A report from earlier this week in the Guardian

[DePloderer]

Exuberant White Sox bring an end to the suffering

David Hannigan on Chicago's blue-collar club and their overdue shot at World Series redemption

 

Monday October 24, 2005

 

Guardian

 

Almost half a century since the team last graced the World Series, the Chicago White Sox had only to wait until their third batter up for the home run that started them on the way to a 5-3 victory over the Houston Astros in Game One on Saturday night.

Three hours after Jermaine Dye dispatched a Roger Clemens fast ball over the right-field wall in that first inning, the south side of Chicago suddenly started to look like the better part of town. The sky lit up with celebratory fireworks and if the festivities appeared a tad premature so early in a best-of-seven contest, the fans can be forgiven their exuberance. They have suffered enough during this past century.

 

Last time the Sox reached baseball's October ritual, 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.

 

Eight of those players were banned for life as a consequence and during the present dramatic run through the play-offs, 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 who let the side down. With particular venom, they lambaste the ownership styles of Charles Comiskey (he made the 1919 team pay for their own laundry and his penny-pinching supposedly made them vulnerable to bribes from bookies), and his successor Jerry Reinsdorf.

 

If Reinsdorf's most famous contribution to the game to this point had been facilitating Michael Jordan's short-lived flirtation with the minor leagues and playing a key role in the baseball strike of 1995, even he will be forgiven almost everything if Ozzie Guillen can lead this team to three more wins over the next week.

 

A charismatic and profane manager dubbed "The Blizzard of Oz", Guillen peppers his comments with swear words, boasts of receiving congratulatory phone calls from his compatriot, Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez (currently near the top of America's hit-list) and has threatened to resign at the end of the season. More animated and unorthodox than any other coach in the sport, nothing summed up his unique style better than his trip to the mound in the eighth inning during what looked like an Astros comeback.

 

When changing pitchers to avert such disasters, 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 20st behemoth Bobby Jenks. "I think it's pretty funny," said Jenks. "He does a lot of things out of humour, and I take it with a smile."

 

The Sox's closer subsequently hurled a few pitches that touched 100mph past a bemused Jeff Bagwell and prevented the drama turning into a crisis. Although greatly assisted by the departure of Clemens with a hamstring injury after two innings, the power of Jenks and the defence of the third baseman Joe Crede were features of a typically gritty White Sox performance.

 

A team with no bona fide mega stars who have adopted Don't Stop Believing by Journey as their locker-room anthem, they strung together one more display 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 their 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 happens this week, they are still regarded very much as Chicago's team.

 

By contrast the Sox, blighted by constant references to their cheating predecessors, defeated the Astros at the 14-year- old US Cellular Field, just another corporate-sponsored park. Their main bequest to folklore in recent decades was 1979's Disco Destruction Night, a fans' promotion that culminated in thousands of Donna Summer records being hurled on to the field at Comiskey Park, their previous home. When criticised for the amount of empty seats at regular-season games, the Sox delightedly point out their supporters are too busy working for a living.

 

Neither their supposed inferiority complex nor the fact the club have not won a World Series since 1917 appeared to bother the present Sox in Game One. The nearest they came to cracking was Guillen almost crying at the sight of his fellow Venezuelan, Luis Aparicio, a veteran of the 1959 side, before the game. The Astros twice came back to tie the game but each time the Sox edged in front again and the starting pitcher, José Contreras, one of two Cuban defectors in their squad, hung in for seven tough innings on a night that grew increasingly chilly.

 

Earlier in the week it was announced that "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 put auctioned in December. By then, the White Sox faithful hope the notorious relic will not be worth as much, its currency having been devalued by recent events.

 

The 1919 Black Sox

 

The 1919 World Series resulted in the most famous scandal in baseball history. Eight Chicago White Sox players - including "Shoeless" Joe Jackson - were accused of throwing the Series against the Cincinnati Reds and the team were later nicknamed the Black Sox. The conspiracy was allegedly the brainchild of the first baseman Chick Gandil and Joseph Sullivan, a professional gambler.

 

Details of the scandal and the extent each player was involved have always been unclear but despite being acquitted of criminal charges, the eight were banned from the professional game for life.

 

The White Sox had clinched the American League pennant that season and were installed as the bookmakers' favourites to defeat the Reds. Cynics were tipped off before it started, however, the White Sox were made underdogs and lost the Series 5-3.

 

Despite the rumours most fans and the press accepted the Series to be honest, but all that would change in 1920 as suspicions turned into confessions. To this day all eight have been denied entry into the Hall of Fame.