Frosty air puffed from every South Side mouth. An April shower soaked the White Sox from first pitch to last. The base paths were made of mud.
Gavin Floyd’s goal was to throw pitches and not catch pneumonia. He said he looked up at the sky from a U.S. Cellular Field bullpen on a 39-degree Saturday morning and hoped for the team’s sake, “I’d just like to keep us in the game.”
What more to expect he had no way of knowing.
He couldn’t know that his 10th victory as a major-leaguer would be a memorable 7-0 one over the Detroit Tigers.
He couldn’t know how masterful he would be, how hard it would be for a Tiger’s wood to hit him.
In the first inning, Carlos Quentin caught a Magglio Ordonez fly ball and then banged into the left-field wall.
“Great catch,” Floyd said. “He probably didn’t even know the wall was out there.”
In the second inning, Joe Crede went face first into a messy infield, gloved a Miguel Cabrera grounder and gunned him out.
In the third inning, Nick Swisher squished through wet grass to the center-field fence for a Pudge Rodriguez fly and made a basket catch.
The wet Sox were going to have Floyd’s back all the way.
In the fourth inning, this 25-year-old pitcher with a mere 30 big-league starts had a murderer’s row of Gary Sheffield, Ordonez and Cabrera dig in at the batter’s box. His last strike caught Cabrera looking.
“You could see his confidence grow,” said A.J. Pierzynski, the catcher calling Floyd’s pitches.
In the fifth inning, the umpire hit him.
Floyd looked away for a second with a 2-and-2 count on Rodriguez. Plate ump Doug Eddings promptly beaned him with a new, dry ball.
He retired the side 1-2-3 and returned to the Sox dugout, only to hear a fan yell: “Hey, you got a no-hitter going.”
“Oh, thanks,” Floyd said, rolling his eyes.
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But many in the announced crowd of 29,649 were chanting words not heard from Sox fans before: “Let’s go, Gavin. Let’s go, Gavin.”
In the sixth inning, he set down Detroit’s side 1-2-3 again. He was wet, cold and getting tired, but he hadn’t even thrown 80 pitches yet.
“And we’re out there playing in sleet,” Sox first baseman Paul Konerko said, “or whatever it was.”
The score was 1-0, and the home team had only a couple of hits off Justin Verlander at this point. The rain was relentless, and most of the hitters were hitless.
“The balls got cold and slick,” Verlander said. “I couldn’t feel the ball in the eighth inning. It felt like they were from a freezer.”
With frozen fingers, a pitch got away from Verlander and struck Orlando Cabrera in the helmet.
“Both teams had to play in it, and both teams got through it,” Pierzynski said. “Gavin pitched unbelievable, and Verlander matched him almost pitch-for-pitch.”
In the seventh inning, Boone Logan and Octavio Dotel began to warm up in the Sox bullpen, just in case.
Up they came again: Sheffield, Ordonez, Cabrera.
But down went the Tigers like pussycats: Flyout, strikeout, groundout.
In the eighth, Scott Linebrink was told to get loose.
But as soon as Detroit’s Jacque Jones went down swinging on Floyd’s 100th pitch, Linebrink stopped throwing. He leaned a hand against the bullpen fence, looking up.
“What are you doing?” a coach asked him.
“Oh, just checking out the scoreboard,” Linebrink said.
Particularly at the big zero under the big “H.”
It was six days shy of a year since Mark Buehrle’s no-hitter in this same park. Another one was five outs away.
“You want him to get it,” Konerko said, “but at the same time, you don’t want him to go after it so much that you lose the lead and lose the game. Especially out in that stuff. That field, it’s a wonder nobody got hurt.”
Three pitches later, Edgar Renteria lined a clean single to right-center field. It was 1:51 p.m.
At 1:52, Floyd came out of the game.
Fans gave him a standing O. If he had pitched a no-hitter, the Sox would have built a statue of him. This team creates more statues than Michelangelo and Rodin did.
Linebrink kept the Tigers at bay. Then so did Bobby Jenks, though not before doing a belly slide into the damp grass like a Sea World seal.
“I was trying not to laugh at him,” Konerko said, “but then he started laughing.”
It was as much fun as they could have on a day like this.
Two of a kind?
Gavin Floyd and John Danks, the two biggest question marks in the Sox rotation entering the season, have turned in quality starts in three of their combined four outings so far. In fact, each has flirted with a no-hitter: Floyd on Saturday and Danks on April 3 in Cleveland. Here’s a look:
%% IP H R ER BB SO NP Floyd 7 1/3 1 0 0 4 4 107 Danks 6 2/3 2 1 1 2 2 87 %%
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