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White Sox 6, Cubs 0: Even The Seagulls Are Giving Cubs The Bird

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There was a true highlight for longtime Chicago Cubs fans today during their team’s series-ending game with the crosstown rival White Sox. Unfortunately, it occurred during the 7th inning stretch, when 69-year-old Ferguson Jenkins — a Hall of Fame pitcher who starred for the Cubs from 1966 to 1972 and played for the team again 1982-83 — led the crowd in the ritual singing of Take Me Out to the Ballgame. The struggling 2012 version of the Cubs did not have nearly as good a day as Fergie did. The Cubs lost 6-0, squandering the few chances they had to score while the Sox jumped on their opportunities — which included home runs by Gordon Beckham, Adam Dunn and Tyler Flowers, the first two hit back to back starting the 4th inning to break what had been a scoreless tie.

The Cubs’ loss enabled the White Sox to sweep the three-game series at Wrigley (the teams meets again for three games at U.S. Cellular Field, aka Sox Park, June 18-20) and scratch their way back to a .500 record at 21-21. Nothing much to write home about, but mediocrity looks pretty awesome here on the North Side of town.

The Cubs have now lost five in a row, all at home. And after seeming for a few weeks to move in the right direction toward reversing their atrocious 4-12 season start, they have backslid to a record of 15-26, the worst in the National League.

It has gotten so bad that the Cubs can’t even get respect from the local seagulls. These scavengers like to invade the ballpark in search of scraps of leftover food, but they usually wait until the game is over and the players and the crowds have cleared. Not so today, when center field was invaded in the bottom of the 9th inning by a flock of seagulls. No, not the 1980s rock group who sang, “I Ran So Far Away.” A real flock of seagulls…

With the deeply slumping Cubs at the plate, the birds legitimately had little worry that they would be hit with a batted ball. And they were not.

The Cubs have certainly had plenty of bad weeks over the years, and this was one of them. I’m sure Tom Ricketts, seen here mingling with fans today as he has been wont to do since he and his super-wealthy family bought the team prior to the 2010 season, thought it would be cool to run a major league baseball team, and it probably is most of the time. But this was not one of those weeks.

Ricketts, in the blue long-sleeved shirt and khakis, schmoozing with fans behind home plate.

First, the Cubs came home for their short five-game stand, and lost the first game to the Philadelphia Phillies (another game that I attended). The Cubs actually took a 2-1 lead with one out in the 4th on a two-run homer by Alfonso Soriano… then did not get another base runner for the entire remainder of the game: 17 up, 17 down. A good starting performance by Matt Garza kept the game close through seven, but the Phils took a 3-2 lead in the 8th, and then blew the game open against the bullpen with six runs in the 9th for a 9-2 win.

The Cubs then got splashed with the controversy that broke out with publication in the New York Times of a leaked proposal, produced for a “Super PAC” founded by Joe Ricketts, Tom Ricketts’ father, who established the family’s fortune as founder of the Ameritrade investment firm. The proposal involved running inflammatory negative ads against President Obama during this year’s election campaign.

Joe Ricketts quickly disowned the plan and Tom Ricketts said he and his team have nothing to do with politics. But the flap put at serious risk any hopes the ownership had of persuading the city of Chicago to kick in nine figures worth of taxpayers’ dollars to help renovate Wrigley Field, an iconic ballpark that is nearly a century old and badly in need of an overhaul.

This is in part because the city is run by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat and former White House chief of staff to Obama, who was said by the local press to be livid about the reported ad proposal, and in part because the ball team the Rickettses bought happens to be located in a heavily Democratic section of one of the nation’s most heavily Democratic-voting city, which also happens to be Obama’s hometown. Can you say faux pas?

The Cubs then lost again to the Phillies, 8-7, with a four-run 9th inning rally falling one run short, amid reports that star-crossed Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood, off to a terrible start this season, planned to retire after pitching in one last game at Wrigley. That occurred at the opening of the Sox series Friday when Wood came in as a reliever, struck out the only batter he faced, then called it a career.

