seven-pitch mini-epic, Rodriguez threw him an eighth pitch low and in, and Spiezio hit it high and out into the right field seats. Two innings and three more runs later, "We'll see you tomorrow night!" One night later, Angels in the Promised Land.

And where were you when the Red Sox saw and raised . . . well, everyone else on the star-crossed street? Nobody is going to top the Idiots, standing one out away from losing the pennant in four straight, before the Swipe Heard 'Round The World launched the upending that dug a four-straight burial of the Empire Emeritus which telegraphed an anticlimactic four-game Series sweep.

But the Astros plan to have a lot of fun trying, and why should they not? Everyone but themselves knew it was carved in marble, with no amendment clause, that Pujols's monstrous 0-1, three-run shot off Lidge Monday night, the flight of which was interrupted (Brad Ausmus's Katzenjammer Kids act to the contrary) only by the glass-and-iron upper wall behind the Minute Maid Park home run train tracks, was the death blow, a two-game Busch Stadium burial an apparent formality.

Somehow, however, seeing Lidge stretching in the bullpen Wednesday night, while Dan Wheeler went out in a non-save situation to finish Oswalt's 5-1 jewel, flicking off Mark Grudzielanek's two-out line single over shortstop, no one believed Lidge would keep his in-flight laughter alive until that final out was turned. That out sailed off Yadier Molina's bat into Jason Lane's glove in right field, Willy Taveras over from center just in case and hugging Lane toward the infield party.

And somehow, too, it should have been obvious that there would be a few in-team competitions for mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the happiest of us all. Not even Roger Clemens dared suggest the Astros' first pennant meant more to anyone than ancient starmen Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell. But if they were handing out the hardware for the most ostentatious postseason champagne shampoo to date, Clemens would have won it in the proverbial walk, for the lather under which he doused soul brother Andy Pettitte and kid brother Roy.

Oswalt the Rabbit would just have to settle for winning the National League Championship Series' Most Valuable Player award. Seven innings of one run, three hit, six punchout, one walk pitching, shrinking your NLCS earned run average to 1.29 atop that almost-as-splendid second game, will do that for you. Biggio would just have to settle for helping instigate Wednesday night's mini-romp, slashing a line single to left to send home Adam Everett from third in the top of the third for the second Houston run. And St. Louis starter Mark Mulder would have to live with a major assist, letting one sail right behind Biggio's heels allowing Ausmus to scurry home and Everett to help himself to third, right before Biggio laid pipe on him.

An inning and an out later, Lane joined in the fun, when Mulder—destiny was to grant him a mere four and two thirds innings with three earned on six hits against him—laid up a belt-high slider and Lane laid it ten rows up the left field seats. Two innings later, after pinch hitter John Rodriguez sent home Grudzielanek with a sacrifice fly, the Astros might as well have said, "Don't even think about it," for the way Everett shoved home Chris Burke with a squeeze bunt, an inning before Morgan Ensberg finally checked in with his only hit of the night, a single up the pipe scoring Biggio for the fifth Astros run.

Not that their new home will be anything less than a creature of beauty, but the Cardinals hoped they might extend incumbent Busch Stadium's life three more games at minimum, sending the old girl off with one more World Series conquest after winning one more pennant in her storied enough garden.

And Tony LaRussa waved off the Redbirds' sundry obstructions, noting that those who stepped in when others had to step down acquitted themselves nicely enough to get here in the first place. "It wasn't a health problem," he said postgame, "it was an Astros problem . . . I think there's a strong segment of our support that marks your season with not even getting in the World Series but winning it, and with that group we failed. We've got to be more realistic in the organization. Did we give it our best shot? I think we did. That's why I congratulate the Astros. But we got into this thing to win the World Series, and this is a disappointment."

The Astros have reasons to feel good and tenuous at once for winning the pennant on the road. On the one hand, both pennants were secured in the road ballpark, and only two of the four division series winners advanced after winning the set at home. One of those was the Astros, however, and during the season the White Sox on the road won one less than the Astros at home, compared to the Astros on the road two games lesser than the White Sox at home.

And if the Astros have any more miracles to work, they are about to step into the arena where miracles mean the most. They can have yet another precedent to smash if they want one, courtesy of their fraternal National League expansion twins. The 1969 Mets opened on the road for the pennant and the Series, winning both at home. And after they dropped the first Series game on the road, the Mets swept the next four from a team of Baltimore Orioles that compares quite reasonably, on paper, to this year's White Sox. That would be one precedent the Astros should wish not to overcome but to equal. And raise, even.

—Jeff Kallman
Thursday, October 20

AN OCTOBER SORT OF CITY

The World Series is coming, Chicago.

You know that. When you walk down those steaming October streets on the way to the greasy spoon, you God damn well know it. You talk of nothing else. When you eat kielbasa, when you eat cheeseburgers, when you eat that fifty dollar vegan dinner, that hundred dollar steak, suck on cigars or cigarettes or a joint before the party, you know about the White Sox. You knew it was coming, you did, you've got piles of scorecards and ticket stubs and your favorite player's had a great season, a great playoff series. You've read every article there is to read, and you know what? All this week, you'll read more. About Ozzie and the pitchers and beating the Angels and Red Sox and Indians and Twins. You'll read stuff until it comes out your ears and flows out your mouth to anyone who'll listen. And everyone will listen just as everyone will repeat what they read and heard and figured out all their own. You won't care a whiff.

Because the World Series is coming.

I wish I was there. Right now and with a ticket in my pocket, collar turned up to the Lake Michigan winds. With that ticket in my pocket and wondering about the game. Bring binoculars? Eat before hand? Peanuts, beer, a scorecard? Maybe I shouldn't waste my time, I'll want to see the game. I check my ticket against the map of the stadium. We're up there all right. One pal says bring the camera, the other gives you a look like you're insane. But I'll score it. Take pictures of the rowdies.

I would walk down Chicago's streets and think to myself of the coming championship, of the victories and the parades and the swarming in the field. Right now, it's still yours. There's no losses yet, just the promise of glory. The giant board blowing up, the fireworks, the sirens, the roar and the bite of a hot dog on a cold night. The swig of beer. The swig of something more potent.

Chicago, remember this dreamworld.

Remember last night's dinner, each conversation swollen with promise. The air is perfect now in Chicago, because it's Chicago's. That traffic that's so damned awful… it's a badge, isn't it? God damn right! The traffic is something to be proud of, the dog shit on the streets, Cabrini Green, new Comiskey. Especially new Comiskey.

You hope they bring on Houston just so you can show off your ugly stadium. Because it's yours Goddamnit, its yours. This is Chicago and these are the White Sox and we're in the World Series. So fuck you, whoever you are. We beat the tar out of everyone to get here. This is a concrete box, but its ours.

Algren said it was "An October sort of city, even in spring." Now it's an October sort of city when it's supposed to be. By Saturday, the fight will begin. You'll remember, always, where you were when so-n-so hit his homer, when blast-it-all struck out to go down by a couple, when they win it all. When they lose.

When they lose, the wound will heal, eventually. When the win, the ennui comes back, around December. You'll go back to work, you'll have to wash that WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS shirt and it will never look or feel the same way again. The team will dissolve, the harmony amongst your fellow citizen will dissolve. The Southside will be the Southside and Comiskey Comiskey, and if they don't win again…

The daily grind will begin to grind again.

Not now, though. Now, as the sunlight gets thinner, the days grow shorter, we anticipate when the nights will be broken by arclamps, hiding the stars for baseball. When what we think we want more than anything still has the power to move us. When every man, woman, and child who wants it can be a White Sox, and this is when the White Sox are invincible, and we beat back life for a little while to soak in the accidentaly beauty and wonder of this sport. When it becomes us, and we become it. When the cliches become true, and truth is in the calculus of a silly game.

Chicago: you're lucky. I wish I was you.

—Peter Schilling Jr.
Wednesday, October 19

"OH, MY GOD . . . "

NLCS GAME FIVE: St. Louis Cardinals 5, Houston Astros 4 (Redbirds Shrink Rocketmen's Lead, 3-2)

That train whistle sounding through Minute Maid Park can sound as lonesome as a backwoods crossing along a dark dirt road, especially if you are the visiting team and your pitching ace has just been taken over the scoreboard.

But if you hear a surge of multiple buzzing segue in as the whistle begins to fade, and you are a pitcher who has only allowed one home run against you in this ballpark before, you can feel so lonesome you could cry when you don't feel so furious you could wrap a bat around the head of any Houston Astro thought to be a Killer B.

Or, you could send your own resident pest up in the top of the ninth, down to your final strike before wait 'till next year, and have him all but shove a base hit through a pair of diving Houston infielders on the left side. Then, you can have your next man wring out a base on balls. And then, you can have your number one hammer pound one over the tracks on which that train rides upon the Astros' bombs.

When Lance Berkman squared off against Chris Carpenter in the bottom of the seventh Monday night, with the St. Louis Cardinals ace still up 2-1, and Craig Biggio (safe when a tweener hop played off third baseman Hector Luna's glove heel and chest) and Chris Burke (a hit-and-run single through the hole at second, sending Biggio to third) on ahead of him. Carpenter pumped Berkman something that tailed back over the plate at the knees, and Berkman pumped it on a rising line the other way into the left field porch.

And the Minute Maid audience dared to believe in the plateau of their collective scream that the Astros were now a mere six defensive outs from starting the World Series in the city where the franchise was awarded in the first place, forty-five years to the day earlier. The Astros' bullpen could have been forgiven for thinking it could shift from defensive to attack pitching, after Andy Pettitte's gallant start had left his mates a 2-1 hole in six and a third and Chad Qualls spelled him to quell another David Eckstein-instigated Cardinal threat in the top of the seventh, turning it over to Mike Gallo (erasing Larry Walker on one pitch to open) and Dan Wheeler in the eighth.

