The mood around the White Sox at the end of the season was dominated by a severe and almost tangible sense of loss. Another in a series of career years from Frank Thomas; 101 runs batted in from comeback-of-the-year candidate Danny Tartabull; the first 30-homer, 100-RBI season from Robin Ventura; unthinkable campaigns by 37-year-olds Harold Baines and Tony Phillips; a marvelous season, offensively and defensively (at several different positions), out of Dave Martinez; Ray Durham establishing himself in the majors; Alex Fernandez silencing doubts about whether he was a legitimate ace and a big-game pitcher; Roberto Hernandez bouncing back to regain his position as one of the dominant closers in the game; and even Terry Bevington’s early season job reinvigorating the players and instilling an appreciation for the fundamentals–all wasted. This was a team that should have made the playoffs. Instead their best efforts were squandered, and there is talk that the still-promising nucleus of what was to be “the team of the 90s” will be disassembled and dispersed. There were two possible responses for Sox fans: apathy and anger. The apathetic stayed home; the angry went out to the ball game.
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We visited Comiskey Park for what turned out to be the final time this season two weeks ago last Tuesday. At the time the Sox were only three games behind the Baltimore Orioles with 11 to play in the race for the wild card playoff spot in the American League, but there was already a sense of doom about the club–a feeling reminiscent of what Jack Brickhouse used to call “a snakebitten Cub ball team” in the late 60s and early 70s, when the Cubs were squandering their prodigious talents on a yearly basis. We can debate all winter the primary source of that doom–whether it was Bevington’s claustrophobic intensity or general manager Ron Schueler’s flawed blueprint (not enough pitching depth; a wrongheaded decision to let Lance Johnson go) or owner Jerry Reinsdorf’s karma or (the answer we like least) the talent and character of the players. Yet there’s little doubt in our mind that doom was made most manifest in the Labor Day game at Comiskey against the Detroit Tigers. The Sox were leading the wild card race at the time, and they went into the ninth leading the Tigers. A few bleeder hits off Hernandez put the lead in jeopardy, and with the tying run on second base and one out, the Tigers got another hit. Phillips fielded the ball in left field and fired it home. Newly acquired catcher Pat Borders blocked the plate, knocked down runner and ball, fell on the runner to the side of home, seized the ball, and tagged him out to preserve the lead. The next hitter, Travis Fryman, worked the count full with the help of some foul balls. The fans were on their feet awaiting the final pitch of the game when Fryman smacked a Hernandez fastball into the left-field seats to deal the Sox a crushing loss.
But the most discouraging thing, where the Sox were concerned, had to be when the Indians came out and started stretching in front of their dugout as the Sox finished batting practice. Among their ranks were Jack McDowell, Julio Franco, and Paul Assenmacher, all of them members of the 1994 Sox team that was headed for the playoffs before the strike, all of them since hired by the Tribe as off-season free agents at wages higher than they were paid here in Chicago. McDowell, in fact, had beaten the Sox the night before in a typically gritty performance, despite falling behind early on a homer by Thomas. (That was a regular occurrence during those nine games and down the stretch; over the last 20 games of the season, Thomas hit 10 homers, drove in 20 runs, and batted .350, at one point bashing eight homers in nine games. How’s that for hitting in pressure situations?) Yet McDowell rallied himself to hold on for a 4-3 complete-game victory. His scowl in the ninth was hauntingly familiar, and afterward Thomas paid him the ultimate compliment by saying his must-win attitude on the mound was what the Sox had been missing most.
Over the next ten days we kept an eye on the White Sox, waiting for them to make a move on the Orioles, but it never happened. By that time apathy had overwhelmed our anger, but the anger resurfaced whenever we tuned in the Sox on TV or whenever we looked at the season statistics. Fernandez finished 16-10 and had one of the best earned-run averages in the league. Hernandez saved 38 games. Wilson Alvarez won 15, Kevin Tapani 13, and James Baldwin 11, though all three struggled down the stretch. Hernandez aside, the bull pen also struggled as the year went on. Was it overworked early? We don’t know about that, but we do know that Bevington was asking for trouble when he pitched Bill Simas two-plus innings in a Saturday win in Boston in the middle of that critical nine-game stretch, then brought him back the next afternoon to defend a 9-8 lead. Simas allowed a game-tying homer and the White Sox lost in extra innings, squandering a three-homer game by Thomas in the most wasteful single event of a long and wasteful season.
