The regular season began and ended at Bill Veeck Stadium with a Bo Jackson home run. Once a Sox fan accepted the idea of a man with an artificial hip playing baseball at all–much less hitting home runs–there was something neat and tidy and almost foreordained about that, which is pretty much how the White Sox’s first-place finish seemed when the season was over. The best team won; how many years was it supposed to take, anyway?
Nevertheless, the season seemed to teeter on the edge that Friday night. The Sox were sending their weakest starter, Tim Belcher, against the Rangers’ best, Kevin Brown. Belcher was an essential part of the 1988 Los Angeles Dodgers who upset the A’s in five games in the World Series, with Belcher 3-0 in the postseason. But he blew his shoulder out in 1990 and has never been the same. The Sox acquired him in August for a couple of lesser phenoms, but he hadn’t quite given them what they expected. By that night it had already been announced that Alvarez and Bere would be the third and fourth starters in the playoffs, with Belcher in the bull pen.
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After that, Brown settled down and Belcher tried to hang on. He took a shutout into the seventh inning, when he gave up hits to the first two batters. Kirk McCaskill allowed both those inherited runners to score, but the Sox still took a 4-2 lead to the ninth, when Hernandez came in from the bull pen.
Yet Fernandez couldn’t pull off the clinching sweep in the nightcap. He tired and surrendered a pair of runs in the eighth that broke a 1-1 tie. The Sox responded right away with a run to make it 3-2, and they had the winning run on in the bottom of the ninth, but Cora’s dying, potentially game-winning pop fly was snagged by Texas center fielder Donald Harris to end the game. Harris responded as if the Rangers had clinched.
Just another miracle.