Perhaps from desperation did Cardinal manager Tony LaRussa hand off to his closer, Jason Isringhausen, for the bottom of the eighth, the idea seeming to be that if Isringhausen could deliver precisely what he went forth to deliver, two innings of shutout relief, the Cardinals could make it difficult if not impossible for the Astros' long-time-a-coming party to pull the first cork.

First the Cardinals had to find a way around Brad Lidge, in search of saving his fourth consecutive LCS game and becoming the first since a former LaRussa charge, Dennis Eckersley in 1988, to save four LCS games in any order. And it came down to Eckstein with two out in the top of the ninth and the Redbirds down to their final strike. Not an Astro fan alive believed a thing but what they were going to the mountaintop at long enough last.

Do you think the Los Angeles Angels are still happy with the swap they made winter last, letting Eckstein walk and signing Orlando Cabrera, who did as little to prevent a lost Angel pennant as Eckstein was about to do trying to interrupt if not prevent a first Houston pennant?

"He's not going to just give up an at-bat," marveled former Arizona Diamondbacks manager Bob Brenly, in the Fox Sports analyst's chair, "whether it's a B-game in spring training or an elimination game in this LCS here. He's going to give you everything he's got every minute he's got that uniform on."

On one ball and two strikes, he snuck one between Adam Everett diving right from shortstop and Morgan Ensberg diving left from third base, each trying to plug the hole, Eckstein's roller seeming to admonish, "Don't even think about it, boys." Up stepped Jim Edmonds, and down to first base on five pitches he strolled, not a syllable of reproach toward any umpire passing his lips this time around, and Albert Pujols checked in, swinging on and missing a first pitch slider that dropped to the dirt like a roller coaster.

Pujols then swung on a second pitch slider hanging right over the tee and drove it right up and out off a window frame post above and behind the tracks on which that lonesome whistleblowing home run train crawls on the home team's bombs. Lidge sank into a crouch on the mound. Pettitte in the Astros' dugout followed the flight of the drive, with Roger Clemens sitting balefully behind him, and said as his jaw hung down, "Oh, my God . . . "

Carpenter was off the hook for the Berkman bomb, which had ruined a splendid evening's work otherwise (one earned run, seven scattered hits, one walk, six punchouts to that point), Pettitte had been as game and on game as he had been all those postseason turns for the Yankees, and the Astros' bullpen had done its standard business until Pujols collapsed Lidge and put the game deeper into Isringhausen's hands.
The righthander found no crueler punctuation than Chris Burke—the unexpected division-series winning bombardier, making his bones admirably as a Killer B in training—launching one deep to right center that restored the air so graphically sucked from the Minute Maid chamber long enough for Walker to pedal back near the track to snap it shut for the return trip to St. Louis.

The Astros receive barely a tenth of one percent of the ink and font expended upon such elongated sorrows as those from Anaheim, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. But the Astros are catching up for extraterrestrial and eleventh-hour heartbreak. The others (including the Giants, if you count their years in New York) can say they've been to the Promised Land and back. The Astros have not even reached the mountaintop unmolested.

"I just couldn't believe I did this," Pujols said modestly in the postgame press conference. The Astros and their fans could believe it even less, and maybe a little bit more.

—Jeff Kallman
Tuesday, October 18

"WE DON'T PLAY AGAINST THE UMPIRES"

GAME FOUR, NLCS: Houston Astros 2, St. Louis Cardinals 1 (Textraterrestrials Lead Series, 3-1)

How tempting it must seem by now to paraphrase Casey Stengel, with or without the inadvertent word reversal: Can't anybody here call this game? The Houston Astros and the St. Louis Cardinals seem to the outsider to have almost as many umpire problems as the Los Angeles Angels and the Chicago White Sox have had. And there is a sense that the Cardinals especially have to walk gingerly when questioned about it or addressing it on their own.

Fair or unfair, two decades removed or not, these Cardinals are now faced with the unpleasant reminders that a different team of them so overreacted to a flagrantly blown World Series call that they went from three outs away from the ring to a seventh game humiliation.

Those Redbirds let Don Denkinger stay in their heads instead of keeping the Kansas City Royals out of their hides, and to this day the best team in the 1980s National League not named the New York Mets is remembered as crass chokers rather than the only three-time pennant winners in the league that decade. These Redbirds have to do everything they can to keep Phil Cuzzi and Tom McClelland out of their heads and the Houston Astros out of their hides.

"This game, there's some real great things about it, and there's some things that absolutely stink," said Tony LaRussa, after the Astros outlasted them Sunday afternoon, 2-1, the Cardinals having to play the final couple of innings without the boss or their center fielder. "Normally, when you miss some chances like they had the last couple of days it comes back to haunt you. Our organization does a great job playing against the other side, we don't play against the umpires."

Perhaps somebody showed him films of Games Six and Seven, 1985 Series, the anti-stars of the show a Cardinal team who showed the world the depths to which playing against an umpire could drive a team who had no business collapsing against a club that probably had no business being in the Series against them.

LaRussa got thrown out of Sunday afternoon's fun in the bottom of the seventh, having spent a fair amount of time carping from the Cardinals' dugout after Jason Marquis, in relief of Jeff Suppan, walked Astros pinch-hitter Orlando Palmeiro and, an infield hit and a fly out later, Lance Berkman to load the bases. LaRussa carped about the liberal strike zone, yet Cuzzi had been calling it that way for both sides' pitchers.

As many accuse the breed of liking to do, the law degree-holding LaRussa refused to let the debate drop and Cuzzi refused to let him stay in the game. That's when LaRussa plunged up from the dugout, needing McClelland to keep him from turning Cuzzi into calzone. Astros manager Phil Garner merely sent swift rookie Willy Taveras out to run for Palmeiro at third, and Morgan Ensberg hit a straightaway fly off which Jim Edmonds in center had no prayer of nailing Taveras at the plate with the second Houston run.

An inning and two outs later, Mark Grudzielanek on first with a leadoff hit off Astros reliever Dan Wheeler, Edmonds looked at a count-filling strike on a high and tight pitch suspiciously similar to the fourth ball awarded Berkman. Edmonds said afterward that he said nothing beyond asking Cuzzi where the pitch was and how he could call it a strike. On television it looked as though Edmonds had barked one of the, ahem, magic words at Cuzzi, who thumbed him faster than the pitch sailed up into Brad Ausmus's mitt.

John Rodriguez pinch-hit for Edmonds to finish the at-bat and sent a long fly to the back of Minute Maid Park. Taveras—staying in the game playing center field, in a kind of quadruple switch that moved center fielder Chris Burke to left, Berkman from left to first, Wheeler to the mound, and first baseman Mike Lamb out of the game—ran back to the track and onto the odd, upward berm at the back of center field to haul down the fly.

"I'm not trying to get thrown out of a playoff game," Edmonds insisted when it was over and the Astros stood a game away from their first-ever World Series. "I don't think I was adamant. I said, `I'm just trying to ask you why that ball's a strike,' and asked him to do a better job and he threw me out.''

Cuzzi's side will not be known for awhile at this writing, and neither will McClellands. For reasons upon which one can speculate at best, the umpires were kept unavailable for postgame comment. At least neither LaRussa nor Edmonds was threatened with a hefty fine. Yet.

Those rounds almost but did not quite spoil a rather tautly played game, pried open at first by the Cardinals in the top of the fourth, when David Eckstein (what a surprise: a leadoff walk, his second of the game) came home on Albert Pujols's sacrifice liner to right off Astros starter Brandon Backe. Larry Walker wrung out a followup walk, but Reggie Sanders looked at strike three close and hissed a bit at Cuzzi before John Mabry—pressed into service at third base, with Abraham Nunez nursing his still-sore left knee—flied out to right center.

The Astros waited exactly one out in the bottom of the fourth to tie it up at one, Jason Lane sending one into the left field short porch with one out, the Minute Maid Park acoustics as usual shaping the home run train's whistle into a wind-like howl that sounds like death come calling. Backe held on through two thirds of the sixth before Pujols's bullet single to left compelled Garner to bring in Mike Gallo, who got Walker to hop one to Craig Biggio at second for the side.

Suppan had delivered the Cardinals a yeoman's performance in his own right, and Marquis at first picked up where Suppan left off, Ensberg's leadoff hit a mere interruption to his dispatching Lamb, walking Lane, punching out Ausmus (looking almost befuddled at three straight strikes), and getting Adam Everett to ground out.

Things would not be quite that simple again the rest of the game. Marquis managed to strand Everett and Taveras (a pair of two-out hits) in the bottom of the eighth, but Brad Lidge managed to survive Pujols (a leadoff single off Taveras's body in right center) and Walker (a pulled hit past a diving Berkman at first) opening the top of the ninth, with a lot of help from Ensberg, who picked off Sanders's tapper up the third base line and threw Pujols out at the plate as Walker ran to third; and, with a lot more help from Eric Bruntlett, spelling Biggio at second for the ninth and turning a tight and deft Area Code 4-6-3 off Mabry's hard grounder for the game.

Like the Angels after the strikeout heard 'round the world the previous Wednesday, the Cardinals worked swiftly enough to remind themselves that there are reasons often enough why an umpire's dubious call is not half the factor that an opponent's anything but dubious play is. "You've got to remember one thing," Edmonds said. "There's a good team and they're playing well, they're playing with a lot of emotion, and they're beating us. You can't make excuses. We're not doing the job and they are.''

And "they" are one win and Andy Pettitte, ailing or otherwise, from the World Series.

—Jeff Kallman
Monday, October 17

THE SMASHING OF PRECEDENTS

GAME SIX, NCLS: Houston Astros 5, St. Louis Cardinals 1 (Starmen Snatch the Pennant Back in Six)

Even Brad Lidge had to laugh.