Kerry Wood on the mound during the Cubs' Opening Day game April 5 against the Washington Nationals. Though Wood pitched decently in relief last season, he struggled immediately this year. Entering that game with one out and one on in the 8th and the Cubs leading 1-0, Wood walked three batters in a row to force in the tying run.

Wood’s last hurrah was one of those moments of pure baseball magic. He walked off to a standing ovation from the crowd, with the White Sox players applauding along with his Cubs teammates. Wood’s little son ran onto the field from the Cubs dugout to embrace him. Wood went into the dugout, then re-emerged to tip his hat to the crowd.

But it also was a bittersweet moment, a reminder of great athletic promise derailed by injuries. Wood came up with the Cubs at age 20 in 1998 and set the baseball world on fire in his fifth start, at Wrigley against the Houston Astros, in which he struck out a record-tying 20 batters while pitching a one-hit shutout — regarded by some experts as the greatest one-game pitching performance in major league baseball’s history. But after going 13-6 with 233 strikeouts in 166 innings, Wood turned up injured during spring training the next year and needed the elbow ligament replacement known as Tommy John surgery.

Wood came back and had a few more good years, especially in 2003, the year the Cubs almost got to the World Series, in which he had a modest record of 14-11 but led the major leagues in strikeouts with 266. But more injuries and more trips to the disabled list  led to a sharp decline. By 2007, he was a full-time reliever. He had some success as a closer for the Cubs in 2008 and for the Cleveland Indians in 2009,  and pitched very well during an end-of-season stint with the New York Yankees in 2010.

He was just okay, though, in his return to the Cubs last year, and he got off to such a poor start this year — 0-2 record, 8.31 earned run average, 11 walks to just six strikeouts in 8 and two-thirds innings — that he uncharacteristically lost his temper, threw his glove and hat into the stands after a brief rough outing on May 8, and cursed at a reporter who brought it up after the game.

And as you already have figured out, the Cubs lost Wood’s last game to the White Sox, 3-2, then lost on Saturday 7-4 (scoring all of their runs on a pair of two-run homers in the bottom of the 9th), and then got blanked Sunday with the win going to Jake Peavy, a former ace for the San Diego Padres who is making a strong comeback after a couple of injury-plagued seasons with the Sox.

The Cubs now go on the road for three games each against Houston and the Pittsburgh Pirates, both sub-.500 NL Central teams who they must be better than if they are going to escape last place this season.

Here are some additional photos from Sunday’s game.

Cubs starter Pat Maholm deals the first pitch to Alejandro De Aza of the White Sox. Maholm, obtained from Pittsburgh during the off-season, had been one of the Cubs' most successful pitchers of late, but three loud homers Sunday contributed to a five-run, nine-hit performance over 6-1/3 innings.

Gordon Beckham, the Sox' second baseman, has struggled at the plate this season, batting .207, and he grounded out to short in his first at-bat.

But leading off the 4th in a scoreless tie, Beckham blasted a long home run just inside the left field foul pole. With another round-tripper he hit on Friday, Beckham now has half of his four homers for the season at Wrigley.

White Sox slugger Adam Dunn then made it back-to-back by connecting with this mighty swing for his 14th homer this season. Dunn is looking so far like a candidate for Comeback Player of the Year. After leaving the Washington Nationals -- where he'd hit 38 homers each in consecutive seasons and batted better than .260 -- and signing a big free-agent contract with the Sox, Dunn had a disastrous 2011 debut in Chicago, hitting .159 with just 11 homers and 42 rbi. Over 42 games this year, Dunn already has topped last year's hr total by three, has 32 rbi and is batting .247.

Wrigley Field's famous hand-operated scoreboard tells a tale sad but all too common for Cubs fans.

