I guess this is the point of blogs

I’m going to vent about Chicago (my dad pronounces it shi-kaw-go) baseball in this post. If you don’t care, I don’t blame you.

Watching the Bears blowout of the Lions this Sunday, that blowhard Joe Buck felt it was necessary to mention how badly the Sox (not the Red, the team that actually has “Sox” on their hat and uniform) have played lately. Friggin' Cardinals fan.

First off, the Sox WILL make the playoffs. The Sox’ magic number is 11. The Indians are 3-10 against the Sox this season. If the Sox go .500 for the rest of the year (their record since the All-Star Break), the Indians have to go at least 9-4 to win the division (including 6 games against Chicago). Right now, I doubt the Sox will break their streak of 88 years without a playoff series victory, but they’ll play more than 162 games this year.

It seems that whenever the national media mentioned the White Sox this season, it was necessary to bring up the negatives. Frequently, the team would be coupled with the Cubs in terms of attendance or their fans would be lambasted by certain idiots for low turnout on a weeknight game in May against the Royals with a 42° game-time temperature.

I think I now empathize with overexposed Red Sox fans, considering how often Babe Ruth and the Yankees were mentioned in every Red Sox national broadcast this decade. I think the only people who weren’t sick of it were Yankee fans (for good reason, mind you).

I’m not going to go into specifics about how the Cubs became the #1 team in Chicago and neighboring areas, but I will say that things are probably evening out in the metro area, due to a consistent TV deal for 20 years, as well as a family-friendly ballpark (and I will suffer no argument to the contrary).

The biggest problem I have with the Sox-Cubs comparisons is that I pull for the Cubs as well. Normally, in sports fandom, part of the fun is Schadenfreude for a rival team’s suffering. However, my dad is a Cubs fan, so I didn’t enjoy games 5-7 of the 2003 NLCS. Nothing would be cooler than seeing both Chicago teams make the playoffs. However, the Cubs of the last two years are like the Sox from 2001-2004, when they had talent, but not the consistency (and that is usually a managerial issue). If it comes to a Windy City World Series on the 100^th anniversary of the last one, I’m all for it. But you won’t see me wearing red and blue that October. Sorry, Dad.