Cheering the White Sox

“If you love the Red Sox, you've simply got to love the White Sox. In this town (Boston), they're telling us that White is the new Red. “




And as much as an Astros win will increase the value of my son’s Roger Clemens rookie card - we’re cheering the White Sox. My ear will be tuned to the radio (if you can’t be there, this is my favorite way to catch a game!) following pitch by pitch.

If there is a curse greater than the one that followed the Red Sox for 86 years it is the one that haunts the White Sox:

“The 1919 White Sox did something to earn a lifetime of hardball purgatory. They threw the World Series. And they have not won another one since. It is the big, dirty secret that no one wants to talk about as Chicago prepares to play host to the World Series for the first time since the ChiSox were beaten by the Dodgers in '59. Counting the Black Sox scandal, the Second City has lost the last seven (five by the Cubs) World Series played here. The last time Chicago had a baseball champion was in 1917, which was the year before Boston beat the Cubs, which was a year before the White Sox took money to lose.

It's all there in John Sayles's excellent movie, ''Eight Men Out" (John Cusack does a great Buck Weaver), or the book (same title by Eliot Asinof). Angry at cheapskate owner Charles Comiskey, eight of the White Sox, including all-world Shoeless Joe Jackson, took cash to intentionally lose the World Series to the Reds. They were beaten, five games to three, in a best-of-nine event. Two years later, after they were acquitted in a bag-job trial, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned them for life. And the White Sox never won again.”

…”Which is why it's important for the White Sox to do what the Red Sox did and put the Black Sox to bed, just as the '04 Red Sox buried the great Bambino. “

(A matter of changing your Sox
By Dan Shaughnessy, Globe Columnist | October 22, 2005)


Go White Sox!