McCaskill’s White Sox Debut to Come Against Old Friends

For two nights, Kirk McCaskill watched from the visitors’ dugout as his Chicago White Sox teammates beat the team he had played for his entire career.

Tonight he will be on the mound against the Angels, a team he now says he hopes will finish “a very close second” to the White Sox in the American League West.

McCaskill won 78 games over seven seasons with the Angels before choosing the White Sox last winter as a free agent. Even then, he noted that the schedule would bring him to Anaheim for the first series of the season.

More important, he traded prospects of a last-place finish for prospects of a first-place finish.

The hard part, McCaskill said, is parting from close friends, among them Mark Langston and Jim Abbott.

“You spend a lot of time with people and get to be very close,” he said. “I hope we’re not going to lose that. . . . I sincerely expect to keep close.”

Tonight, McCaskill begins his attempt to rebound from last season’s career-high 19 losses. He won 10 games and had a 4.26 earned-run average.

“For me, it really serves as motivation,” he said. “I look back at that, and what happened makes me work that much harder. That’s one of the great things about baseball, and I think it’s one of the reasons people are so intrigued by the start of the season. The slate’s clean, you get to start over--thank God.”