Southside Cinderellas Steal the Glass Slipper
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
This May, a friend and I went to a game at Sox Park on the South Side of Chicago. It was just becoming clear that the White Sox were in the middle of one of those special seasons, and that their stunningly dominant play through the first six weeks of the season wasn’t some sort of fluke.
The Sox pasted the rival Twins in that game, and as we came down the great wide ramp that leads from the main concourse into the parking lot, we were both astonished by the barely restrained violence of the crowd. It wasn’t just the normal boastfulness of a crowd realizing their team is special; it was more as if 87 years of frustration was being released in one night, and I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if a mob had thrashed some hapless Minnesotan.
Late in the season,the same friend and I went to Sox Park again, this time to see the Sox play the Indians. Cleveland had pulled to within a game of first place and looked like a near-certain bet to overcome a faltering Sox team that was already being spoken of as having pulled off one of the great choke-jobs in baseball history. The park was no more than three-quarters full, less than that by the time Joe Crede hit his second home run of the game, a monstrous shot to left field, to win it in the bottom of the 10th inning.There was no near-riot on the ramp on the way out of that game; people were still convinced the Sox were going to find a way to blow it in the last week of the season.
To understand what the White Sox’ victory in the World Series means, you have to understand that they weren’t supposed to win. By that I don’t just mean that as they entered the season they were thought by most observers to have little chance at being more than just another in a long string of frustratingly mediocre White Sox teams, but that they weren’t supposed to win before the Cubs.
People love the Cubs; Chicago, the entire Midwest, and much of the Southwest simply love them.There is nothing so perfect in baseball as a May afternoon in Wrigley Field, with its organ music and the bright sky over Lake Michigan sprawling out forever past the bleachers. The collective anticipation that overtook the city in 2003, when the Cubs looked for a few days like they really might win the pennant, was like nothing I’ve ever seen.
The White Sox aren’t the Cubs. Individual people – bitter, crabbed, eccentrics – might love them, but there aren’t entire social classes and cities that do. The Cubs play in the fashionable Lakeview neighborhood in their quaint park, in which you feel as if you’re watching a game in 1921; the White Sox play in a concrete bowl stuck between a housing project and a highway. Cubs fans are from that part of Chicago that forms the Third Coast, and may as well be part of California or the Mid-Atlantic for all it has to do with the rest of the country; White Sox fans aren’t just working class, but unfashionably so, drawn from that part of Chicago and its suburbs that may as well be part of Indiana.
More to the point, the Cubs are drowning in their history; the White Sox, with a history every bit as long and frustrating, are not, and never have. Is this because the White Sox’ curse has to do with tossing a World Series, rather than with a goat? Is it because the Sox have been owned by a succession of rakes and scoundrels, rather than by the patrician Wrigley family and then the Tribune Company, which, in its bland, stolid anonymity embodies something Chicago prizes in itself?
It probably has to do with both of those elements, and with the fact that the Sox play in the equivalent of Staten Island, and with the fact that one city can only handle so much yearning. Even the Sox’ great and long-delayed victory becomes just another chapter in the litany of Cubs humiliations. Great as the Sox have been, their victory doesn’t mean as much as a Cubs’ victory would. It’s not fair, but that’s how it is.
All of this fits, and is magnificent. Any bandwagoning embrace of the White Sox would be ridiculously phony. They aren’t the Red Sox, and they aren’t the Cubs; they’re the Sox, the heroes of determinedly unfashionable and idiosyncratic people who couldn’t possibly care less about whether anyone else understands or races to take part in their joy. I couldn’t be happier for them.
