Brace yourselves, Chicagoans: within the next 30 hours we could quite possibly become the biggest loser of a baseball city in a loooooong time.
On the North Side, the Cubs will have taken a 97-win juggernaut, seemingly unstoppable on all fronts, and run head-first into a Dodger team no one saw coming and folded.
On the South Side, we have our Good Guys who won their terrible division in the grandest fashion possible, then had the misfortune of facing the one team that most resembles everything these White Sox are not.
While your editor here at 35th Street will surely go in mourning (or at least half-mourning) should this be the end of the line for his favorite team, there are actually two small bits consolation to any impending doom:
1. The team everyone loves and was expecting to go the distance is about to do the same, which means. . .
2. . . . no one will really notice.
Oh sure, there will be some lip service about how the Sox wildly exceeded expectations, or about the great run they had through game 161, 162 and 163, or about how few teams go from fourth to first. But the rest of it – every column, every blog, every talk radio caller and newspaper cover – will look elsewhere at what happened during and after the hailstorm of boos at the Friendly Confines. We, friends, will be alone in our misery, and that is the best thing we could ask for.
Some will complain that the Cubs, even in failure, get more attention and better coverage. Is that really a bad thing? Does anyone want a spotlight shining on just how these White Sox never really belonged in the playoffs in the first place? Do we really need a national audience picking apart our team and what liking them says about as fans?
In no way is this a guarantee of failure tomorrow. The Sox are back at the long-range weapons testing facility on 35th, and all those long pop-ups we saw the past two games in St. Pete could return their rightful, moonshot form often enough to at least avoid totally soul-crushing defeat and put everything back into the realm of regular, pedestrian, boring defeat. Which, given the circumstances, doesn’t look half-bad.
But we’ll talk about it when it happens.