The last chalkboard of the baseball season. The Northsiders are grinning ear to ear. Already making room on their calendars for October baseball.
The South Side?
We get to add another hundred-loss season in the books. I’m stuck here in Limbo still carrying a torch for the Pale Hose. Call it loyalty, call it stubbornness, call it stupidity.
Einstein supposedly said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” I stay with problems too long myself, and the Chicago White Sox are Exhibit A. This is the first year since 1971 that I didn’t walk through the turnstiles at Comiskey... or whatever corporate billboard they are pimping on the facade. That is fifty-five seasons as a White Sox fan. In those fifty-five years, we have had fifteen winning seasons.
Fifteen!
Do the math, that’s about one decent stretch every presidential administration or so.
I got married, had three kids, got divorced, all while waiting for the Sox to figure it out. Life changes, people come and go, but this team, they just keep losing.
How do you divorce a baseball team? If I could go down to the the Daley building, I would have been in front of a Cook County judge decades ago.
“Your honor, irreconcilable differences: I’m tired of watching middle relievers turn every Tuesday night into a funeral.”
Stamp the papers, hand me visitation rights to Polish sausages with grilled onions and let me go.
Sure, 2005 was a magical season that kept us believing. The World Series parade down LaSalle was great. Not as good as the Super Bowl XX parade and sure as hell not as good as watching each Shepkid come into the world, but close.
It is still a memory I can pull out on a cold winter night. I can walk into the park, order a polish, and remember that first bite back in ’74. The mustard dripping on my polyester pants. Some things will never lose their taste.
They say it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Easy for Tennyson to write, he wasn’t stuck watching Mike Caruso ground into double plays.
Maybe that is the hook?
Every spring, we are all virgins again. We forget the heartbreak and convince ourselves this is the year and when it isn’t, well, we already knew what we were getting ourselves into. Marriage vows and Sox fandom run on the same contract: sickness and health, until death do us part.
Third place in the Central doesn’t look so bad anymore compared to a miserable marriage.
Good luck to the Cubs and our Northside neighbors. Enjoy the Padres and whatever you do, don’t start Leon Durham at first base.
