Almost half a century since the team last graced the World Series, the Chicago White Sox won baseball’s October ritual with a 4-0 sweep of the Houston Astros in the best-of-seven contest.
It began on Sunday with a home run from their third batter up, Jermaine Dye, that led to a 4-3 victory in Game One in Chicago and ended when the same player hit a run-scoring single for a 1-0 victory in Game Four in Houston on Wednesday.
The south side of Chicago is suddenly the better part of town and the rowdy Sox fans can be forgiven their exuberance. They have suffered enough during the past century.
Last time the Sox reached baseball’s Fall Classic, the mayor, Richard Daley, marked the achievement by setting off the air raid sirens still in place all over the city. It was 1959. They did things differently then. Their defeat by the Los Angeles Dodgers that year was the only decider appearance by the Sox since the 1919 side carved an unwanted place in sporting folklore for throwing the Series.
Journalists have been desperate to pin the decades of spectacular failures on some perceived curse bequeathed by ”Shoeless” Joe Jackson and his cohorts.
Sox fans are too pragmatic to entertain such notions. Rather than seek other-worldly excuses, they will recite a litany of bad players and ill-equipped managers.
Ozzie Guillen is different. The charismatic and profane manager, dubbed ”The Blizzard of Oz”, is more animated and unorthodox than any other coach in the sport. Nothing summed up his unique style better than his trip to the mound during the eighth inning of Game One.
When changing pitchers, most coaches call the bullpen by telephone or motion from the field to indicate whether they want a left-hander or right-hander sent in.
In the middle of the biggest night of his managerial life, Guillen strolled out and with his hands far apart and then over his head, requested with a classic schoolyard gesture they send in the 140kg behemoth Bobby Jenks.
In the World Series a team with no bona fide megastars strung together four displays where the sum was greater than the individual parts, the perfect metaphor for their own place in the Chicago landscape.
The Sox have always been less fashionable than their city rivals, the Cubs, who have not won a Series since 1908. But the Cubs’ peculiar failures are put down to a colourful curse involving a billy goat called Murphy being refused admission to a game. They play at the ancient ivy-clad Wrigley Field, arguably the most bucolic venue in all of sport; tickets to their games are infinitely more prized; and no matter what happened this week, they are still regarded very much as Chicago’s team.
By contrast, the Sox, blighted by constant references to their predecessors, play at the 14-year-old US Cellular Field, just another corporate-sponsored park. When criticised for the number of empty seats at regular-season games, the Sox delightedly point out that their supporters are too busy working for a living.
Neither their supposed inferiority complex nor the fact that the club has not won a World Series since 1917 appeared to bother the present Sox.
”Black Betsy”, the prized bat used by Joe Jackson (who remains a cause célèbre because many believe he did not fully participate in the conspiracy), will be auctioned in December. But the White Sox faithful hope the notorious relic will not be worth as much, its currency having been devalued by recent events. — Â