Collier: Konerko's next contract looks grand

Monday, October 24, 2005
CHICAGO -- After two games of this 101st World Series, the players' pool -- the portion of gate receipts that goes directly into the pockets of the performers -- is at $7,134,418.92, or roughly the amount of money Paul Konerko is going to have floating around in the couch cushions if somebody doesn't figure out a way to get him out in critical situations.
Seven million?
Konerko's not going to take batting practice for that kind of jack.
Is there a better time to be a free agent than the one the White Sox's mauling first baseman has picked?
Konerko's father told Chicago writers this week that the White Sox have had all season to talk contract with the guy who is making this postseason his personal financial institution, and it didn't sound as though his son is predisposed to give his current employers the inside track when the spending starts late next month.
Scott Podsednik's ninth-inning homer off vexed Astros closer Brad Lidge won Game 2, 7-6, last night at U.S. Cellular, but the White Sox were listless and had scratched out but two funny-looking runs off Andy Pettitte in the first two and a half hours of a rain-swept South Side night when Konerko stood in against rookie Chad Qualls.
There were two outs and the bases were loaded, even if they shouldn't have been.
Qualls had come in to relieve Dan Wheeler, whose final pitch hit Jermaine Dye's bat as he tried to get out of its way, but home-plate umpire Jeff Nelson ruled that Dye had been hit by the pitch, which is what loaded the bases.
"I thought it hit his bat," said Astros manager Phil Garner, only because it did. "I asked him to get some help from the other umpires but he said it was his call. Brad Ausmus asked him to get some help. I asked him to look at the ball, but the ball was already gone."
That argument lost, Garner went to the mound to await the arrival of Qualls, whose first pitch Konerko ripped into the seats in left for a grand slam, jerking the White Sox into a temporary 6-4 lead.
"Qualls is so nasty, the only thing you can do is look for him to throw it in a certain spot," Konerko said after his fifth postseason homer and RBIs 12 through 15 inclusive. "You're not going to be able to react any other way. He threw it right where I was looking.
"This is amazing, but it's been this way for us all year. We've won games like this for six months and now we're doing the same thing in the biggest month of them all."
So the MVP of the American League Championship Series, in which he homered in back-to-back games, is bidding to be the MVP of the World Series as the cap to his second consecutive 40-homer, 100-RBI season.
Yeah, that's going to cost somebody, though not, probably not Kevin McClatchy.
You get more than just a run producer in Konerko, who knows what to say and how to say it. Asked about hitting a grand slam on baseball's biggest stage, he said, "It was the second-best feeling I've had this week. I had a baby Tuesday night, so that's the first thing obviously, but really, this team is so selfless and everybody is pulling so much for each other that I had the feeling anybody could have done it.
"It's hard to describe; it's kind of an out-of-body thing, but when you see it go out, you think, 'Wow, now we have a chance to win.' "
With Podsednik's homer, the chances for the Astros in this tournament shrunk to the barely detectable. Teams that take the first two games, as the White Sox have, win this thing 78 percent of the time.
"It's not a good spot," Garner said, "but we had a chance to win, as badly as we've played. We've got to go home and regroup, but we'll bounce back. We'll make a series out of it."
He'll have a ton of psychological healing to do between now and tomorrow night, when he'll send Roy Oswalt to a Minute Maid Park mound to see what, if anything, can be done about Konerko, et al.

Source: http://www.post-gazette.com/