 

 

A Day Of Weather, Baseball, Barb, Beer and Books: My Life In A Nutshell

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I have a pretty wide range of interests and keep myself very busy pursuing them. But it’s rare for me to pack quite as many different elements into a single day as I did yesterday. There was weather wonkiness and baseball, both experienced with Barb at U.S. Cellular Field, where we ate some pretty decent ballpark food and got to spend time with a Michigan State friend. Then in the evening, I attended an event staged by the ChicagoSide sports website featuring Jim Abbott, whose new autobiography focuses on his inspiring success at overcoming a significant disability to star as a baseball pitcher in the 1980s and ’90s. Craft-brewed beer was consumed at both venues.

Add in a couple of purring sessions by Gracie the Cat, and I think you’ve pretty much got my life in a nutshell.

Tuesday happened to be Weather Day at the stadium with the tongue-twisting name that I prefer to call Sox Park. The featured speaker was Tom Skilling, the popular veteran chief meteorologist for WGN television here in Chicago.

Although Barb likes baseball and grew up south of Chicago as a White Sox fan, there usually has to be a persuasive reason for her to actually attend a game. The presence of Tom Skilling — of whom we are both fans and on whose forecasts we relied for years in planning our many trips to and from Chicago — was justification enough.

Skilling did a talk, accompanied by videos played on the outfield Jumbotron, about how everyone in the Midwest needs to be aware of the destructive capacity of tornadoes, and warned that while twisters are rare within the city of Chicago, they can occur.

The audience was mainly young children on class trips, and we were among the few adults who were not either teachers or chaperones. That made the event even more fun, though, as long lines of kids queued up to ask Skilling some really bright questions. It was clear that these students had been well prepared for this weather chat.

Now before the event started, Barb availed herself of the opportunity to have her photo taken with Southpaw, the team’s mascot. It’s not quite clear what Southpaw is, but when the team name is the White Sox, the options for a more literal-minded mascot are pretty limited.

One thing we quickly learned, though, is that Southpaw is incredibly fickle.

U.S. Cellular Field, opened in 1991, lacks the charm of ancient Wrigley Field on the North Side (to say the least), but its seats are more comfortable, the sightlines for the game are decent, and the food at this ballpark lives up to its reputation as being among one of the best in major league baseball. We both had hearty barbecue sandwiches (one brisket, the other pulled pork) with kettle chips, and enjoyed one of Sox park’s more esoteric treats: elote, a Mexican street food made up of fresh cooked corn kernels stripped off the cob and flavored with butter, mayo, lime juice, salt and chili powder. As good as the sandwiches were, I could seriously eaten that elote all day.

This was washed down by an excellent Mad Hatter IPA from the New Holland brewery in Holland, Michigan. One area in which Sox Park has it all over Wrigley is in its offerings of Midwest microbrews.

We were joined for a couple of innings by Courtney Cawley, one of my colleagues on the board of the Michigan State alumni club of Chicago, who works at U.S. Cellular Field for its  catering company, Levy Restaurants. I mention this mainly to provide a shameless plug. Courtney is a planner who stages great events at the ballpark’s restaurant facilities, so if you have a conference, wedding, bar mitzvah or other big to-do coming up, contact her.

Now as far as the ballgame itself… my favorite kind of game is well-pitched and played at a crisp pace. Unfortunately, Tuesday’s game, which ended with a 10-8 victory for the visiting Detroit Tigers, was anything but that.

The White Sox actually built a 6-0 lead after five innings as Tigers starter Max Scherzer, who is off to a rough start this season, continued his struggles, throwing 99 pitches before he was pulled two batters into the Chicago 5th. Here the Sox have the bases loaded in the first inning, shortly before veteran catcher A.J. Pierzynski singled home Alejandro De Aza and Gordon Beckham with the game’s first two runs.

Sox batting star Paul Konerko, who is leading off first base in the photo, was left stranded that inning, but took matters into his own hands in the 3rd by belting a home run, his seventh in a season in which he has a sparkling .344 batting average.