—Jeff Kallman
Thursday, October 20

AN OCTOBER SORT OF CITY

The World Series is coming, Chicago.

Because the World Series is coming.

Chicago, remember this dreamworld.

The daily grind will begin to grind again.

Chicago: you're lucky. I wish I was you.

—Peter Schilling Jr.
Wednesday, October 19

"OH, MY GOD . . . "

NLCS GAME FIVE: St. Louis Cardinals 5, Houston Astros 4 (Redbirds Shrink Rocketmen's Lead, 3-2)

"I just couldn't believe I did this," Pujols said modestly in the postgame press conference. The Astros and their fans could believe it even less, and maybe a little bit more.

—Jeff Kallman
Tuesday, October 18

"WE DON'T PLAY AGAINST THE UMPIRES"

GAME FOUR, NLCS: Houston Astros 2, St. Louis Cardinals 1 (Textraterrestrials Lead Series, 3-1)

And "they" are one win and Andy Pettitte, ailing or otherwise, from the World Series.

—Jeff Kallman
Monday, October 17

FOUR MARKSMEN, 25 BEDEVILED ANGELS

ALCS Game Five: Chicago White Sox 6, Los Angeles Angels 3 (The Four Marksmen of the Apocalypse Win The Pennant, 4-1)

Maybe the evening rain that began to drive just a little bit harder down upon Angel Stadium as the ninth inning ended underwrote the Los Angeles Angels' farewell just a little less emphatically than the snap Paul Konerko applied to the final out that sent the Chicago White Sox to their first World Series since the Eisenhower Administration.

Within two hours thunder and lightning shattered the southern California sky, clapping and crackling funereally across the grounds whose dwellers faced the soggy truth of the Angels' near-complete overmatching by a White Sox club which left it an open question as to whether their own brand of slash and crash offence had been overthrown by their mound marksmen's pinpoint scopes.

There would be time enough to grind the mind from there as to whether these White Sox would step forth after a week's rest to secure their first world championship since the Bolshevik Revolution; time enough to wring the final drop over whether the Angels could have played even up with the White Sox and still be picked off by such starting pitching as had not been seen in a postseason since Seaver, Matlack, and Koosman—if not Koufax, Drysdale, and Podres.

Time enough to sing of Jose Contreras, Freddy Garcia, Jon Garland, and Mark Buehrle, to call the conquering roll backward, the firing squad that bedeviled the Angels with pitches the Angels could not solve if they had swung shovels for the most part; time enough to ponder whether the coming week's surcease—rather than leave them as tentative as a twelve-day layoff had proven not to leave Garland—would leave the Four Marksmen of the Apocalypse not stale but steady (do the White Sox even have a bullpen? the question must have seemed tempting), enough to paralyze whomever the National League might send forth.

And time enough to forget how many bad or blown calls pecked at the Angels, who were done in so profoundly by a collection of White Sox who outpitched and outplayed them even without the faltering umpires. These White Sox swept a pitching-tattered array of Boston Red Sox for the right to drop one before sweeping a band of feeble Angels so lost for their run-gun-and-stun offence and, in the end, even their see-you-later-alligator bullpen, that it wouldn't have mattered if all those calls had gone the Angels' way.

The White Sox secured the American League pennant on a moist, cloud-weaving Sunday night in Anaheim despite the Angels at least keeping eventual League Championship Series Most Valuable Player Paul Konerko hitless until the top of the ninth. You could assume the White Sox had told their man thanks for all that heavy first-inning lifting, on behalf of all those quivering shells the Million Dollar Quartet fired through the Angels' wood or just enough to it to find White Sox leather.

You could also assume that Konerko wanted to thank them for such thanks, when he faced Francisco Rodriguez and banged one off the right field wall to send home Tadahito Iguchi, before Aaron Rowand sent home Jermaine Dye with a sacrifice fly for the eventual 6-3 final, a fly that turned into an inning-ending double play, Vladmir Guerrero's throw home short enough to miss Dye but strong enough to allow a throw to third to get Konerko.

But you could also assume the White Sox had taken just an hour's pity upon Paul Byrd, the Angels' gallant Game Five starter, who had beaten the White Sox on fumes in the series opener following a trio of cross-country flights to launch a set in which the opening Angels' win seemed now a mere day's obstruction.

Through five Byrd kept the White Sox limited to a run that didn't even score in the first inning for a change. He ducked a first inning jam (Konerko of all people lining out to right, Carl Everett popping out to Adam Kennedy behind second base); he escaped the second with only one run on his evening's rap; he retired the side in order in the third (major assist: Chone Figgins, picking Dye's rapper off the third base line and firing a long strike to nip him for the side); he dodged Everett's one-out hit in the fourth, Kennedy with the elevator-up leap for Rowand's liner ahead of A.J. Pierzynski's shallow fly.

The Angels even pried a game-tying run out of Contreras before he rang up the bottom of the third's first out, Juan Rivera slashing one up the third base line and off the box seat rail for an opening double, taking third when Contreras's pickoff throw sailed into short center field, and coming home when Kennedy slashed a hit the other way to left field.

Dye doubled home Juan Uribe to re-take the lead in the top of the fifth and the Angels thanked Byrd for a tremendous night's work, bringing in Scot Shields to get Konerko's fly to the left field corner for the side, before getting a little crazier in the bottom of the inning. They re-tied the game and even took the lead for once.

They even got a call their way for a change. Kennedy beat out Crede's pickup and long throw across off a hard smash up the third base line, and Figgins (1-for-15 in the series to this point) drilled one to the right field corner that might have caromed off the curved fence enabling a triple but for a too-eager fan grabbing the ball off its bounce and just enough below the fence that the umpires awarded Kennedy the run, Kennedy having taken off on the pitch and being a certain score otherwise. Figgins took third on Orlando Cabrera's high chopper to second and Garret Anderson sent him home with a sacrifice fly to the right field track.

But Guerrero then broadened his sad mastery of the hard-hit groundout, this one to second baseman Iguchi to end the inning and, perhaps, the Angels' season. Was there any sight sadder on the side of the Angels than their gentle giant, straining harder and harder, perhaps through a left shoulder more sore than any acknowledged, to find the swing that terrorized enemy pitchers into lining him up for intentional walks when his lineup protection faltered in spells down the stretch?

Well, there was Figgins batting .118 in the set, there was Anderson batting .176 with one extra base hit, and there was Bengie Molina—who had stood tall against the Yankees in the division series—hitting like Figgins. There was earnest Kelvim Escobar, the temporarily converted starter, brushing off Crede's game re-tying, seventh-inning opening bomb with the final two of his five strikeouts, but getting pried for an eighth-inning walk (Rowand) before a bouncer from Pierzynski bounced off his hindquarters. Escobar fielded cleanly but tagged the sluggish White Sox catcher with an empty glove, ball still in throwing hand.

But above all there was Rodriguez. Three years earlier he was K-Rod, the find of the postseason, the kid with the live sliders who turned big bats into broken matchsticks as the Angels made their magnificent plunge to the 2002 World Series rings. Now, however, he relieved Escobar and took the mound throwing each pitch as if he were trying to strike the living hell out of each hitter with the same pitch, the kind of overthrowing guaranteed not to find the strike zone if the White Sox had set up a picket line across the plate.

He served one that Crede banged up the pipe, Kennedy diving to grab it before it found the outfield and springing up to throw home, with Rowand turning on a little 1959-style Go-Go and diving across the plate safely behind the throw. He kept it to 4-3 with a battling called strikeout on Scott Podsednik, but ahead lay two ninth-inning opening walks setting up for Konerko and Dye.

Contreras was only slightly less cool an executioner than Buehrle and Garland had been, nor was he quite the bristling rider Garcia had been, but he was as composed as he needed to be when he needed to be, even when the Angels did something too many thought too unfathomable since their sleepy-time Game One win and took that too-short-lived lead.

Once Crede's seventh inning opener landed between the left field bullpens and the left field seats, Contreras became rock enough to roll the Angels in order in the seventh through the ninth with a consistency his opponents might call sickening. In each of the three he sandwiched a fly to center or left center between a pair of ground outs. There are lesser ways to secure a fourth consecutive complete-game pennant-winning victory.

The Four Marksmen and their 2.27 ALCS earned run average resembled Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Johnny Podres. Come to think of it, the last time the White Sox went to the World Series they <i>faced</i> Koufax, Drysdale, and Podres, riding a grizzled future Hall of Famer (Early Wynn), an underrated second (Billy Pierce), and a band of grinding Go-Gos led by a pair of future Hall of Famers (Nellie Fox, Luis Aparicio).

But the Four Marksmen's ALCS ERA came out .10 lower than Koufax-Drysdale-Podres mostly because Podres surrendered five earned in two starts and nine and a third innings against Koufax and Drysdale surrendering one each. The White Sox fell then, in six games, to a transitional team of Dodgers winning its first West Coast pennant; the White Sox then had an owner (Bill Veeck) despised by his fellows and beloved only by his players and their fans.

Now, manager Ozzie Guillen all but thanked his players for winning the pennant in spite of him, leaving the on-field whoop-it-up all to them. The White Sox wait to see whom between the Houston Astros and the St. Louis Cardinals survives to meet them. And their incumbent owner is not exactly among the beloved, especially not among fans willing to read behind the moboisie's ranting and isolate the true instigator of the 1994 strike. The one that ended up canceling a World Series that the White Sox themselves might have gone on to play.

