The pitching was the easy part for Bobby Jenks

The closer for the champion White Sox of 2005 dies at 44, after an unimaginable series of plagues.

Bobby Jenks

The 2005 Chicago White Sox were a baseball comet. They won 99 games in the regular season, won 11 of 12 postseason games, swept Houston in the World Series, gave everybody lots of time for holiday shopping. In the American League Championship Series, they closed out the Angels with complete games from Mark Buehrle, Freddy Garcia, Jon Garland and Jose Contreras, and there will be an MLB franchise in Tehran before that happens again.

It was the Sox’s third championship ever and the first since 1917. In other words, the club had thrown a World Series since the last time it had won one. It hadn’t won a playoff game in 13 years. Their history makes the Cubs look as dynastic as the Windsors. But before Chicago could begin renaming streets after Buehrle, Paul Konerko, and A.J. Pierzynski, the Sox came apart and fell to earth. They haven’t been to an LCS since.

If you have to be known for one note, play it loud and strong. Bobby Jenks saw a spotlight, late that September, and he sought it out and stood right in the middle. He saved three of those four World Series wins, and he quickly gained an identity. Whenever manager Ozzie Guillen needed him, he not only raised his right hand but then spread his arms as if he were embracing a barrel. Jenks was 6-foot-4 and 270 and he put every calorie into his fastball. He looked like he belonged in Shinnick’s Pub, a Sox fan’s hangout. When it was over, he stood on the field and said, “For all of those who doubted me, kiss my ass.”

Those champs are having their 20th anniversary celebration next weekend, and fans were primed to learn whatever happened to Aaron Rowand, Joe Crede, Neal Cotts and the like. Instead it will be at least blemished by the fate of Bobby Jenks. He died in Portugal on Saturday, 44 years old, going several thousand extra miles to find something that would arrest his stomach cancer. In doing so he had taken a leave of absence from the independent Windy City Thunderbirds. Once considered unmanageable himself, Jenks managed that team.

Jenks had a longer shelf life than the Sox did. He wound up with 173 saves, and in 2007 he retired 41 consecutive batters. He made two All-Star teams. He was replaced by lefty rookie Chris Sale, and after he signed with Boston he said he was glad to go to a team that “knows how to run a bullpen.” Guillen replied that the team “had lied for him” while keeping various misbehaviors out of the media. The injuries then ambushed Jenks, and he was out of baseball after 2011.

Out of sight and mind, Jenks now fought his lifelong opponents in private. After surgeons supposedly fixed spurs in his spine, Jenks had to have emergency surgery for an infection. As it turned out, one of his original surgeons was conducting an operation on someone else at the same time. “Concurrent surgery” has few supporters in the legal system, and eight years later Jenks got a $5.1 million settlement. But by then Jenks had fought painkiller addictions and depression, and one night he took all the food out of his refrigerator and broke into a stranger’s car. He got a divorce. He met his next wife, Eleni, in a rehab center. Eventually he became the pitching coach at an independent league team in Grand Junction, Colo. There would be happy interludes, but not endings.

In January, he was one of the many who lost his house in the Pacific Palisades fire. Most of the physical evidence of Jenks’ career was destroyed. Later that month came the cancer diagnosis, delivered without long-term hope.

From the beginning, Jenks was well-known in the scouting world. He didn’t pitch at his Idaho high school, thanks to poor grades, but a friend had an American Legion team. The Angels saw him and drafted him in the fifth round and waited for him to harness his stuff, some of which was personal.

“At 18 he was doing things that it takes MLB pitchers years to learn,” commented Mike Butcher, the former Angels pitching coach, on Facebook Saturday. “His pitch recall was incredible, even at that age. His teammates absolutely loved him. He had some well-documented battles along the way, but he took accountability and overcame them.”

Jack Uhey was the Angels’ scout and said Jenks would have been a high first-round pick with more exposure and a clean personal sheet. He pointedly asked Bobby and his dad about the rumors: Bobby was a member of Aryan Nation, Bobby had a kid out of wedlock, Bobby was a drunk. They rejected all those notions, but Jenks turned out to be a problem anyway. His Double-A manager sent him home for a time. His weight ballooned and his drinking never subsided. The Angels finally released him and Chicago signed on.

Uhey also recalled when another Angel executive told him: “No matter what happens with this kid, he’ll be in the major leagues when he’s 24.” Which was Jenks’ age in 2005.

“I didn’t even know the Angels had waived me until the White Sox told me,” Jenks said.

Dustin Hermanson was Chicago’s closer in 2005, and a good one with 34 saves in 39 opportunities. But Hermanson had a foot injury in September and didn’t think he’d be at his best. He publicly supported Jenks’ promotion, and Jenks went 6-for-8 in saves. The White Sox had led the A.L. Central by 15 games at one point, but Cleveland chopped that lead to a game and a half, although the Sox’s wild-card status was solid. When it’s your year, someone like Bobby Jenks comes up from Birmingham in June with strobe-light fastballs, even though he’s 24 and has never thrown a major league pitch before.

That night in Houston,Jenks watched the veterans and kids celebrate around him. “I really wasn’t very nervous,” he said. “I always felt I would be here, doing something like his.”

Sox fans could be forgiven for demanding more years of victory. Bobby Jenks seemed to sense this would be as good as it got.