The downpour came more quickly than the grounds crew could anticipate.
One minute, it was a sunny day. Then, at the start of the seventh inning of the White Sox’ 3-2 loss Sunday to the Angels, rain started to come down rapidly.
‘‘It just came on so fast, the high winds and then the hail,’’ Sox head groundskeeper Roger Bossard told a pool reporter. ‘‘In my career here, I’ve never seen hail during a game.’’
As the crew rushed to cover the infield, the tarp got stuck and wouldn’t move, leaving most of the right side of the infield exposed to the rain and hail blowing in.
‘‘I had a lot of our guys who were on the other end, and for some reason the wind got underneath and they pulled the wrong part of the tarp,’’ Bossard said. ‘‘And it just . . . it got us. And when you get these high winds and rain like this and that quarter of an inch of rain now, then if there’s any mistakes at all, you just don’t get it covered. So it caught us. But we were ready for it.’’
Bossard, the head groundskeeper since 1983, said 1979’s Disco Demolition — a promotional event that was held at Comiskey Park to boost attendance but quickly turned into mayhem when the records were collected and brought to center field and set on fire — was ‘‘No. 1 on my hit list.’’ He was an assistant groundskeeper at the time.
Because of the ruckus that ensued with former team owner Bill Veeck and broadcaster Harry Caray trying to get fans to remain in their seats, the Sox had to forfeit the second game of a doubleheader.
Bossard said the weather Sunday was No. 2 on his list.
‘‘I’ve never run into where I had three inches of water on the infield and then got it ready,’’ Bossard said. ‘‘I’m proud of my crew and the job they did. But the hail was really surprising. You get hail and 35 mph winds.’’
After observing the field, Bossard told umpire Alan Porter, the crew chief, that he wasn’t sure whether the game could resume. But he wanted to try.
‘‘I called MLB and told them: ‘I need a shot. Give me my chance,’ ’’ Bossard said. ‘‘Then, after about an hour of work, I got everybody from both clubs, and there were three or four sports a little iffy. We fixed them, and we got it in.’’
In that hour, Bossard said it took 175 bags of drying compound to get the field ready. After that hour, Sox general manager Chris Getz and manager Will Venable and Angels GM Perry Minasian and manager Ron Washington went out to the field multiple times to make sure the conditions were OK for the game to continue. The grounds crew had to use smaller tarps to cover large swaths of the right side of the infield.
Venable said they were just making sure the field was playable. Sox starter Davis Martin said the players didn’t know whether they could play.
‘‘Someone said there was a bayou in the third-base area,’’ Martin said. ‘‘They did a great job getting the field ready because we didn’t think there was going to be a possibility of that, especially when the hail started coming down.’’
Bossard quelled any trepidation by saying: ‘‘The field was exactly the way it would have been in a regular rain delay. They were happy with it. . . . The field turned out to be good. I’m very happy. I’m going to go home tonight, and I’m going to sleep real well.’’
The game was delayed for 2 hours, 48 minutes.