CLEVELAND — All-Star shortstop Tim Anderson moved on from a horrific fielding game, turned the page and chalked it up as a learning experience. He went so far to say he was “glad it happened.”
“You need things like that to happen,’ Anderson said Thursday morning, a day after making three errors in the first two innings of an 11-1 loss on the front end of a doubleheader sweep by the Guardians. “You want to be great, so you’ve got to always go through the process where you learn, to where you understand yourself. In a situation I haven’t been in, haven’t been there before. It’s something you can learn and grow from.”
Manager Tony La Russa took blame for his team not looking ready to play after two consecutive postponed games in Cleveland due to bad weather.
“That’s a lot for him to say, but at the end of the day he wasn’t the one out there fielding the ground balls, he wasn’t out there hitting,” Anderson said.
“It’s just understand that we’ve been sitting around for two days, no excuses, but you know you’ve got to get yourself ready to play. In those situations you’ve got to understand that you have been sitting around for two days and you have to up the level of focus more. I can understand that I wasn’t on point yesterday. But now it’s a new day.”
Anderson’s fielding funk Thursday afternoon, though. His throw on Armed Rosario’s routine ground ball in the first inning pulled first baseman Jose Abreu off the bag, his fourth error in two games.
Anderson, who made a pair of good plays and doubled home the Sox’ only run of the game after the errors, appeared to let a heckler get the best of him later in the game, and was seen on the TV broadcast raising a middle finger toward the stands. He declined comment on that Thursday.
“Move forward, flush it, keep growing and learning and try to make today better than yesterday,” Anderson said.
Anderson has hit safely in his first eight games.
Leury in the 3 hole
La Russa batted Leury Garcia third for the second straight game, a move that raised eyebrows considering Garcia’s .077 average going into Thursday. For a team that had averaged two runs over its previous six games, La Russa, citing Garcia’s .385 average (5-for-13) vs. Zach Plesac and his 1-for-3 game with a walk and fly ball to the warning track Wednesday night.
“And when you’re kind of in a funk, sometimes a change of scenery does something,” La Russa said. “It’s not really dramatic, it’s just that one move. But he’s been known to get hot and if can get hot, he does a lot of things for your offense. So we’ll see. I thought he was inspired yesterday. He took really good at-bats, ran the bases.”
Money
Lefty Tanner Banks, the 30-year-old rookie, is unavailable for a couple of days after throwing four more scoreless innings Wednesday. Banks has not allowed a run over 9 1⁄3 innings covering four games.
“You can tell he feels confident, he’s making better pitches,” La Russa said. “The trick in this game is to maintain the anxiety that keeps you focused. You don’t want to drift into, ‘Oh, I got it now.’ Or you get spanked. But man, he’s really done a good job.”
