Wake Me When One of Them Wins the World Series

Normally the Indignant Citizen prefers to leave the baseball commentary to his friend and former coworker Vince at Exile in Wrigleyville. You won’t find a more informed blog about White Sox baseball anywhere on the Net. That being said, the Indignant Citizen feels compelled to offer some commentary on the recent Cubs-White Sox series, which concluded its 2005 regular season run today with a Cubs win.

The Indignant Citizen considers himself a White Sox fan. He is not one by birth, but by choice. And he made the choice in 2003 when the Cubs were the darlings of baseball; not that it’s any of your business but I mention this to dispel any notions that the Indignant Citizen is some kind of bandwagon jumper. I made a well-reasoned decision to choose one team and I will stick with that team whether it wins or loses. This weekend it lost.

It seems necessary after the behavior observed at Sox Park on Sunday to offer some perspective on this series. In short, it’s meaningless. That’s right, it means nothing. Bragging rights? Bragging rights for what? The best loser team in Chicago? Nice title. Not that anything has been settled with respect to any kind of title. Although the Cubs won the series at Sox Park 2 games to 1, the White Sox took two out of three at Wrigley in May, leaving the season series tied at 3 games apiece. In the history of the series the White Sox lead 25-23, not exactly dominating.

I wanted the White Sox to win on Sunday, not so much because beating the Cubs was anything special but because Minnesota beat Milwaukee and it would have been nice to maintain that 10.5-game lead in the AL Central. These interleague games are for the fans, and even more so the cross-town rivalries. But in the grand scheme of the season, particularly for a team with a chance to win its division like the White Sox this year, the outcome of a series like this is almost meaningless. The White Sox lost the last two games against the Cubs, but Minnesota only picked up one game over the weekend. During the entire 12-game homestand the White Sox went 8-4 and picked up 4.5 games on the Twins. I’d call that a success.

And no matter how smug the sun-baked and booze-soaked Cubs fans were leaving the ballpark today, they will wake up tomorrow still trailing the St. Louis Cardinals by 8.5 games. One could argue that two wins in a row over a good club like the White Sox could launch the Cubs on a winning streak. And that’s fine if it happens. But it hasn’t yet.

Meanwhile the White Sox have Buehrle starting for them Tuesday in Detroit, and they should win that game. They should sweep the Tigers, in fact, and they may manage to take two out of three from the A’s, who are struggling in the West. Then they come home again for three games against Tampa Bay, baseball’s second-worst team, and three more against the A’s. We’re looking out a long way here, but the next couple of weeks could produce a lot of wins for the White Sox, and nobody will remember that they lost these last two games to the Cubs at home. It just won’t matter.

That’s the thing the fans at these games tend to forget. The Big Picture goes out the window during these crosstown series, and the fans sink to a stultifying level of name calling and chest pounding. It happened on Sunday, fueled by beer, of course. Luckily no blows were exchanged in Section 101, but there was plenty of swearing and finger pointing. Which brings the Indignant Citizen to the subject of taunting. People, first off when kids are around we should try and keep it clean. Sometimes profanity can be used to make a point. But often I find it misused as a cheap substitute for coming up with something truly clever or used at inappropriate times, i.e. with children nearby.

Also, I have a problem with anyone taunting any player or team by saying he or it they “sucks.” Here’s the deal on that: If you’re taunting that way at a game, it means you’re in the stands. Get it? You’re not on the field. The guy or team you think sucks is on the field making millions of dollars and engaging in hot jungle sex with beautiful women or men every night. Chances are they don’t suck nearly as much as you do. What really kills me are the fans who taunt really good players by telling them they suck. I was at a White Sox game one time when they were playing the Twins. Torii Hunter hit a home run in that game for the Twins and made a great running catch in the outfield that nobody in the ballpark thought he would make. And yet, late in the game, fans were still yelling “Torii, you suck!” from the stands. What’s that about? Hunter do many bad things—he may be a dirty player, he may cheat on his wife, he may be a lousy teammate—but one thing Hunter does not do is suck.

I hate the New York Yankees, but I give their fans credit with being creative while not necessarily being profane. Two classic examples are last year when Yankees fans picked up on something former Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez said after losing a game at Yankee Stadium and turned it into a taunt. Martinez said something to the effect that once in a while you have to tip your hat to the Yankees and call them your daddy. Next time Pedro pitched, “Who’s Your Daddy?” rang through the stadium over and over.

Another time I was at a Yankees-Red Sox regular season game in 2002. The Red Sox were winning, and their fans, of which there were quite a few, started chanting “First Place Red Sox.” This went on for about an inning before Yankees fans started chanting “Nineteen-eighteen” in reference to the last championship the Red Sox had won at that point.

I guess the bottom line with the Cubs-White Sox series is I enjoyed the game, enjoyed seeing two of the game’s premier pitchers in Jon Garland and Mark Prior, wished the Sox would have won but don’t think the outcom of this season's crosstown rivalry will affect either team in the long run. Whichever team finally wins a World Series first will have true bragging rights, the only bragging rights that really matter.