[cknox0723]

i am sick right now. not literally...though, yes, literally. sorry to disappoint, but this will be the shortest write-up of them all. i am scrapping everything i had planned to write about this game because i simply don't have the heart. i'm not even going to bother with the shift key.

our first home game. buehrle vs. rich harden and the tigers. (see how sick i am over this? no colors, even) buehrle doesn't look indestructible early on, but he gets out of a third-inning jam by striking out pudge, rather than doing the fudge with him. then he gets himself in and out of trouble again in the fourth, by retiring someone named hessman as well as young, light-hitting, supposedly high-ceilinged shortstop giarratano.

we are still hitless at this time, but adam kennedy makes the 20,000 plus faithful at the cell cheer with a leadoff fourth-inning walk. magglio ordonez follows, takes a strike and then another. doesn't matter. harden throws an 0-2 splitter, hoping to bury it in the dirt and make maggs dig, but he misses high, about a foot. the pitch is right over the middle. ordonez takes a huge cut...he nails it, rips it to right, it's going, it's going...

and it's curving, it's curving, and then it's tailing off...and lands in the seats on the wrong side of the yellow pole. eventually he hits but a simple ground ball which takes away yet another of our precious outs.

but then frank catalanotto, who struck out in his first at-bat in chicago, hammers a fastball as if directed by the grace of god. it's a lightning-quick double, and ordonez thunders home to a storm of cheers. no home run, but we're winning anyway.

it stays that way...through the fifth, through the sixth, as buehrle strikes out the side in a pique of mastery that only an artist, a davinci or rodin, could truly appreciate. then rich harden ceases to exist, replaced by the sinewy vestiges of someone so similar yet so incredibly different. it's one of the great mysteries of baseball, why a pitcher suddenly loses effectiveness. for all of the harrowing about pitch counts like you'd find in the modern-day game, no number provides an answer.

the number 78 was harden's limit today, as all of his pitches after that are distinctly lacking in character, in consitution -- in anything. ramon vazquez starts the bottom of the sixth with an innocuous little single, and then adam kennedy hits a ground ball to third that ty wigginton handles like a mexican jumping bean. that gives us two runners, and it only seems reasonable to send them jumping like mexican beans, since they do no good standing around. in an effort to stop that, pudge makes a throw down to third, but his efforts only encourage our runners more. it helps that this throw ends up somewhere down the left field line. there's our second run, but we don't stop there.

magglio ordonez doubles home a run. after "catalanotto dressing" strikes out, raul gonzalez annihilates a pitch down the left field line. apparently the ball ends up embedded in the wall, because gonzalez gets a three-bagger. frank thomas follows with a long sacrifice fly, and then eric munson does the same, except his hit is with two outs and no one on, so it's just the third out. it's five-nothing at this point and we have more runs than hits.

but i'm not even going to bother with cliffhangers, because my euphoria's been completely replaced by the agonizing frustration of an incomprehensible loss. i wish i didn't have to tell you how it happened, or that it happened at all, but it's too late now. the only consolation i have is that i figure my description of this mess is coming out ok. but, says the pessimist in me, that's only temporary.

temporary, like our goddamned 5-0 lead.