—Jeff Kallman
Monday, October 17

EMPTYING THE TANK

GAME THREE, NLCS: Houston Astros 4, St. Louis Cardinals 2 (Rocket Riders lead series, 2-1)

The only thing Roger Clemens lacked Saturday afternoon was his top of the line repertoire. And aside from enough ways to exploit the lack, the only thing the St. Louis Cardinals lacked as they finished their third National League Championship Series skirmish was yet another third baseman.

While the Cardinals kept just enough distance from the Rocket's red glare, they had to watch in mute horror when Abraham Nunez, already filling in nicely enough for injured Scott Rolen, got upended into a nasty left knee injury while Jason Lane was occupied sliding into third base in the bottom of the sixth.

Lane had just singled home Mike Lamb (a one-out double) to break a tie the Cardinals had forged off Clemens in the top of the inning (Larry Walker's sacrifice fly, scoring Albert Pujols) when Brad Ausmus rapped a single to right, and Lane trying to beat Walker's throw in from right hit the ground sliding, his knee catching Nunez right above the left knee, sending Nunez flipping over and down in too-obvious agony.

The Cardinals sent Hector Luna out to spell Nunez—and Brad Thompson to relieve starting pitcher Matt Morris—and it almost figured that Luna would figure in the fourth Houston run, when Thompson got Adam Everett to chop one up the third base line. Luna picked it cleanly enough and threw home anything but, a sailing pass catcher Yadier Molina couldn't have caught if he had climbed a contractor's ladder, Lane crossing the plate somewhat incredulously for the 4-2 lead.

It was Lamb who put the Astros up in the first place, with Morgan Ensberg aboard on a leadoff walk in the bottom of the fourth, swatting one the other way into the left field porch for an early 2-0 lead. The Cardinals had to grind it to cut that one in half in the next inning, when Molina opened with a clean base hit and Nunez singled him to second, before Morris bunted one back to the mound and resident pest David Eckstein lofted a sacrifice fly back enough in right to send home Molina.

Why, the Cardinals even managed to pry one out of Brad Lidge for a change, pinch hitter John Mabry slashing a two-out double the other way into the left field corner, on a full count, sending home John Rodriguez (a pinch walk), the first time they had pricked the Houston closer in 31 innings against him since 2003. Astros fans must have felt an extra wrap of satisfaction when Lidge got Eckstein to end the game with a short fly to center fielder Willy Taveras.

Clemens threw 64 percent of his pitches for strikes and worked off a drained tank but otherwise did what a future Hall of Famer is supposed to do, admitting only later that he was all but willing his pitches to do what they had to do, only too mindful that he stood one misstep from disaster, and kept a close enough eye upon his errant hamstring after about every third pitch. And he probably needed no coaching to accept that for once in his season the Astros gave him something to work with aside from a clean mound, a lively home audience, and a few desperate prayers.

Tell it not to St. Louis center fielder Jim Edmonds, however. "Roger pitched a Roger game,'' Edmonds said graciously, perhaps knowing too well that Roger hasn't really pitched a Roger game—heavy on the strikeouts, humble on the walks, and humbling on the brushbacks to the plate crowders—since the Clinton Administration, or close enough.

Morris had not necessarily had himself an off day, throwing 65 percent of his pitches for strikes and spreading eight hits around the three earned and single unearned run he surrendered to Clemens' two earned. "I've seen them do it a number of times, flip it over into those boxes,'' Morris said about the economical bomb he surrendered to Lamb. "I didn't think he hit it as good as he did, and I don't think he hit it that good anyway—but it went out.''

Clemens waved away the almost-usual question as to whether he might have worked his final game as calmly as he admitted that whatever he had in his right arm he had twice as much in his spleen, using movement instead of velocity or snap to ward off the Cardinals when he needed most to do it.

Now the man who had faltered in the game that meant the pennant once and for all a year earlier had put the Astros a game closer to draining the Cardinals' tank. They may yet have to hand it to Clemens for another seventh game. "It's just a grind for me right now," he said. "At my age, I just want to go out there and empty the tank. You know, the guys played hard for me and got me the lead, and then I was just battling, trying to make pitches throughout the game . . . I was just trying to move the fastball around the zone as much as possible, and it's just a good win."

And while Clemens does not yet want to think about the Last Game (again), the Astros may want to think of finding ways to give him something more to support him, if and when the seventh game comes, than a clean mound and a few desperate prayers. He won't have the home audience if it comes to that.

—Jeff Kallman
Sunday, October 16

"POSITIVE IS OUT THE WINDOW RIGHT NOW"

GAME FOUR, ALCS: Chicago White Sox 8, Los Angeles Angels 2 (Ozz Sox Lead, 3-1)

If you had never seen them until this American League Championship Series, you would assume the only time the Los Angeles Angels could win a game was when they were close enough to sound asleep. Playing wide awake seems to leave them at the Chicago White Sox's mercy.

Winning Game One the Angels looked like sleepwalkers who missed not a beat from bedroom to refrigerator to corner store and back, but losing Games Two through Four they resembled zombies walking through the paths of stones thrown by exorcists named Buehrle, Garland, and finally Freddy Garcia, come Saturday night.

Garcia like Garland before him made Angel Stadium's gathering feel more than a little as though they had been invited to a fine dinner party that had been burglarized with the hosts doing little to repel the burglars until the alarm system went off. And when he finished it handed the White Sox the first starters since the 1973 New York Mets' Tom Seaver, Jon Matlack, and Jerry Koosman to reel off three consecutive League Championship Series complete games.

These Angels looked almost nothing like the club who forced themselves from a sound sleep to push the New York Yankees out of the postseason with play that mulcted innumerable paens to their gutsy style. When designated hitter Casey Kotchman rapped a game-ending grounder to White Sox second baseman Tadahito Iguchi, they might have looked a little too relieved had not they not looked a little too frustrated.

While the White Sox's leadoff hitter, left fielder Scott Podsednik, spent his Saturday night reaching base in four out of his five plate appearances the Angels' leadoff man, jack-of-all-trades Chone Figgins, reached base in none of his four plate appearances.

While Paul Konerko continued speaking softly and carrying a big enough stick, his first-inning bomb (is this beginning to sound excessively familiar?) giving the White Sox another game-opening 3-0 lead, Vladimir Guerrero—who also speaks softly, and usually carries a big enough stick—spent his evening going 0-for-4, padding his LCS resume to 1-for-15 with a single run batted in.

While designated hitter Carl Everett and catcher A.J. Pierzynski combined to go 3-for-7 with three RBI, Kotchman (the Angels' designated hitter on the evening) and catcher Bengie Molina also went 3-for-7, but they came up with one less RBI, Kotchman with a nice drive into the gap in left center for an RBI double in the fourth, and Molina floating a base hit up the pipe in the second.

Molina had actually cashed in a break that actually went to the Angels for a change. After Darin Erstad pried a four-pitch walk out of Garcia with one out, Kotchman soft-hopped one to the third base side of the mound but Garcia, fielding it a little off-line, threw it wild, high, and loose beyond first baseman Konerko's reach, allowing Erstad to take third while Kotchman helped himself to second.

But after Molina floated Erstad home, Steve Finley dialed an inning-ending Area Code 4-6-3—and there was interference on the line. Pierzynski's mitt behind the plate had very clearly touched Finley's bat, something Finley himself tried to get the umpires to ring up en route first base. Finley got nipped by a very close throw at first as it was on the play, but by right the Angels should have had a catcher's interference call, the bases loaded, and one out.

That wasn't the only Angel call jammed on the night. Reliever Scot Shields, who had just come in to relieve Santana at last, had Podsednik (a leadoff walk) picked off dead at first in the top of the fifth while working on his first hitter, Chicago right fielder Jermaine Dye with one out. Shields had been keeping Podsednik tight on the base as it was, but now he whipped one right on the low target to Erstad at first, and Erstad landed a tag on Podsednik's arm pit a second before Podsednik's lead hand touched the pad diving back. And again an umpire missed the call.

And then Podsednik stole second on a slightly late throw up the pipe from Molina, before Everett's RBI grounder hung up the sixth White Sox run. On the other hand, maybe it was just as well. These Angels looked so incapable of taking advantage of any break they actually did get that you could have reversed both those calls after an umpirical conference and they still would have found ways to get themselves out the inning if Garcia hadn't done it for them.

The White Sox righthander, like Garland and Buehrle before them, knew too early that the Angels were getting frustrated enough not to lay off anything that did not resemble a strike in any way, shape, or form. And if Garcia looked at times as though he were toying with the Angels like the nerd who turns out to be the real schoolyard bully, you could not blame him for having seen and measured his men and stitching them precisely. Garcia gave his mates all the room they needed when it was obvious enough that Ervin Santana's inexperience had returned only too soon to haunt him.

No one accused Santana of lacking heart, but he seemed shocked early and easily out of his developing adjustment tools. It only began when he opened the game walking Podsednik and plunking Tadahito Iguchi; it only continued when he served something Dye could hit to the back part of the yard, enough to set up second and third for Konerko; and it only made too much sense when he served Konerko a dangling slider and Konerko dangled it over the left center field fence, once again bouncing off that putting green-like Angel Stadium hitter's background.

Shields and Brendan Donnelly kept the White Sox mostly quiet through two and two thirds' relief, but Esteban Yan fell off the page in the top of the eighth, throwing Joe Crede a hanging splitter with one out, second and third (Everett, a leadoff walk; Aaron Rowand, a double down the left field line), and the Angels playing the infield in. And Crede ripped it right past Figgins at third for the final two White Sox runs, before shortstop Juan Uribe dialed Area Code 5-4-3.

And try not to wonder what might have been if the Angels could have gotten more than one inning-opening hitter on base. They answered that in the bottom of the eighth, when Finley pulled one to the right and through the right for a leadoff single. The Angels even got another rare break for a change, when Adam Kennedy rapped one off the end of his bat to Crede at third. Crede threw around the horn for an apparent double play, but Iguchi at second took the throw and threw on with his feet straddling either side of the pad corner, rather than one foot toeing it, and the call was Finley safe at second, alertly and appropriately.