The Sox might have felt confident, and perhaps a bit overconfident, with the 6-0 lead they built, since their starting pitcher was Jake Peavy, the one-time ace of the San Diego Padres who had been making a smart comeback early this season after struggling with injuries during his first two seasons after being obtained by the Sox. But Peavy, who weaved his way out of trouble at times earlier in the game suddenly lost it in the 6th…in which the Tigers piled on eight runs to take the lead.

It started innocently enough with a single by the Tigers’ Andy Dirks, but then slugger Miguel Cabrera broke the ice with a bomb of a home run deep into the left-field bleachers.

After a double by prize free-agent acquisition Prince Fielder, Peavy got a ground out, but then hit Brennan Boesch with a pitch. That set up the moment that showed the wheels had totally fallen off, as Tigers second baseman Ryan Raburn — sporting a batting average in the .140s with no home runs and two runs batted in on the season — blasted a three-run homer to dead centerfield to make the score 6-5. Peavy was left in to face one more batter, Jhonny Peralta… who he made his second Hit By Pitch of the inning.

While many in the stands scratched their heads about why first-year manager Robin Ventura left the fading Peavy in for so long, the subsequent performance by journeyman reliever Will Ohman may have provided an unfortunate explanation. Ohman continued the bizarre sequence by hitting the first batter he faced, pinch-hitter Delmon Young. He then squandered the little that was left of the Sox’ lead by surrendering a three-run home run to Tigers centerfielder Austin Jackson, the fifth of what has been a breakout season for him so far.

Ohman finally put this fire out, but started another in the 7th inning by putting two runners on with one out. Singles by Raburn and Peralta plated the Tigers’ final two runs of the game.

The Sox did manage to make it interesting by scoring two runs in the bottom of the 9th on a two-out double by shortstop Alexei Ramirez that brought home Konerko and Pierzynski and put the potential tying runs on second and third. But a flyout to right by Dayan Viciedo ended a long and frustrating afternoon for the Sox.

The win brought the Tigers, struggling to justify their pre-season hype as the prohibitive favorite to win the American League Central, back to .500 at 18-18, two games behind surprise division leader Cleveland. The Sox were 17-20, in third place, three and a half games behind the Indians.

I’ll follow up with some words about Tuesday night’s Jim Abbott event, but I’ve got to go now…. so I can stroll over to Wrigley Field for tonight’s game between the Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies.

I do love me some baseball.

White Sox Baseball: A Day In ‘The Cell’ Was No Ordeal

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No one who has been reading this blog will be surprised when I say that I’ll be spending a lot more of my baseball time and money at Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, than at U.S. Cellular Field, home of the city’s other major league team, the White Sox.

I have loved going to games at Wrigley, a quaint baseball antique, since I attended my first game there nearly 30 years ago, so much that somewhere along the way I started rooting for the Cubs. The Cell, as the successor stadium to the Sox’ old Comiskey Park is known, opened in 1991 and seriously lacks the charm that makes the nearly century-old North Side ballpark a major tourist attraction.

Then there is the convenience factor. It is sheer coincidence that we ended up moving so close to Wrigley Field, but I can take a leisurely 15-minute stroll there and go to a baseball game. Or I can walk one block short of Wrigley, get on the Red Line train at the Addison stop, and take a 10-mile schlep through downtown to Sox Park (a tag favored by many over the tongue-tying name that resulted after the U.S. Cellular phone company bought the naming rights years ago).

If I hadn’t arrived in Chicago pre-packaged as a Cubs fan, the easy access to Wrigley Field probably would have been the tipping point.

But now I’m going to say something that some might find shocking. I do not hate the White Sox, although I may be required by statute to do so if I want to call myself a Cubs fan for the rest of my life.

And I had a nice time at this year’s first U.S. Cellular experience, Saturday’s game in which the White Sox defeated the Detroit Tigers, 5-1 (though admittedly this was enhanced by the fact that it was a field trip organized by the Michigan State University Alumni Club of Metro Chicago and I was surrounded by fellow Spartans, most of whom grew up in or near Detroit and were rooting for the visiting team).

