Mark Buehrle Will Be Celebrated In Thailand

Back in college, everybody had one. I was on the South Side of Chicago and went to lots of White Sox games, because they were free with a Pizza Hut coupon, and you could go to Pizza Hut and just take them off the counter. No one gave a crap about the coupons or the White Sox. And everyone who went to a game seemed to see the same pitcher over and over and over. Mine was Mike Sirotka. Of the 30 or so games I went to in college, I swear he pitched 20 of them. For Ravi, it was Jim Parque. For others, it was James Baldwin (it was always one of those three).

Then, in the year I stayed in Chicago following college, Sirotka was out, and Buehrle was in (my rotation, if not the rotation). In his first full season in the big leagues, I must have seen him five times in about six tries. The best thing I remember is my friend Aman calling him exclusively Mark “Whirly-Buehrle,” which is fantastic.

Well, Whirly-Buehrle pitched a perfect game yesterday, and that’s pretty spectacular. It was the 18th in history and featured an absolutely ridiculous catch you’ve no doubt seen by now. It’s the best catch I’ve seen, situation-assisted or not, since the Endy Chavez catch, and would be a highlight unto itself if it happened in a 12-4 game. Now Dewayne Wise goes down in history. It was a good day to have GameCast.

I know two die-hard White Sox fans. I mean, apart from the President. One is my Uncle Mike. We bet on the result of a “Good Sox/Bad Sox” series back in 1990, a bet which I won, and which forced him to make me a tape of the Chicago radio commercial for the retail outlet Andriana Furs. They had a catchy jingle. He never did, but I can still hear the jingle. The other is my roommate in college, James R. C______, who’s off in Thailand and Cambodia at the moment, doing whatever people do in Phnom Penh, Bangkok and Phuket. James loves his White Sox; it appeals to his me against the world demeanor (he has worked as a union boss) and both appeals to and is a result of his visceral hatred of the Cubs.

Last summer, James, some other friends and I were in Chicago for another’s bachelor party. On the weekend in question, the Cardinals were in town to face the Cubs and the Red Sox were there to play the Pale Hose. The city was absolutely packed with out-of-towners for the two biggest non-intra-city matchups of the year; people everywhere were rocking jerseys. We were staying at the convention center because hotels were packed and the idiot best man hadn’t booked rooms and had to be bailed out by connections of the groom’s wife (you are reading his website). Well, at one point we get into the elevator, and it’s myself; James; our loud, shame-resistant friend Daphne; and a guy wearing a Cubs jersey. Daphne, who’s from Texas and is for some reason a Cubs fan, says, “Look James, a Cubs shirt.”

Without missing a beat, James replies, “F*cking pajama wearing north siders.”

The whole elevator goes quiet and then we get to the guy’s floor. He turns around and have smiles at James’ boldness and is at a loss for what to say. He just sort of shakes his head and says “Nice.” Translation: “You weren’t being nice, but you are pretty hardcore.”

The one baseball jersey James owns is a Mark Buehrle jersey, and I can imagine at some point today in Thailand he’s going to see a ticker or one line in an English language newspaper and, in the middle of somewhere it has no business happening for this reason, raise his arms in triumph.