It’s Not Even Close as White Sox Bring Brewers Back to Earth, 7-1

Boo hoo hoo for the True Blue Brew Crew. It’s over. The winning streak is over. The Milwaukee Brewers have been beaten. The best they can do now is 161-1. All they have to do is win their next 148.

“We fooled a lot of people so far,” outfielder Rob Deer said. “Maybe we can fool some more.”

Tuesday night’s 7-1 loss to the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park put an end to this madness, after Milwaukee won its first 13 games of this season and 16 in a row over two seasons.

Now, after all that hard work, the Brewers find themselves just two games ahead of the second-place New York Yankees in the American League East.

“Baseballs were bound to bounce against us,” was the rather poetic post-mortem of losing pitcher Mark Ciardi, a rookie who retired only seven batters in his second major-league start. “We were overdue for a little bad luck.”

“Now we can get on with the season,” said Chris Bosio, one of four Brewer pitchers who worked in the game.

“No matter what happens the rest of my career, nobody will ever take this away from us,” Deer said.

The Brewers fell behind, 5-0, before the game was three innings old, and when Manager Tom Trebelhorn reached into his bag of tricks, it was empty. Eight times this season his team had come from behind to win.

Not that Trebelhorn stopped trying. In the eighth inning, with the score already 7-1, the young manager waved in Robin Yount from center field and went with five infielders. Ozzie Guillen had opened the inning with a triple, and Trebelhorn made the move after the next batter struck out.

Donnie Hill tapped out, pitcher to first, after which Yount returned to center field. The run never scored.

“Oh, we were just fiddling around with it,” Trebelhorn said. “It can save you a ball game here or there, but I’d hate to have to rely on it. We were mostly just having some fun.”

So were the Brewers, until their bats were finally cooled off--in 44 degree weather, down 40 degrees from the night before--silenced by White Sox pitchers Joel Davis and the aptly named Jim Winn. Held to seven hits, the Brewers didn’t reach second base until the sixth inning, and didn’t score until the eighth, when Jim Gantner doubled and Paul Molitor sliced a soft single to right.

Davis didn’t even know he was going to start for Chicago until two and a half hours before the game. Manager Jim Fregosi rushed minor leaguer Bill Long from Hawaii to replace the disabled Neil Allen on the roster, but reconsidered starting Long “because the Brewers had a chance to break the record, and I didn’t think a young guy should have to put up with that pressure.”

A 14th straight win to start the season would have meant ownership of the big-league record for the Brewers, who already had tied the 1982 Atlanta Braves for the best start ever.

“I went right at ‘em,” Davis said. “I was elated to have the chance to break the streak.”

Fregosi, who claimed that the idea of starting Davis came to him like a vision while driving to the game, was extra careful how he used him. When he changed pitchers in the sixth inning, Davis was working on a four-hit shutout. He had thrown only 61 pitches and permitted only one runner to reach second base.

Winn came in with two Brewers on base, threw one pitch, got Yount to ground into a double play, and went on to register his first American League save.

Doing most of the damage for the White Sox Monday were right fielder Ivan Calderon, with three hits and two nice catches, and Greg Walker and Hill, with home runs. For Walker, whose two-run shot in the seventh put the game on ice, it was only the third hit in his last 45 at-bats.

Against Ciardi, the Sox scored on Hill’s solo homer in the first, strung together four hits to score three more runs in the second, and made it 5-0 in the third on Daryl Boston’s bases-loaded sacrifice fly. Ciardi got the hook with one out in the third.

The assignment might have been a bit much for the rookie, considering the spotlight that had fallen upon his team. The True Blue Brew Crew had caught the public’s fancy. The “Today” show and “Good Morning, America” were busy lining up Brewers as guests for Wednesday morning. Players felt a media crush worthy of a World Series. That’s what Ciardi meant when he said: “Things have been getting a little crazy.”

He swore he wasn’t nervous. “I had a good night’s sleep,” Ciardi said. “Treb asked me if I was nervous, but once I got out there, I wasn’t. I just didn’t pitch well, and I’m sorry about that. The record had a lot of meaning to a lot of people.

“Well, maybe I’ll get another chance. It could happen again. It’s a long season.”

One of the people to whom the record obviously did mean a lot was rookie catcher B.J. Surhoff, who made the final out. After Deer’s two-out triple kept the candle flickering, Surhoff went down swinging against Winn.

He slammed the bat on the ground, twice. Third-base Coach Tony Muser comforted him with an arm around the shoulders.

After a half-hour cooloff period in the training room, Surhoff said: “I was very (bleep) off at myself. I thought if I could put the ball in play, I could keep it going. I didn’t like the way it ended. Here I am, a contact hitter all my life, and I struck out.”

So ended a dreamy couple of weeks for the Brewers. Maybe things can get back to normal now.

Asked what he would remember most about the winning streak, Trebelhorn said: “The shared effort by everyone on the ballclub.”

“The sheer effort?” someone asked, straining to hear in a crowd.

“Shared effort,” Trebelhorn said. “Well, sheer, too.”

After one more game here, the Brewers return home to play a three-game series with the Baltimore Orioles, who were no-hit by Juan Nieves a week ago. Come Monday, baseball’s hottest team will be in Anaheim to play the Angels.

If they are 17-1 by then . . .

Never mind.