Newsday Article

[KevHead0881]

This was an interesting read. Basically, an outsiders look on the Sox existance.

 

FROM NEWSDAY

 

Pale by comparison

Why fans of Chicago’s ‘other’ team have trouble dealing with Sox-cess

By Chuck Culpepper

Newsday

 

May 13, 2005

 

You don't know what you don't know, and there's a towering chance you don't know the last time the best baseball team of the moment won the World Series.

 

Fear not, for hardly anyone else knows, either, including some members of the front-running Chicago White Sox themselves, during a spring-training quiz in Arizona.

 

Third-base coach Joey Cora, whose 11 major-league seasons included four with the White Sox: "White Sox fans know they haven't won since 1919."

 

(Buzzer sound: incorrect answer.)

 

Pitcher Kris Honel, whom outfielder Aaron Rowand recommended for interviewing because of Honel's Chicagoan background: "I don't even know. And I'm from Chicago. The only championships I know about in Chicago are the Bulls' championships."

 

(Buzzer.)

 

Rowand, after hmmm'ing and pondering for a few seconds: "1917, I think."

 

(Bell sound: correct answer.)

 

Now, every Red Sock in Boston's locker room - not to mention in creation - could have blurted "1918" before you finished the question, having heard it crooned chronically in Yankee Stadium and announced fashionably on spiteful T-shirts.

 

But as the White Sox mow through the early season with the American League's top ERA behind starting pitchers Mark Buehrle, Freddy Garcia, Jon Garland and former Yankees Orlando Hernandez and Jose Contreras, they're threatening to inform the multitudes who don't know the adage that they've thrown a World Series (the Black Sox scandal of 1919) since they've won one.

 

There's enough not knowing out there that White Sox historian - repeat: White Sox historian - Richard Lindberg said White Sox fans "look at the much-vaunted Red Sox curse and say, 'At least they're in the World Series once every 20 years.'"

 

There's enough not knowing out there that White Sox fan Pete Donaghue, 43, who once met resistance from the White Sox's neighborhood when trying to open a White Sox bar, recalls shouting at the TV during baseball's dramatic 2003 postseason.

 

In the October when he and 9-year-old son Luke high-fived as the Cubs blew utterly the NLCS, and when Luke did Halloween as an unmistakable Steve Bartman, the Cubs fan who - wait, you know that story - sportscasters kept referring to the Red Sox and Cubs as bearing the longest unthinkable droughts.

 

It's rough getting credit when a drought nine years older - the Cubs' - breathes noisily 7.9 miles away. Had the White Sox blundered similarly, he said, as they surely would have, he said, nobody would've noticed.

 

"We don't even get credit for being terrible!" Donaghue said.

 

Yet even while somehow not winning it all since 1917, the White Sox haven't accessed the recognizable domains of terrible, which might be part of the problem with knowing the White Sox. While this year they've raced to 26-9 and will become the last team to reach double digits in defeats, most years they've settled into the limbo we call "pretty good."

 

For instance, you almost certainly don't know - and your relatives may worry if you do - that in the last 10 seasons, the White Sox have finished second seven times.

 

You probably don't know they're .511 over the last 25 years.

 

And you almost surely don't know their study in successful plodding during the all-Yankees, all-the-time 1950s, when they finished fourth in 1951, third for five years after that, second for two, then first in 1959, when they beat the Dodgers, 11-0, in Game 1 of the World Series on Early Wynn's pitching and two home runs by Ted Kluszewski.

 

That would be their most recent home postseason win.

 

With their 2005 lineup built around scrap and hustle and the labor South Side people adore, the White Sox present a threat to their own historical essence as summarized by Lindberg: "The White Sox are a footnote. They're anecdotal. If anybody pays attention at all on the East Coast, they remember the shorts they wore one day in 1977."

 

They're anecdotal, simmering along, sinking dramatically (1919 and the 30-year aftermath) or thriving dramatically (1959, 1983, 1993, 2000) in little bursts. Their fans have loved characters such as Wilbur Wood and Dick Allen, have lamented the Hall of Fame exclusion of - you probably didn't know - 1950s-60s pitcher Billy Pierce and have refrained from the look-at-me wallow found elsewhere.

 

"They don't languish in the fact they didn't win a World Series," said Roland Hemond, the White Sox general manager from 1971-85. "They just treasure the good moments. And I love them for it."

