Rate Field, Chicago (MLB #20 -- How rain delays are like baseball games themselves)

 

 

Like baseball games themselves, every rain delay is different in sometimes subtle, but usually interesting, ways. 

For this game, we spent close to a full eight-hour work day at the stadium to see a nine-inning game. That sounds like it could be horrific, but we had a good evening. Or maybe I should say shift.

We got to the stadium at about 5:15, shortly after the gates opened for the scheduled 6:40 opening pitch. About 15 minutes before the scheduled first pitch, the grounds crew covered the field with the tarp (they were more adept, hence less entertaining, than the crew at the AAA game at Memphis). Soon it started raining, hard. At about 8:45 or 9, more than two hours after the scheduled first pitch, the rain stopped, the tarp was removed, and they announced that first pitch would be at 9:40, exactly three hours after it was originally scheduled. 

At that point, our two guests for the evening, Brianna and Joe, decided to leave, since Joe had to be up at 4:45 a.m. to get to his 24-hour shift as a firefighter. Brianna is the daughter of Kerry's best friend, so we've known her since she was in grade school, and Joe is her fiancee, as of two days earlier, so we had never met him. Three hours of conversation with friends old and new is great, even if it's pouring cats and dogs a few feet away.

The game then took not quite three hours. Then it took us awhile to find the designated rideshare area, and longer for a rideshare to find it (we ultimately took a cab who failed to hook up with his ride, too), so we left the stadium at almost exactly 1 a.m. I haven't figured out why taking a rideshare from a baseball stadium doesn't ever seem to work. I thought it might be that there are so many people trying to do it at the same time, but tonight that wasn't the issue. Being stubborn, we're going to try it again tonight, using lessons learned from last night. Stay tuned.

Rewards for staying 

One thing I liked about this rain delay was that the White Sox decided they ought to reward the folks who stuck around, which I thought was a very civilized approach. 

It was a sparse crowd to start with. Probably half about the 11,000 tickets sold were to people accompanied by their pooches for "Dog Days." I often walk a lap around the concourse when I get to the stadium, and count how many people are wearing the gear of each of the teams playing. It can be a challenge with a big crowd, but my lap through Rate Field was pretty quiet. It did take us through the designated dog area before the game, and the number of dogs with White Sox gear on was as high as the number of people, both about 10. Though I later saw a handful of people with Angels' gear on they must not have shown up that early.

As the rain delay wore on, many of the folks with dogs, and many of the others, left. When they announced the new first pitch time, they asked everyone to leave the upper deck, and sit anywhere in the lower deck that they could find. We stayed where we were, just under the overhang of the second deck, a popular location, but some people went down to the seats closer to the field, and wiped them off. I'm sure that was fine once you got the seat dry, but since we had nearly an inch of rain, I'm sure there were still puddles under the seats.

A few minutes before first pitch, they passed through the crowd, passing out free T-shirts from their TV affiliate. The White Sox haven't been drawing very well for the last few years, so I suspect that they have had a lot of giveaway days where they've ended up with extra T-shirts and caps, so what are you going to do with them? Why not give them to the faithful on a long, long night?

A few innings into the game, a few White Sox employees showed up with a big box of baseball caps, from some other promotion. Although I loved the concept, I don't need more baseball caps, but Kerry went and got one for Brianna.

A couple of innings later, they were back, some of them behind home plate, some a few sections away in one direction or the other, each group with different hats. Someone behind us suggested that it was like Pokemon, that you were supposed to try to collect one of each. The best-looking cap was one celebrated the White Sox time of '93, which won the AL West (but didn't get far in the playoffs). How long have they had those caps around, I wonder?

I'd never seen a team do that before, but now, I'm wondering why not.   

The game: Chicago White Sox 8, Los Angeles Angels 7

I always find myself rooting for one team or the other, although I don't always know which team it will be when the game starts. With the White Sox and Angels, neither of whom are high on my list of either favorite or least-favorite teams, I didn't know who it would be. But when the game started, I told Kerry that I thought I was rooting for whichever team whose winning would make the game finish the fastest. For most of the game, it looked like that would be the Angels.