U.S. Cellular Field was the last conventional, big-old-ballpark built before Camden Yards, the Baltimore Orioles’ stadium that opened in 1992, became the template for the more compact and idiosyncratic “retro” stadiums based on old-timey places such as Wrigley and Boston’s Fenway Park. Located at 35th and Shields streets on the South Side, it looms large over the adjacent Dan Ryan Expressway.

There is a big banner on the side of the stadium that salutes the World Series championship that the White Sox won in 2005. Granted it was the team’s first crown since 1917, and the crosstown rival Cubs are still nursing a historic streak of no championships since 1908 (and not even a trip to the World Series since 1945). But there are some folks who believe the Sox and their fans remain a little too fixated on an event that occurred seven years ago now: Ben Strauss of the ChicagoSide sports site has an interesting perspective in his piece, “Excessive Commemoration at US Cellular.”

But the Cell makes up at least somewhat for its charm deficit with a few more creature comforts than Wrigley. The seats are a bit more comfortable, the aisles a bit wider. There are fewer seats with bad sightlines, in part because, unlike Wrigley, there are no steel support posts to create obstructed views. These are among the reasons why Mrs. B — who is naturally inclined anyway to favor the Sox because she grew up in a family of the team’s fans in a town south of Chicago — prefers to go to games at U.S. Cellular than Wrigley, much as it breaks my heart to admit that.

Sox Park has been known since it opened for having one of the better food concessions among major league ballparks, and the selection of beers, including some nice craft brews, is much wider than at the Cubs’ field.

That said, the Cell is a big place and you are likely to feel farther from the action than at the Cubs’ little bandbox. Our seats in the lower level in the left field corner were perfectly acceptable, but felt really far from home plate. The following, which shows Sox pitcher Gavin Floyd throwing to Tigers leadoff hitter Austin Jackson, was as close as I could get even with my telephoto lens maxed out.

We did have a good view of the outfield play. Here’s Jackson settling under a White Sox fly ball in the early going.

Floyd ended up picking up credit for the win by containing a powerful Detroit lineup that includes the massive Prince Fielder, the slugging first baseman who they lured away from the Milwaukee Brewers with a huge contract this past off-season.

Floyd pitched six shutout innings, holding the Tigers to three hits and striking out six batters. He did have to weather some control problems, as he walked three Detroiters and hit three more with pitches.

The Sox are hardly tearing the cover off the ball — they rank 19th in batting average and 24th in run production among the 30 major league teams — but decent pitching and some timely, if very occasional, hitting has them at 5-3 in the early season going, even after the Tigers — the team widely favored to win the American League Central Division that they share with Chicago — salvaged one of the three games in the weekend series with a win on Sunday that put them back in first place with a record of 6-3.

The White Sox on Saturday got three solo home runs, from shortstop Alexei Ramirez, backup catcher Tyler Flowers, and veteran star first baseman Paul Konerko, seen here completing his tour of the bases.

Meanwhile, Adam Dunn chipped in with a double in four at-bats…

… though his performance in the season’s first week has hardly quelled concerns about the multi-multi-million contract to which the team signed him prior to the 2011 season. After averaging about 40 home runs and 100 runs batted in per year from 2004 through 2010 playing for the Cincinnati Reds, Arizona Diamondbacks and Washington Nationals, Dunn was a colossal flop in his first season with the Sox, batting .159 on the season with 11 home runs and 42 RBI.

While his .233 batting average after hitting two more doubles on Sunday looks pretty meh for a player who is being paid big bucks to carry his team’s offense, it is almost half again as high as his season average last year.

But Saturday, a day on which White Sox pitchers held the Tigers to one run on an eighth-inning homer by outfielder Brennan Boesch, was one on which the team didn’t need a ton of offense. Here’s closer Matt Thornton retiring Detroit pinch-hitter Brandon Inge on a ground ball to the mound for the game’s last out.

And the final verdict…