 

Oh, there's pessimism - "Not only is the glass half empty, but it's got a crack in it and it's spilling all over the piano," Donaghue said - but there's just not pessimism as cottage industry.

 

Unlike in Boston or on the North Side of Chicago, there's no storehouse of harsh, mind-boggling October blunders.

 

The Dodgers clipped the White Sox in six efficient games in the 1959 World Series. Toronto beat Chicago in six in 1993 and went on to its second straight world title. The 2000 ALDS against Seattle went three up, three down.

 

The closest you could get to a bona fide moment happened in 1983 with Game 4 of the ALCS. The Orioles led the best-of-five 2-1, but it's an inarguable South Side fact that the White Sox absolutely would have won Game 5 with 24-game winner LaMarr Hoyt slated to pitch. We'll never know (even if they do).

 

A tense Game 4 went nine scoreless innings and hinged on two things if you're particular about it: a shocking 10th-inning homer by late-season addition Tito Landrum, a former model with one home run in but 13 Orioles appearances, and a seventh-inning, rally-killing, baserunning human error by Jerry Dybzinski.

 

Landrum? Dybzinski? You probably don't know, and nobody's clamoring to remind you.

 

"White Sox fans vividly remember Tito Landrum and so do I," Hemond said, "but they haven't let it be excruciating. They still say, 'Boy, what a year that was.'" Burns, Hemond said, remains "indelible as a hero even though we lost."

 

They won the AL West by 20 games, something you might not know. Ron Kittle, the 1983 Rookie of the Year with 35 home runs and 100 RBIs, said: "I used to drive 100 miles an hour to get to the ballpark. And there were days years later that I hoped somebody would carjack me."

 

As chatterbox manager Ozzie Guillen's team bids to overthrow known reality with its searing start, it must push aside the multiple pillars that help explain why you don't know: the inexplicable shadow of the Cubs, the Chicago media, the bizarre shadow of the Cubs, the East Coast media, the weird shadow of the Cubs, North Side gentrification, and the nonsensical shadow of the Cubs.

 

Cubs: Although the White Sox have 14 winning seasons in the past 25 with a .511 percentage and the Cubs have eight and .477, "The more the Cubs lose, the more fans love them," Lindberg said.

 

Chicago media: "All the media live on the North Side," Donaghue said.

 

Cubs: If it were not enough that the dominant TV network WGN hooked up with the Cubs in the late 1960s or went to national cable with the Cubs in the 1980s while the Sox bungled some TV moves, there's always the South Side-lamented fact that one of the city's two newspapers, the Tribune, owns the Cubs.

 

East Coast media: "I explain to people that if you hit one home run in New York as a Yankee, it's like hitting five or six in any other city," said Kittle, also a former Yankee. "The media is what makes it."

 

Cubs: The White Sox let go of Harry Caray. The Cubs hired him. People came in droves to hear him sing during seventh innings. Mercy.

 

Gentrification: Up from dingy days of yore, the Wrigley Field neighborhood now has "400,000 people with disposable income within walking distance," as Donaghue put it.

 

Cubs: "They get a lot of transitory crowds," Hemond said. "People coming into Chicago may determine to go to Wrigley Field to see what all this mystique is. Whoever came up with the term 'friendly confines of Wrigley Field,' they're to be commended."

 

Then, too, sometimes you don't know because the fans who do know don't really care if you do know, another White Sox quality under siege from this burst of excellence.

 

Descended from laborers from the slaughterhouses, stockyards and steel mills, despairing of gentrification, loathing MBAs skipping work smugly at Wrigley, the White Sox's South Side neighborhood, whose name, Bridgeport, you probably don't know, has a legacy of insularity. The interlopers include Jerry Reinsdorf, owner, Chicago White Sox, still blamed in a labor-supportive neighborhood for the 1994 strike that curtailed a season in which the White Sox occupied, as you may or may not know, first place.

 

In a classic human irony, many lament the passing of an old Comiskey Park (after 1990) that they did not patronize lavishly before destruction and a new Comiskey next-door. In a classic human trait, they're huffy; their team has to win to get support.

 

"Angry," Lindberg said. "Hostile. It's on two fronts. It's the hate-Reinsdorf camp and the hate-the-Cubs camp. It's on two levels. They're angry about the stadium. Don't like the stadium. Don't like the owner."