Going into the seventh inning, the Angels were ahead 5-1, and their pitcher, Josh Kochanowicz, whom I'd never run across before, seemed to be in control. The White Sox had only hit five balls out of the infield, and two of those were on broken bats, and none went for anything more than a single. But the seventh started with a slow ground ball going under the shortstop's glove for an error, and the next hitter laid down a beautiful bunt and beat it out. At that point, the Angeles relieved Kochanowicz, and it all fell apart. A solid single, a batter hit by pitch, and a double off the wall later, the game was 5-4, and there still weren't any outs. A relatively new rule says that a pitcher has to pitch to three batters before you can relieve him, but the relief pitcher had done a lot of damage in those three hitters. The Angels changed pitchers again, and the first hitter was Munataka Murakami, who was tied for the major league lead in home runs. A few seconds later, he was in first by himself, after a three-run homer. The next batter homered as well, so the White Sox had a seven-run inning and a three-run lead. 

It looked like that the game would finish quietly, but the White Sox started the 9th inning the same way the Angels started that fatal 7th inning, with an error by the shortstop (this one on a throw). Five batters later, it was 8-7 with two out and a runner on third. The White Sox pitcher was clearly struggling, so they brought in a new pitcher.

The last time we saw Bryan Hudson pitch was in AAA last year. He'd just been sent down to the minors, and got shelled that day. But not this time. He got the batter to ground out getting the "save" (credited to a pitcher who finishes a close game that his team wins), the first of his major league career. Good for him. 

Mike Trout

For the decade of the 2010s, there was no better player in the game of baseball than the Angels' Mike Trout. From 2012 through 2019, he won the American League's Most Valuable Player award three times, finished second in MVP voting four more times and had one bad season in which he finished fourth. At the end of that stretch, he was teammates with Shohei Ohtani, who has been the best player of this decade. Amazingly, the Angels never made the postseason when they had those two as teammates. A part of the problem is that Trout has been frequently injured since then. Since 2019, he's played in 130 games (of a 162-game season) once, 119 once, and otherwise has never played in more than 82. 

Since Trout plays in the American League, our season tickets are for a National League team (Arizona), and AL teams don't play that often in NL stadiums, I'd never seen Trout play. I'd seen the Angels play at least two or three different times, but he was always injured. I finally got to see him play.

In his first at-bat, he doubled off the wall. In his next three, he walked, beat out an infield hit, and hit a fly ball to the wall. In the ninth, he led off with a ground ball to the shortstop. Normally, it would have been routine, but even at age 34 after all the injuries, Trout can run, so the shortstop hurried his throw, and the throw was bad, and that error set up the Angels' final rally. 

Usually, getting to see a famous player a decade past his prime is a distinct disappointment, but Trout looked like the best player on the field (he also played a good centerfield, though he didn't get many plays).   

The big inning

For many years, a key baseball strategy was "small ball," playing to maximize the chances of scoring a single run. In particular, small ball often includes making an out to advance a runner to where there's a better chance of that runner scoring, by hitting a long fly ball that the runner can tag up on and advance a base, or bunting or hitting a ground ball in a place where the batter will be out but the runner will move up.   

One of the discoveries people made when they started doing statistical analyses of baseball games is that "small ball" is usually a bad strategy to win a game. Giving up an out to get a run increases your chances of getting one run, but decreases your chances of getting two or three or more. And in most major league baseball games, the winning team will have a single inning where they score as many runs as the other team does in the entire game, or even more. When I first read that, I found it hard to believe, but I've been tallying it up for the games I've seen for years, and have found it true every single year. Tonight was an example of that. The Angels scored either one or two runs in five different innings. The White Sox, on the other hand, scored no runs in six of the eight innings when they batted, and only one in one other. But they had one inning where they scored seven, as many as the Angels' scored the entire game.