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2005 World Series:

For Sox, paucity of passion is scandalous

By JOHN ROMANO
Published October 22, 2005

CHICAGO - The start of the World Series is hours away, and still the poets have yet to arrive.

You may recall they were all over Boston last year, rhapsodizing on ghosts and quests, on the seduction of the game and the devotion of generations.

It was more than baseball, they whispered, it was life. From cemeteries to churches, you supposedly could feel the tug. It was about curses. It was about heartbreak. It was about romance.

It had been 86 years, they said, since the Red Sox had won a World Series.

Yeah, well, it's been 88 years since the White Sox won.

And the three guys sitting at the bar at Jimbo's tavern don't seem the least bit romantic to me. They're talking baseball, and knocking back beers. I heard a few curses, but nothing to do with billy goats or Bambinos.

Welcome to the South Side of Chicago.

The place where romance fell behind.

"Boston has glamour and the Bambino curse," said former White Sox GM Roland Hemond. "We don't have any curses. We just show up and play."

There are no odes to the ballpark. No essays on the timeless nature of the game. The fans are passionate, but not really self-important.

Their team, their White Sox, have neither the charm of the crosstown Cubs nor the melodrama of Boston's Red Sox. The houses here are made of brick, and the fans are built the same way.

"White Sox fans are a forgotten entity," said Mike Veeck, son of the late White Sox owner Bill Veeck. "We care about the game, but we're not paranoiac like Red Sox fans. We have multifaceted lives. I'm not going to stab my wife and daughter just because the Sox lose. And I don't feel like life has cheated me because they haven't won a World Series in my lifetime.

"There's a hard scrabble quality to South Siders. A true blue quality. You know Carl Sandburg's notion of Chicago as the City of Big Shoulders? That's us. He was talking about White Sox fans."

Lately, those fans have been lining up out the doors of Grandstand, a sporting goods store a few blocks from the stadium. They are waiting to buy White Sox gear and are willing to wait in a chilly drizzle to get it done.

Not because this is the happening place to buy. Because, really, it's the only place. This town has not exactly been overrun with Sox fever.

"It doesn't matter if the White Sox win the World Series," said catcher A.J. Pierzynski. "The Cubs will always be the Cubs. They'll always get more attention than the White Sox."

Cub and White Sox rooters break along social and economic and geographic lines. The Cub fan comes from the suburbs and from out of town. He will come to a Sunday game, preferably after an early-morning round of golf, to relax. To the White Sox rooter, there is nothing casual or relaxing about baseball.

This is the image, of course. The perception that has outlasted generations and, perhaps, reality. Cubs fans are yuppies, and White Sox fans are blue-collar. The North Side is genteel and the South Side is dangerous.

Like most stereotypes, it probably has some validity. And, at the same time, is probably too broad a generalization.

The endless stream of taverns and memorabilia stores around Wrigley Field has given the place a perpetual frat-house feel, while the expressway and rundown buildings near Comiskey Park (hardly anyone calls it U.S. Cellular Field) seem more industrial than inviting.

Neither franchise has enjoyed much success (since 1919 they have gone a combined 0-for-9 in the World Series) but the popularity of the Cubs has grown at a disproportionate pace.

Sure, there are explanations. The marketing of Wrigley Field, for instance. And the exposure the Cubs got on superstation WGN. On the South Side, they say the Cubs also get far more coverage from the Chicago Tribune, which just happens to be the team's parent company.

No matter the reasons, the Cubs have a much larger following in Chicago and nationally.

The debate is in the devotion of those fans.

"A lot of Cubs fans go to Wrigley just to look at the girls and have a good time," said Dave Polcyn, a rare South Side native who grew up as a Cubs fan. "The Sox fan goes to Comiskey for the game."

That the Sox even survived as the lesser loved team in the city is somewhat remarkable. Look at St. Louis. Look at Boston and Philadelphia. Those were once two-city teams. Eventually the second team left for a place of their own, and the White Sox nearly did the same.

The White Sox were on the way to Seattle before Veeck bought the team for a second time in the 1970s. In the early '80s it was Denver that was calling. And then, of course, came St. Petersburg's near-grab in 1988.

"Anybody can be a Yankees fan. That's easy," said Jimbo Levato, owner of Jimbo's tavern down the street from Comiskey. "The true fan is when you stick by your team, win or lose. That's why we deserve this.

"It's such a good feeling to see them walking in the tavern with smiles on their faces after all of these years."

The White Sox had long ago tested the loyalty of their rooters; the weak and the faint of heart had fallen by the wayside and only the strong, the dedicated and the masochistic remained.

The White Sox do have one claim to fame. The team was at the center of baseball's most sordid story.

The Black Sox scandal of 1919 - when White Sox players conspired to throw the World Series - is the franchise's most enduring legacy.

You may not remember the Go-Go Sox who lost the 1959 World Series. And you may not know it was Bill Veeck who created the exploding scoreboard at old Comiskey. You may not even be aware of Mike Veeck's Disco Demolition mishap.

But mention Shoeless Joe Jackson, and everyone has an opinion.

The specter of the Black Sox still hangs over the team, although not in the spooky sense of a curse. The impact was more practical. With eight of the team's best players banned form the game, the Sox went into a tailspin.

After winning the American League pennant in 1917 and '19, the Sox would go 40 seasons before reaching another World Series.

"I don't put any stock in a jinx or a curse. They didn't win because they weren't a very good team," said author Donald Gropman, who wrote Say it Ain't So, Joe. "But a story like the Black Sox will hang around longer when it seems to have some mythical control over a team's fate.

"People say, "Look, they did this terrible thing and now the team is suffering for it.' Well, if they won, nobody would ever think about it."

And that's just it. The White Sox have not won. In the 84 seasons after the Black Sox scandal, the franchise had but one AL pennant.

Until now. Until this team.

This World Series is not about curses, and it's not about some mystical mojo. It's not about unfulfilled dreams, and it's not about generations of fans who have waited in vain for a moment that has never come.

But maybe it should be.

If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan freed a man from any other form of penance.

[Last modified October 22, 2005, 01:14:12]