But Figgins skied out to left and Orlando Cabrera popped out to center, and no amount of quiet fuming from Angel quarters after it ended would change the fact that they were one game away from pop going their season. "Positive," Kennedy said in the locker room afterward, "is out the window right now."

But there lingered the discomfiting feeling that Kennedy is close to a troublesome truth. Unless, of course, the Angels got planted in front of the screens in the video room and shown the key moments of the 2004 Boston Red Sox resurrection. And, unless they sent Paul Byrd, their Game One winner and scheduled Game Five starter, on a non-stop redeye round trip flight to Chicago and back. The Angels need a powerful sleepwalk now.

—Jeff Kallman
Sunday, October 16

LACKING

ALCS GAME THREE: Chicago White Sox 5, Los Angeles Angels 2 (Ozz Sox Lead Series 2-1)

John Lackey left his fastball back on his locker stool, while bringing an unwound and dropless substitute for his latterly-developed, tight-wound hammerdrop curve ball to the Angel Stadium mound Friday night, and the Chicago White Sox slashed and burned him before the first inning was over. Jon Garland brought a rough riding fastball and a ballroom level breaking ball, each dancing all around the strike zone, dialing more speeds than a Sunbeam Mixmaster, and the Los Angeles Angels couldn't hit him for the most part if they had used sliding doors for bats.

And Lackey lost an American League Championship Series Game Three that he deserved sadly enough to lose, Garland lost a Game Three he deserved boldly to win, and Doug Eddings down the right field line with two security policemen flanking him just in case had absolutely nothing to do with anything. By the time any Angel arm took the mound and pitched to capability the White Sox had a 5-0 lead, built mostly in the first inning, because it was apparent too soon that the only curves in red in the ballpark belonged to some of the ladies upon whom the Fox Fan Cam trained at regular intervals.

Only too much pre-game conversation had it that Garland off a twelve-day layoff was the likelier candidate for opposition abuse, but it was Lackey pitching on normal rest who worked as though his vacation extended a day too long, following two sterling short-rest turns against the New York Yankees in the division series. He opened leaving an unbroken curve ball up for Scott Podsednik to rip and pull to right field for a single, left an alleged fastball out over the plate one sacrifice out later for Jermaine Dye to hit into the right center field gap for an RBI double, and hung a full-count curve for Paul Konerko to hang over the left center field fence, bouncing off the Angel Stadium hitting background and into the seats for an impossibly early 3-0 lead.

"They got a big crowd here and they're pretty loud," Konerko said after the game. "It was good to take the crowd out of it early."

And Lackey never faced less than four White Sox hitters in any of his five innings' work other than the fourth; he so lacked his best curve that even in a second inning when he threw first pitch strikes to every hitter he faced, he still had to work with a man on base, Juan Uribe lining a hit to right that two hopped to Vladimir Guerrero's glove, before Lackey himself picked up Podsednik's hopper back to the box and threw him out cleanly to end the inning.

Garland from the outset worked as though he could through the equivalent of a doubleheader on the night without breaking a thing beyond an awful lot of Los Angeles lumber, as he did precisely on several angel outs. The earliest sign was the bottom of the first, after Chone Figgins, the Angels' defencive jack-of-all-trades and leadoff Tasmanian devil, turned a two-strike opening into a leadoff walk, but Garland struck out Orlando Cabrera on three pitches before Guerrero chopped one off the plate and high to White Sox second baseman Tadahito Iguchi, hustling to the pad to grab, step, and throw for the inning-ending double play.

Only too soon did the Angels indicate that starting something was one thing but continuing it was something else again, including a mistake from a usually intelligent brand of dirt devil who turned his own two-out rally beginning into a rally suicide in a manner in which Chuck Jones could not have animated better. With two out in the bottom of the second Darin Erstad lined an extra base hit down the right field line and around the corner, crossing second and grinding it to third, and trying to stop himself when he finally saw what everyone in the ballpark and at home knew almost the minute he'd finished rounding second: he was meat. Dye's throw sailed right up to third baseman Crede, and Erstad trying to stop himself took Crede's tag on the ankle as his short spikes caught in the dirt, bent him over, and dumped him onto his side like Elmer Fudd after a Bugs Bunny countertrap.

The further Lackey struggled to rewind his curveball, the further away the White Sox pushed the game. They sent home their fourth run with one out in the top of the third, when Carl Everett dumped a high floater inside the left field line after Lackey swished Konerko for his first strikeout on the night, sending home Iguchi (a leadoff single ripped into left), before Aaron Rowand lined right to Cabrera who tossed to Kennedy for the side-retiring double play. And the Ozz Sox sent home their fifth in the fifth, Iguchi's one out double lined over the shortstop and into left center announcing Konerko shooting one up the pipe for a hit, Steve Finley fielding it in center and throwing home a strong strike interrupted by the back of the mound, allowing Iguchi home.

Kevin Gregg debuted as Lackey's relief opening the sixth, and it looked as though he might inspire a mood swing for his own side. With his oddly open delivery, not so much using a leg kick as a forward extension before coming home, Gregg threw first-pitch strikes to the first six White Sox hitters he faced, rid himself of the sides in order in the sixth and seventh, striking out the side in the second of those innings, and for once an Angel pitcher had equaled Garland's virtuosity, the third-strike breaking ball Gregg dropped in on Uribe the likely candidate for the single nastiest pitch on the night thrown by anyone in Angels silks.

And for once the Angel hitters showed their man on the hill a little love, in the bottom of the sixth. Kennedy shot a flare liner over shortstop for a one-out hit and, one out later, Garland laid a fastball inside the middle of the zone that Cabrera laid right over the left field fence. Guerrero then blasted a 1-1 pitch just foul outside the right field line, before swinging and missing on one of Garland's down-and-away teasers for the side.

But Gregg may have spent too much in the sixth and seventh, because he opened the White Sox eighth walking Dye on four pitches before Konerko shot a liner the other way, to right field, and Brendan Donnelly spelled him, with Everett coming up and the White Sox 4-for-8 with men in scoring position to that point. Donnelly swished Everett on a low split-fingered fastball before Rowand hit into a step-and-throw double play, Cabrera ambling over from short to pick up his slow sink-and-roller up the pipe and throwing on to Erstad after crossing the pad at second.

Donnelly also turned the White Sox aside stranding them with first and second in the top of the ninth. But he, too, was no equal to Garland, who merely continued keeping the Angels' bats either broken or boneless enough to send everything on which they could lay the wood in the basic direction of a waiting White Sox glove. Garland did that in the bottom of the ninth no less than earlier, even if some were surprised to see him still in the game, the White Sox having Neal Cotts and Cliff Politte warm in the bullpen. But he got Figgins to loft a soft fly to shallow left on 1-2, Cabrera to sky one further back and straightaway on 2-2, and Guerrero to line one high to right on the first pitch for the 5-2 win and the 2-1 LCS lead.

Scioscia hopes his unlikely rookie division series savior has another miracle game to roll from his right arm come Saturday. And he hopes, too, that the Angels' bats have miracles enough that Ervin Santana won't have to no-hit the White Sox in order to give a no-hit band of Angels a chance to even the series.

—Jeff Kallman
Saturday, October 15

SWEET AND SOUR THURSDAY

GAME TWO, NLCS: Houston Astros 4, St. Louis Cardinals 1 (Spacemen, Songbirds Tied 1-1)

Signs abounded that Thursday was not to be the St. Louis Cardinals' night, but four least likely to have been missed involved their resident pest, their thus-far thundercrack left fielder, their Flying Molina Brother, and the Houston Astros' starting pitcher. And a fifth just might have been the Astros cashing in at long enough last with men in scoring position, good when combined with Roy Oswalt's deft pitching for sending the National League Championship Series to Houston tied at a game apiece with a 4-1 win.

David Eckstein had carried a prior reputation for taking the proverbial one for the team when not refusing to flinch at the mere hint of a knockdown pitch, and against Roy Oswalt in the second National League Championship Series game he had changed not one color. Oswalt bent Eckstein back with a breathless up-and-in fastball that sailed right in front of his throat before walking him with two out and Yadier Molina (a ground rule double) on second, in the bottom of the fifth, Eckstein rather emphatically running to first as if to remind Oswalt that merely because he was bent it did not mean he was broken.

Should the Cardinals end up facing Eckstein's former team in the World Series, said former team may be in for a bellyful of "what were we thinking?" when it comes to questions of why they allowed him to escape. "He is one of the toughest minded players I have ever been around," La Russa said, sounding just a little humbled himself. "I mean, he is absolutely no give, no matter the score, no matter the situation, no matter what the challenge is."

Oswalt did a little pickup/dustoff of his own self, dropping a third strike in on Jim Edmonds that provoked just a little bit of a dirty look from the Cardinals' center fielder to the home plate umpire. An inning later, Albert Pujols opened with a solo home run, closing the Astros' early enough lead to 2-1, and it was the second Houston run that might have drawn a little more attention than the first.

Brad Ausmus had opened the top of the fifth with a double up the pipe and just beyond Edmonds' reach. Oswalt pushed him to third with a nothing-to-it-folks bunt up the third base line, Craig Biggio pushed him home with a ground out to Eckstein at shortstop, and the Astros for once had gotten a man to second or better and brought him home the old fashioned way.