 

After all, they don't even have a major bar, a dire contrast to Wrigley, where, Kittle said, "The people like the Cubs so much 'cause you can go to bars before the game and go to bars after the game, so your drunk continues all through the game."

 

Consider Donaghue's attempt to start a bar in the early 1990s, shortly after new Comiskey construction razed two quietly legendary old bars. He bought an old muffler factory. He and fellow investors filled out forests of paperwork. They invested roughly $40,000.

 

Finally, when Donaghue went to court for his liquor license, the otherwise friendly judge ruled the bar would have a "deleterious" effect on the neighborhood. "Deleterious?" he said. "It's an abandoned building!"

 

Months later, he got a letter from the city accusing him of serving minors in a bar that did not exist in a building he no longer owned. He took it as a peculiar sort of warning.

 

Leaving a game with some Comiskey debutants not long ago, he said: "We walked out to go get a beer, and we had to take a cab to Chinatown! I was apologizing to those guys."

 

People, ever mysterious, might bristle that you don't know about the White Sox while relishing that you don't know about the White Sox. "I kind of wear it as a badge of honor that I'm not a lemming," Donaghue said.

 

And so 20,044 non-lemmings per game have watched the 2005 White Sox stream to a 26-9 record as of yesterday, hold first place, and portend that this year, we all might end up knowing something.

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.

[JUGGERNAUT]

Once again the best columns on our beloved team are being written by the East Coast media. It sure would be nice to have good columnists in this city.

 

http://www.newsday.com/sports/printedition...ny-sports-print

A nice pc about El Duque & Contra.

 

http://www.newsday.com/sports/printedition...ny-sports-print

A terrific pc about the history of our beloved Sox. Not just on the field but in the media.

 

Lindberg: "The White Sox are a footnote. They're anecdotal. If anybody pays attention at all on the East Coast, they remember the shorts they wore one day in 1977."

 

Dramatic fall: 1919 & the 30 yrs that followed. Dramatic rise: 1959, 1983, 1993, 2000. Last home post season win: 1959 WS gm 1 11-0 over Dodgers. Overall: pretty good, but not good enough.

 

Most memorable recent year: 1983. Gm 4 of the ALCS. Do or die for Sox. ex-model Tito Landrun hits a HR. The Sox had 24 gm winner LaMarr Hoyt ready to pitch gm 5 if they could win gm 4. The ex-model did in the Sox in a year they won the AL West by 20 gms.

 

Recent times: WSox have finished 2nd in last 10 yrs. They have 14 winning seasons with a .511 win% over the last 25 yrs. The loveable losers on the N Side have only 8 with a .477 win% in that time.

 

Lindberg: "The more the Cubs lose, the more fans love them." Donaghue: "The Wrigley Field neighborhood now has "400,000 people with disposable income within walking distance."

 

----------------------------------------------------------------

 

I didn't know that some investors tried to open up bars near the Cell. That was an eye-opener. Wrigley: party-ville, Cell: A place to see the Chicago White Sox play.

If you won't allow bars outside then build them inside. Price will be determined by demand after you take that first step. Now that they've decided to open the parking lots at 6 am for loop workers to make use of the next step is to open the park earlier

& have a few interesting spots for people to meet & share a pint or two.

Edited May 13, 2005 by JUGGERNAUT

[TheBigHurt35]

Very nice. Thanks...

[Be Good]

Newsday is awesome, but last time I can remember them writing a big article on the Sox (not counting sundays) was in 2000. And we've had newsday home delivered for 6 years.

[JUGGERNAUT]

http://www.sportingnews.com/archives/worldseries/1906.html

This is my dream. It would be great to see it live 99 yrs later.

 

The South Side White Sox against the West Side Cubs.

 

The Hitless Wonders also showed their opportunistic nature, managing a 2-2 tie in games despite the meager offense. Scores: Gm 1: Sox 2-1 , Gm 2: Cub 7-1 , Gm 3: Sox 3-0, Gm 4: Cub 1-0, Gm 5: Sox 8-6, Gm 6: Sox 8-3.

 

Sox hit .198 & the Cub hit .196 over the 6 gms.

 

http://www.sportingnews.com/archives/worldseries/1917.html

Not as memorable.

[thomsonmi]

Great article, but no mention of Puffers Tavern?!?!?

 

http://centerstage.net/bars/puffers.html