No Doubt a New-Look Team for White Sox

He can’t quite remember who played in the first big-league baseball game he went to as a kid, except for knowing for sure it was a White Sox game.

He remembers quite well the last White Sox game he saw. It was at the 2005 World Series.

“I was there,” Rob Mackowiak says. “I went to Games 1 and 2 both.”

He was a Pittsburgh Pirate at the time.

“Third deck, first row,” he recalls. “My agent got me tickets. Me and my dad were hanging right on the rail the whole time. Drinking a beer, wearing ponchos in the rain at that Game 2 ... whoever thought you could have such a fantastic time like that, watching a game of baseball in the rain in a poncho?”

The next time the 29-year-old Mackowiak actually put on a uniform himself to play in a game of baseball, well, that came Wednesday.

In another steady rain.

He didn’t care. He was out there playing in the outfield for the White Sox, a team he got to see a lot of as a boy from Oak Lawn.

Mackowiak ripped a single his first time up on the third pitch he saw.

“This day couldn’t get here fast enough for me,” he said afterward in the Sox clubhouse.

He wore uniform No. 10, which was pitcher Shingo Takatsu’s number a year ago.

How long ago that seems. Takatsu was the staff’s bullpen stopper at that time. He wore a low number on his shirt and a daily grin on his face.

By the first day of August he was gone, cut loose from the squad. Takatsu missed out on the World Series experience and has returned to Japan to play.

Mackowiak didn’t even play for the Sox, yet he ended up enjoying the Sox festivities more than the man whose number he has taken.

“I wore No. 3 with the Pirates,” he says. “They just handed me this one. I guess it’s whatever’s available. I’m not one of those guys who will fight a guy or pay him or whatever just so I can get my old number back.”

Wouldn’t have mattered. No. 3 is permanently out of circulation with the Sox, even though first-base coach Harold Baines hasn’t hung it up yet.

Mackowiak’s presence is one of many changes the World Series champions made. They look a little different than they did last spring ... or even last fall.

Takatsu’s smiling face is gone.

Frank Thomas’s giant self is gone.

Then there are the White Sox’s “eight men out” -- in alphabetical order, Geoff Blum, Carl Everett, Willie Harris, Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, Damaso Marte, Timo Perez, Aaron Rowand and Luis Vizcaino, each of whom played a part in the Sox winning the 2005 World Series.

Blum’s homer won Game 3. Everett hit .444 in the Series. Harris hit 1.000 in the entire postseason. El Duque didn’t give up a run in it. Marte was the winning pitcher of Game 3. Rowand had a half-dozen doubles in October alone. Vizcaino’s ERA in the playoffs was a perfect 0.00.

Perez? Well, he was there for the Sox from beginning to end, spring camp to champagne shampoo.

Speaking of smiling faces, Perez was the guy who would take a curtain call, wave his cap and pretend to be the one who hit a home run if a Paul Konerko or a Jermaine Dye was a bit slow in leaving the dugout to take a bow.

Everything looks a little different in March than it did October. The “crowd” at Wednesday’s game, for instance, filled only about half of Tucson’s park.

“It wasn’t exactly an intense crowd,” Konerko joked.

Well, things do change.

“For 2005, we’re world champs,” catcher Chris Widger says. “For 2006, we’re another team. We’re not the old team, we’re a new team.”

It’s too soon to tell much of anything, but according to Konerko, “I don’t see anybody here looking flat-footed or letting their guard down, thinking about last year. This is this year.”

For a lot of people, Mackowiak among them, this year couldn’t get here fast enough.