They owed their top-of-the-second first run to Molina, the youngest of the three brothers now playing in the League Championship Series (elders Bengie and Jose wear the Los Angeles Angels' silks). With Oswalt himself at the plate, Chris Burke on third—he who has suddenly become a junior Killer B, tripling off the right center field wall, beating the throw in by hitting the pad on a slide just inside the would-be tag, with one out ahead of the Ausmus pass—and Ausmus on first with a free pass, Cardinals starter Mark Mulder threw Oswalt a 1-0 slider slightly inside, around which Molina seemed to close his mitt a second before the ball was inside, the ball bumping right off the mitt and tailing behind him to his left.

But after Oswalt walked and Biggio swished for the side, it seemed likely enough that the Astros would have to settle for that much supporting their man, who looked not even dented after sending an 0-1 fastball to the wrong location that Pujols relocated beneath the left field auxiliary scoreboard, launching the bottom of the sixth.

The opening inning seemed only too much the Astros' incumbent standard. Biggio opened with a clean hit to left, and rookie Willy Taveras caught at least two Cardinals somewhat asleep, bunting with St. Louis third baseman Abraham Nunez cheating down the line and Pujols ready to choke the plate running down from first. Taveras bunted a sinking short liner right toward Nunez coming down, with Pujols coming down the first base line, and Nunez had nowhere to throw with second baseman Mark Grudzielanek slow to cover at first, and Mulder off the mound moving to his right to protect Nunez. But Mulder swished Berkman and dropped the coin with which Ensberg dialed Area Code 1-4-3 to strand Biggio in scoring position.

Until Oswalt himself reached second base in the top of the eighth, on Biggio's single up the pipe, the Astros would not again squander a man in scoring position on the night, in part because Mulder didn't allow them to get one there in the third and the fourth. And the regrouping was timed perfectly, as this was Oswalt's night with no debate, the back-to-back 20-game winner performing at the peak you would expect precisely of a man posting such seasons in what remains an era of inflatable offence. Oswalt matched and raised Mulder for swift innings and the execution of an assassin, striking out at least one hitter in four of his seven innings, and getting outs in the air from (of all people) Eckstein alone, a liner in the first (needing a diving catch from Jason Lane in right field) and a straightaway fly in the seventh.

Mulder rolled up one less walk than Oswalt but the same strikeout volume (six) while scattering eight hits and surrendering only one earned run, while Oswalt drove home the pitches he needed when most he needed them, including a pair of devastating outs at Edmonds' expense, when the Cardinals' center fielder twice got to hit with two men on. The called punchout was one, and what proved Oswalt's final pitch of the evening—the ball Edmonds whacked almost feebly to first baseman Lance Berkman, with Oswalt himself taking the throw to the pad and fist-pumping in an unusual display of pleasure on the field—was the second.

"He's a great pitcher," said Sanders of Oswalt before the game, during the Cardinals' warmups and batting practice. "He has a 94, 95 mile an hour fastball, and then he can drop a curve ball in there at 78, 82, so you have to look in location and don't miss it." As if to punctuate the point, Sanders spent his evening forcing Larry Walker at second to retire the side in the bottom of the first, picking up a gift of an infield hit and second base to boot on Morgan Ensberg's fourth-inning throwing error, and swishing on three pitches in the middle of the three straight outs that followed the Pujols bomb.

And then Sanders was gone, at least from the game and possibly for one or even two more during the Houston leg of the series.

With Mulder out in favor of Julian Tavarez, Chris Burke singled home Berkman (a leadoff double, and third base on the house, courtesy of a wild pitch and a gutsy if offline throw from Molina playing the ball's carom off the backstop edge), the first time in the LCS that the Astros had cashed in a man in scoring position with a base hit unaided by the opponent. Then Adam Everett sent a 1-2 pitch sailing toward the left field fence.

Sanders took what seemed an awkward and slightly off-line turn and path toward the ball, reached for it on a short leap, and the ball hit off his glove as he twisted down on his left side and back, his head hitting the ground in a split second, on the warning track. He stayed on hands and knees in obvious pain as Edmonds scurried over from center field to back the play, pick up the ball, and keep Everett from an inside-the-park homer, even if he couldn't keep Burke from scoring the fourth Houston run or Brad Lidge from coming in to close the win in standard (for Lidge) fashion.

"A trainwreck," La Russa quoted a Cardinals' team doctor as saying of Sanders' immediate condition. As of this writing Sanders was listed as 50-50 at best to play Game Three in Houston Saturday. He hit his back, he hit his head, he's got sore spots all over his body,'' the manager continued. "He's bruised quite a bit all over and we'll see how he feels.'' Sanders had his own diagnosis. "I'll be fine," he said simply enough.

Both the Cardinals and the Astros could say the same things of themselves as they packed up for Houston. They were 50-50 in the series thus far, and they each believed they'd be fine.

—Jeff Kallman
Friday, October 14

THE HUSTLER’S HANDBOOK

ALCS GAME TWO: Chicago Black Sox 2, Angels 1 (Series tied, 1-1)

“The ball game isn’t over yet. But it’s a rigged ball game.”
—Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

What does it take to win in Chicago? In Comiskey, new Comiskey, where they haven’t yet won a division championship game at home? I’ll tell you what it takes: a special brand of small ball, we’ll call it grift-ball. To wit: take strike three, out three, ump called inning-over, and your catcher runs to first as if the ball was in the dirt. Only it wasn’t, everyone knows that. Except the ump, who seemed to change his mind at the last minute. Now that bastard catcher’s on first, the Angels are fuming. Suddenly there’s an extra out, then there’s a stolen base, finally a double, and the grift is on.

Should the Sox wind their way through the postseason, should they capitalize on the grift, Pierzynski’s going to be the king of Chicago, a guy right up there with Shoeless Joe… had Shoeless not been caught. Pierzynski was caught on television: strike three on a bad pitch, ball low, almost in the dirt but not quite, but A. J. bolts for first as if it bounced. The catcher knows it’s caught, heard the final out called, and then, before everyone knew it, Pierzynski’s at first, the ump’s saying he belongs there, and Los Angeles is back to being a cursed team. It’s over now: A. J. was replaced by one Pablo Ozuna, who stole second. Then Joe Crede blasts the phantom home, the man who should not have been there in the first place.

And Chicagoans know that A.J. just did what everyone would do: take something when no one’s looking.

Because sometimes it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get caught, but it also doesn’t matter if you steal in broad daylight and the cops are on the take and look the other way. It used to be that this is how it was in Chicago, during Prohibition, and maybe, just maybe, the horrible grifting soul of Southern Chicago took its rightful place. The old Roman, Mr. Comiskey himself, was an awful grifter, lousy to his players, who then wrecked the franchise forever with their grift. Now we’ve come full circle.

Think about how sweet this would seem: we can say all we want that it's best not to cheat, that umps should know better. Maybe they should... definitely they should. But for over eighty years your team, and your pop's team, and your grandad's team, and his dad's team, hell, they weren't as interesting as the Cubs. They sucked and always sucked and this year, when it didn't seem like anything would happen, out of nowhere comes these Sox. And God damn and raise a toast if they didn't take one of their games because a White Sox player was thinking with a bit of mischief. That'a lesson, right there. We gulp our beers and laugh and hit the bar and say, "don't know what lesson, but who cares?" No one in Chicago...

Again, this is a team without curses, but a team that looks like a penny criminal or a half-buck gambler whose streak of bad luck has run into the decades. Now, at least for a day, his number’s come in, and he’s hot on the wheel, found the right fence, got his wallet full for a change, and not with IOUs. For this was what makes that type of man: some talent, mostly hard work, and then that moment, when you’re paying attention and you take the chance and this time, for once, you got it.

I admire the con. It was a quick con, it took some thinking, it wasn’t a lumberheaded move like Alex Rodriguez trying to muscle a baseball out of a pitcher’s glove. This was a catcher who’d been grifted before, in San Francisco, and thought, why don't I do that? Steal when the stealing’s good.

Would we have dug this in Minnesota? Probably not, which is what frustrates me about this town.

They’ll say in the morning that it’s a lousy shame that a game as great as this one—and a 1-1 ninth inning tie with the White Sox pitcher readying himself for his 10th inning of play is a great game—should go down with controversy. No doubt the Angels will be fuming, Southern California will be fuming, and maybe even Bud Selig will be fuming. But A.J.’s not fuming. Neither is Ozzie Guillen or any of the White Sox, or the ghosts of Mr. Algren, Joe Jackson, or any of the faceless fans that sat in Comiskey, old and new, over the years (though perhaps the old Roman will be spinning in his grave… if anyone’s watching). It took that one little swipe to end the ball game, that and some legitimate ballplaying, a steal and an off-the-wall double. And maybe this is the nut that’s going to roll in the Angels chassis and drive them bonkers. Now they’re the ones who have to find the angle, find the grift, find the easy mark and make him. Him being the Chicago White Sox. It won’t be easy.

If that’s the way to take the trophy, you do it, I guess. Say you’re better than that, that you don’t play that way, and see where it gets you. Nothing in Chicago, anyway. Maybe it means something in Anaheim.

—Peter Schilling Jr.
Wednesday, October 12 (late)

ONE, TWO, THREE STRIKES—YOU'RE SAFE!

On a Wednesday night that already resembled a dress rehearsal for the annual day-after-Christmas gift exchange, the White Sox may or may not have been given the gift that may or may not keep on giving, depending on whether the Los Angeles Angels of 2005 shake off Doug Eddings's halting strikeout call that they thought meant side retired, rather than learn the wrong lessons from the St. Louis Cardinals of twenty years ago.

No number of replays would show anything short of what third-string Angels catcher Josh Paul caught Kelvim Escobar's dirt-diving pitch with either his upside-down mitt hitting the dirt at the split second the ball did, or the ball taking a nanosecond's hop up into the upside-down mitt web, or the ball landing just in the web.

