Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
White Sox win World Series! The Astros, and the 2005 season, go out with a whimper.
Oct 27, 2005 | Jermaine Dye slapped a single up the middle in the eighth inning and clapped his hands as he trotted to first. He knew he'd given the Chicago White Sox an insurmountable lead and the World Series championship by driving in Willie Harris from third base.
The run made it 1-0.
The Sox put the Houston Astros out of what had become their misery by completing a four-game sweep Wednesday night in Houston. Dye was the Most Valuable Player. Joe Crede, who hit almost as well as Dye and played a stellar third base, would also have been a good choice.
So here we go again. The White Sox one-upped those other Sox, who last year won their first championship in 86 years, by winning their first in 88. And they did it without benefit of a library of literature about curses and the tragic beauty of endless defeat, without playing in a "lyric little bandbox of a ballpark."
They did it without becoming regulars in the pages of the New Yorker, without anyone on the South Side ever bidding anyone "adieu."
They just did it. As owner Jerry Reinsdorf said earlier this week, "We don't have a curse. We just have a lot of failure."
But it's not quite "here we go again," is it?
Reinsdorf, a venal little rat of a man whose leadership of a group of hard-line owners led to the strike that wiped out the 1994 postseason, actually managed to look like a sympathetic figure for a moment as he tearfully accepted the championship trophy in the clubhouse after the game.
That may have just been because he was standing next to commissioner Bud Selig, though representing all those White Sox fans who have waited so long probably had something to do with it.
But this Sox championship in Chicago isn't quite the civilization-altering event last year's Sox championship in Boston was. It pays to have people telling your story down through the generations. Or maybe it just pays to have your own town, your own whole region, instead of playing in another team's shadow.
A team with its own portfolio of beautiful losing. But we're not going to talk about them because White Sox fans get all upset when everything's about the -- the you know whos up on the North Side, with their lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.
The Astros -- another team with a championship-free history that's just kind of nondescript, not lyrical -- had made a specialty of losing 1-0 during the regular season, doing it five times, a big-league high. But three of those losses happened in April, when they'd been a lousy team. Houston also made a specialty of rebounding from that lousiness, turning themselves into the best team in baseball from mid-May on.
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