It's So True

Don't you just love this? I know I do. A Rick Morrissey column this week has me feeling good about the White Sox's chances this year.

So a bold prediction for 2005:

The White Sox will win the World Series. This is the only way life could be any worse for the Cubs. And that is where you always go with this franchise. You go to wherever the maximum pain is. Five outs away from the World Series in 2003? Yes, that does hurt. The Red Sox, the Cubs' brother in futility, winning the Series in 2004? Thank you, sir, now hit me across the back of the legs with your cane.

When the Red Sox stunned the Yankees in the ALCS, I wrote a column about it for the Tribune, with the Cubs' misery threading its way through the piece. Didn't mention the White Sox and their misery once. And heard about it from miserable Sox fans. How dare anyone dismiss their pain, they said. They hadn't won a World Series since 1917 and have had to live with the Black Sox scandal all these years. Surely that torture counts for something.

Fair's fair, and Sox fans will be able to rub a World Series title in the faces of Cubs fans. You rightly ask: How, with that lineup and that budget, could the Sox win the Series? How, after trading Carlos Lee and not re-signing Magglio Ordonez, could the Sox win it all? Especially with that pitching staff?

I have no idea. I just know that, in the grand scheme of things, it would make perfect sense. A Chicago team wins the World Series, and it's not the long-suffering Cubs. It's the almost-as-long-suffering Sox. (The standard Cubs fan would react typically—by pretending South Side fans don't exist and catching up with his old friend, pain.)

So it's the Sox in seven games. Oh, yeah, over the Cubs. I almost left that part out.

And if not this year, then next year. Always next year.

In the past, I've told my brother, a Cubs fan, that the ideal situation for me would be for the Cubs to make the World Series...and lose to the Sox. It's the ultimate in sibling rivalry, I know.