What they will show, every last one of them, is Paul springing up from his crouch just so as he transferred the ball from his mitt to his throwing hand, after Pierzynski swung on and missed the pitch for the should-have-been inning-ending strikeout. They will show Paul taking a few steps to his right, toward the Angels' dugout in U.S. Cellular Field, as Pierzynski seemed at first to incline the other way, stepping over the plate and toward his own dugout, before turning and beginning to run toward first base as Paul to his right tossed the ball back toward the pitcher's mound.

They will show Doug Eddings, further, making one strikeout sign with his right fist, as Paul arose from his crouch moving right, and the second sign with his left fist right as Pierzynski wheeled around counterclockwise and started running up to first base while Paul tossed the ball rolling back toward the mound. But Pierzynski stood on first and no one among the umpiring crew gainsaid as Angels manager Mike Scioscia called for a conference and some crew chief help from Jerry Crawford in right field. The call stood pat and Pablo Ozuna now stood on first base as Pierzynski's pinch runner.

And then they will show two strikes to Joe Crede, the White Sox third baseman, and Ozuna on second after stealing on strike two called on the inside corner, before Escobar, trying to finish three innings of still-spotless relief, in spite of the apparently stolen strikeout, threw Crede a slider just under his belt buckle.

Crede merely belted a game-winning RBI double on a high line hopping off the left field fence, toward the corner. The Angels looked as though they had been bastinadoed, bound, and gagged while the management at their hotel ransacked their rooms for valuables in broad daylight. Moments later Mike Scioscia picked himself up, dusted himself off, shook it all off, presumably instructing his players to set about doing likewise, and started all over again.

Pierzynski himself was not entirely certain what happened on that play. "I thought the ball hit the ground and he didn't tag me," Pierzynski told Fox Sports field reporter Gary Myers under the howl of the U.S. Cellular Field audience lingering after it was over. Pierzynski had yet to see the replays that thousands had seen at least five or six times afterward. And the replays still showed either Paul trapping or Paul catching the ball right on the dirt.

Someone might have reminded Angels' starter Jarrod Washburn that gratitude for only one postseason game missed on a strep infection was no reason to shower the White Sox with an LCS gift of the earliest possible 1-0 lead, when their starting pitcher, Mark Buehrle, had six consecutive first-pitch strikes toward six straight outs to start Game Two.

He had leadoff hitter Scott Podsednik down 1-2 in the bottom of the first when the White Sox left fielder bounced one high back up to Washburn, who caught it cleanly and threw not too hard but not too straight, either, the ball sailing high, above, and off first baseman Darin Erstad's mitt, and far enough to the side to let Podsednik take second, be sacrificed to third, and sent home on a hard smash to shortstop.

Someone might have reminded Aaron Rowand, too, that just because the Angels bestowed his team such an unwarranted gift, there was no reason to show such gratitude as allowed him to get thrown out at the plate in the same sequence he had opened with a triple, with some aid and comfort from the enemy to get to third in the first place.

With Washburn still seeming somewhat on the drained side, Rowand lined a 3-2 pitch into the right field corner, Vladimir Guerrero chasing it and bobbling it as Rowand approached second and throwing as Rowand turned for third. The throw missed two cutoff men and bounded toward the foul line as Rowand arrived at third. But Robb Quinlan, playing third for the Angels on the evening, hustled to the line behind the infield, grabbed the ball as Rowand made for home, and fired down the line to catcher Bengie Molina in front of the plate, Molina wheeling and tagging Rowand dead on arrival.

Washburn from there swished Pierzynski on three pitches and got Crede to pop out to Guerrero for the side. They would hook up to commit revenge soon enough.

And someone else might have reminded Adam Kennedy, for good measure, that when a nonchalant White Sox shortstop hands his teammate ahead of him first base on the one-out house, returning the favor his pitcher had done the opponent two innings earlier, he is not supposed to dial the gift exchange department in Area Code 1-6-3.

Jose Molina with one out in the top of the third grounded hard enough to White Sox shortstop Jose Uribe on Mark Buehrle's first pitch, but having all night to make the play may have brought out the styler in Uribe, picking the ball as if his oxygen had been switched for ether and throwing it over first baseman Konerko's head for the error. But Kennedy swatted one right back to Buehrle and up and around went the double play for the side.

Molina, Kennedy, and Chone Figgins might have been reminded that it is not very nice when one of their buddies opens an inning tying the score, another follows up reaching base, and the best they can do to make it more meaningful a gift, off a pitcher spending the night portraying Sandy Koufax, is back-to-back forceouts and a liner to right to make it a low-level threat after all.

Quinlan opened the fifth driving a 1-0 pitch into the left field bleachers, and Erstad lined a two-strike hanger up the pipe for a followup single, but Molina bunted in front of the plate, Pierzynski fired up to Uribe, and the only thing keeping the Angels out of the double play was Erstad's side-rolling takeout slide, deadening Uribe's throw enough that Molina could have walked safely to first. Kennedy bounced one to White Sox second baseman Tadahito Iguchi playing in the hole and the best he could do was force Molina, before Figgins batting righthanded shot a liner to right looking for the gap but finding right fielder Jermaine Dye's mitt before it touched the ground for the side.

Considering the possible lingering weakness from the weekend's strep, Washburn pitched perhaps more beyond his capacity as the game got to the bottom of the fifth, but he began showing his draining when he walked Pierzynski to open the inning and surrendered Uribe a single to right one out later. He turned aside Podsednik on a popup outside the short third base line, Quinlan hustling down to take it for the second out, but he threw Iguchi a 2-2 fastball that ran inside all the way into the second baseman's side to load the bases and open the Angels' bullpen, from where Brendan Donnelly and Scot Shields kept the White Sox as frustrated as Buehrle was keeping the Angels.

And when the Angels were not frustrating the White Sox Eddings was, Konerko and Carl Everett taking no little umbrage at Eddings's demonstrative, double-clutch style of strikeout call, when Shields punched them out back-to-back in the bottom of the sixth, Konerko especially seeming to demand where on earth Eddings found the unmitigated gall to put on such a show right in his grille as he started back toward the White Sox dugout in apparent none-too-mute fury.

Escobar's cruise received a refueling from Anderson, whose alert stab of Uribe's one-out liner in the bottom of the seventh merely telegraphed his red alert throw in to second to nail Crede, who had reached on a one-out double off the left field wall and was caught leaning far enough off second on Uribe's liner to park a crane between himself and the pad.

Two innings and one aborted two-out strikeout later, Crede hit another double off the same wall, though quite a few feet left of that seventh-inning spot, and the circumstance would be considered as suspect as the potential consequences stood to be, depending upon who followed up how and in what state of mental clarity.

Either Pierzynski moving left and then turning around to run up the baseline obscured Eddings's vision a brief enough moment, or Eddings in that hour was simply not capable of owning up and saying that in all honesty, on further review, he really had no more idea of what happened than a lot of other people straining for objectivity in the contrapuntal cacophony of White Sox fans hollering safe and Angel fans demanding an indictment for grand theft.

Likely enough to be forgotten was that Escobar had started the bottom of the ninth getting Carl Everett to ground a two-strike pitch to Erstad unassisted before swishing Rowand on a pitch hitting the dirt with Paul tagging Rowand to finish the play. The most compelling reason why Paul did not lay a tag anywhere on Pierzynski could only have been his absolute faith that he had caught the ball cleanly enough.

"It can go either way," Crede said of what was yet to be, even in the wake of a call that will live in infamy enough, particularly if the Angels take it to seven games and lose that seventh game. "This is two real good teams battling each other. It's amazing how much rides on every pitch of this series." Especially those swung on and missed for third strikes in the bottom of the ninth.

—Jeff Kallman
Thursday, October 13

IN TOUCH WITH HIS INNER REG-GIE!

GAME ONE, NLCS: ST. LOUIS CARDINALS 5, HOUSTON ASTROS 3
(Feathers Lead Flyers, 1-0)

Perhaps compounding his actual or alleged crime in Chicago, Doug Eddings almost made people forget that there was a National League Championship Series beginning on Wednesday night. And that it involved the Houston Astros looking for revenge against the St. Louis Cardinals, who moved them aside a year earlier en route their own humbling by (of all people) the Boston Red Sox, and who are looking to say goodbye to their forty-year-old ballpark in grand style.

And Eddings's broken call on strike three against A.J. Pierzynski nearly made people forget that the Astros and the Cardinals got started behind a pair of pitchers who had missed last year's tango thanks to injuries, and that the Astros' starter could have been knocked out of at least his Game One start thanks to a freak pre-game accident.

There was nothing accidental, however, about a new (well, a previously unvetted) Reggie vying to overthrow an old Reggie for the Mr. October belt, the new Reggie wearing St. Louis silks and carrying ten runs batted in on his resume from the Cardinals' what-a-surprise division series sweep of the San Diego Padres.

With one swing in the bottom of the first, Reggie Sanders yanked a broad dent into what seemed going in a Houston psychological advantage, the Astros sending three luminescent arms—Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, and 20-game winner Roy Oswalt—to the Cardinals' one, 21-game winner Chris Carpenter. Carpenter had to help himself in the top of the first after Lance Berkman caught St. Louis center fielder Jim Edmonds on a rare perception lapse in center field, Edmonds briefly turning the wrong way as Berkman's two-out double over the middle sliced slight left as Edmonds angled toward right center, the ball diving past Edmonds to the wall. Carpenter then got Morgan Ensberg to bounce back to the mound for the side.

Then, no surprise here, either, David Eckstein, the Cardinals' resident pest, and probably hungering for a crack at the Los Angeles Angels in the World Series, just to show them what they were fool enough to let walk unmolested after last year, opened the St. Louis first batting righthanded against lefthander Pettitte and slapping a lofting liner the other way for a base hit. Two outs later, Pettitte left Sanders a 1-2 pitch right over the dish and Sanders served it right under the Busch Stadium auxiliary scoreboard over the left field press box.

The drive fattened Sanders's 2005 postseason credentials to one less RBI than he had audited for his entire previous postseason career. Entering these rounds Sanders had thirteen RBIs in 191 at-bats; planting Pettitte's unlikely meatball gave him twelve RBIs in thirteen at-bats for this postseason alone. The Astros could do no more than shake it off while wondering as the Padres before them where <i>he</i> suddenly made touch with his inner Reg-gie!

Sanders had not quite given the Cardinals everything they would need this night; they still needed Carpenter to make the Astros drive his cutters and sinkers into the dirt, not to mention dropping the suicide squeeze in the second inning that pushed home Mark Grudzielanek with the third Redbird run. And they still needed Superpest to single home Abraham Nunez and take second on the throw to the plate before coming home himself on Albert Pujols's single just off the pipe in the fifth.

It took the Astros seven innings to find a hole in Carpenter's shining armor and get any kind of runs for their starting pitcher, the syndrome which almost squeezed them out of the postseason, while Pettitte pitched little like the man who had been baseball's hottest arm in the season's final three months.

And it took the hero who got them here in the first place to find that hole. This time, after the Astros had squandered a few too many chances to get somewhere back into the game, Chris Burke pinch hit for a pitcher in considerably less than eighteen innings, batting for Pettitte with two out and Adam Everett (a one-out single just past a rightward-diving Eckstein at shortstop) on board, and driving one off the upper deck rim just inside the foul pole.

The Astros had punted a chance to make the score 3-2 in the top of the third, when Berkman—with one out and the bases loaded—hit nothing worse than a hard smash right into Grudzielanek's scoop, the second baseman spin-throwing to Eckstein at the pad, the pest stretching for the throw and having to bounce one to the maximum point toward which Pujols at first could stretch to finish Area Code 4-6-3.

Nunez, holding third base admirably enough for injured Scott Rolen, teamed up with the third of the Flying Molina Brothers playing this postseason to waste Morgan Ensberg's ground-rule double opening the top of the fourth. After Ensberg took third on an infield out, Everett chopped one sharply up the third base line, where Nunez fielded, turned as if to take the guarantee at first base, but whipped one down the line to Yadier Molina. The play had Ensberg so obviously dead that Molina could have mailed him the tag for the out.

Astros manager Phil Garner thought Pettitte tried to pitch through a mild swelling in his right knee. Pettitte had it in the first place thanks to nothing more suspicious than running the bases during a routine batting practice drill, only to be caught on the knee with a sharp line drive. He hustled into the clubhouse to get it tended without talking to anyone, while the Astros insisted he was in fine enough shape to go, but Pettitte refused to blame his Game One performance on it after the game. "It was a freak accident," the former Yankee standup man told reporters. "I saw it the whole time, I tried to jump over it, but it hit my knee."

There may be some who think that someone finding his inner Reg-gie! may be the freak accident of the postseason thus far. At least until the next time Sanders steps up and cranks. And he thinks it is not exactly enough on which to hang the fate of what remains of the free world. "Everything," he said gently after the game, "is about timing."

He should have been in Chicago.

—Jeff Kallman
Thursday, October 13

NELSON ALGREN DOESN'T CARE ABOUT A LOSS, WHY SHOULD WE?

ALCS GAME ONE: Anaheim Angels 3, Chicago White Sox 2 (Angels lead, 1-0)

There was an advertisement during last night's game, the usual "I Live For This" hokum, with some fellow high up in the stands yakking on about how the White Sox are all about the blue collar guy, whoever that may be. I don't know if it was the sign-bearing guy shouting "I Live For This!", who could barely see the game without a pair of binoculars I'm sure he couldn't afford, waving his sign and staring downfield at the poor millionaires trying their level best to win a game for that guy who has to work in the machine shop every day and Home Depot at night, because he's got to pay for his Ford F-150 that he just bought and that shines as bright as the moon he doesn't see for all the city around him. That's the grift: and Algren, a writer who knew grifts, would have dug it… if the principals were shifty little jerks on streetcorners. As it is, the grifters now are Bud Selig and Co., Ltd. They don't mingle among us.

But then again, there is no Algren and his pal Nephew, wandering around the Southside with their redwagon full of newspapers, debating the merits of baseball. There's also no curses here in the Southside, and I'd like to think that, for the most part, White Sox fans aren't buying this blue-collar hokum any more than they're buying curses. This is a jaded lot—at least the ones I spoke with last year and patronized in a mediocre article, desperately searching for a story—and one that I'd like to think doesn't enjoy—but doesn't care, either—that Fox and MLB are trying to milk a curse, trying to angle this team and its fans.

Last night saw two teams that I'd say look as though they were good and ready to get their bottoms reddened by the Cardinals or Astros in ten days time. Neither dominated, neither choked, one team capitalized and the other didn't. Supposedly, the White Sox have never won an ALCS game at home; Sciosca has never won game one of a playoff series. The latter ended, the former marches on. No one cares, because there's nothing to care about but the game itself. Number two is tonight.

That is baseball in the Southside of Chicago, and it's all a part of life's wonderful grift.

"Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint, you have to love it a little while." Nelson Algren certainly loved Chicago, and White Sox fans have loved and loathed their team and one another like husbands and wives love and loathe each other in their special way. This is healthy. This is not a crew that is going to bemoan curses and blow up baseballs like their counterparts to the north; nor will they, like Red Sox fans, urge their local writers to pen article after article on the "tragedy" of the team. If they win, all the more reason to roll out the keg full of beer, and if they lose, well, the keg's still cold, might as well drink it.

—Peter Schilling Jr.
Wednesday, October 12

SLEEPY TIME TIME

To those who hold that a little exhaustion never hurt anyone, it may be wise not to repeat that in the company of the Chicago White Sox, who must have been sick nigh unto death Tuesday from hearing how exhausted the Los Angeles Angels must have been coming in. Particularly because it turned out that the Angels played as though they had had three and a half days off before the first American League Championship Series game and the White Sox played as though they had flown two coast-to-coast redeyes playing three postseason baseball games from coast to coast to two-thirds coast in three days.

The Angels' silent assassin, Garret Anderson, was so exhausted that he lined up a pitch from Jose Contreras—a man who had not been beaten in ten consecutive starts—and hit one six rows up U.S. Cellular Field's right field bleachers to open the top of the second, putting the Angels up 1-0. Paul Byrd, the Angels' bearded starter was drained enough to start the game on three days' rest. Byrd kept the White Sox to a one-out solo homer in the bottom of the third (third baseman Joe Crede, sending one just over the left field fence) and a two-out RBI single (catcher A.J. Pierzynski, a one-hop liner to right) in six innings' work.

Steve Finley, Adam Kennedy, Chone Figgins, Orlando Cabrera, and Vladimir Guerrero were so wiped that they that built two more Angel runs an inning later before the White Sox had gotten anywhere near a single number, crooked or otherwise. That was an amazing piece of sleep-hitting Finley ripped to open the inning, spanking one through the hole past first for a base hit. It took Finley about two No-Doz and a quick pop of One-A-Day to kick his motors running—and manager Mike Scioscia half a pot of coffee to remember the hit and run sign—while Kennedy propped his eyes open with the toothpicks to shoot one past third for a base hit. Figgins sure did need that bucket of ice water over his ornery sleepy head to drop that bunt dead on arrival about five feet up the third base line to push Finley and Kennedy over a base.

Blink and you missed however they replenished Orlando Cabrera's energy supply, not to mention the oxygen tank they wheeled out to Finley at third, but that was Finley gunning it down the line as Cabrera swung and chopped one slow up the third base line, while wide-awake White Sox third baseman Joe Crede looked homeward a moment before taking the high hop and throwing to first late enough to award Cabrera an RBI infield hit.

Blink again and you missed whatever happy gas they blew into Vladimir Guerrero's wrung brain, chopping one back to Contreras with Kennedy on the run. Contreras wheeled and whipped to second for the out there, but now you could see just how beyond exhausted Cabrera really was. He dropped like a corpse into a dead man's slide that upended White Sox shortstop Jose Uribe to throw a sailer high and wide of first base, allowing the third Angel run to stand, which was surely better than the Angels themselves were, the tired darlings.

Yes, sir. Those Angels were so drained that they picked up where they left off with the Empire Emeritus, against whom they hit .366 with men in scoring position. Those White Sox were so wide awake that Dye popped up trying to bunt his way on for a hit in the sixth and Podsednik fouled two bunts before Shields punched him out with the leadoff hitter on first in the eighth. And the Angels plan at this writing to send Jarrod Washburn—he whose simmering fever and strep infection knocked him out of a fourth-game division series start—out to start Game Two against Mark Buerhle.

And, they beat the White Sox at the White Sox's reputed game, regarding which there are two things forgotten easily in the glare of Ozzie Guillen's effervescent sesquipedalic arglebargle: 1) The Angels under Mike Scioscia's command played and won with a brand of small ball (I have called it Angelball) when the White Sox were still trying to find a way to keep the Minnesota Twins' hands off the American League Central tiller; and, 2) The White Sox are not quite as small ball-dominant as Guillen and his charges would have you believe. They hit 200 or more bombs for the sixth consecutive season and, among American League division series teams, rolled up the fattest team slugging percentage (.500), 65 points higher than the second-best ALDS slugging average. (You guessed it: the Angels, at .435. The Red Sox slugged .413; the Yankees, .392.)

Exhausted Angels are the last thing the White Sox need Wednesday night in front of the home folks. If you are Ozzie Guillen, after Game One you want the Angels wide awake. They are dangerous on less than four hours' sleep.

—Jeff Kallman
Wednesday, October 12

The Catcher Was A Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff