Well, the 2005 baseball season is now over and the Chicago White Sox won the World Series, beating the Houston Astros in four straight games. I like how Tyler Kepner put it in his front page story in today's New York Times: "The baseball gods were merciless once, inflicting decades of sorrow on a franchise for one fateful mistake." And then he went on to say "All these years, it turns out the gods have a heart after all." Last year it was the Boston Red Sox that exorcised their demons after not winning the Series since 1918. The White Sox demons lasted a bit longer - they last won the World Series in 1917.
I was rooting for the White Sox after the three teams I follow most closely, the Mets, the Yankees and the Red Sox were eliminated. When I last wrote a blog story about baseball in mid-September, the Mets were in last place after having lost 15 of their last 19 games. They actually had a strong finish, winning 12 of their last 16 games but by then few in New York cared how the Mets were doing any more, especially since the Yankees were having such a magnificent finish. They only lost 5 of their last 21 games, caught up with the Red Sox and won first place in their division. And, as I was hoping, the Red Sox also made it into the playoffs as the wild card team. I was really looking forward to another exciting Yankees - Red Sox series like the one we had last year, but it was not to be. They both lost in the first round of the playoffs to clearly better teams - the Yankees to the Los Angeles Angels and the Red Sox to the White Sox.
It was not difficult for me to then root for the White Sox. For ten years, when I was attending the University of Chicago, I lived in the south side of Chicago just a few miles from the White Sox stadium. The White Sox have two great fellow Cuban pitchers, Jose Contreras and Orlando Hernandez, the legendary "El Duque" about whom it will one day be said that he swam from Cuba to the US fighting sharks all along the way. I really like their manager, Ozzie Guillen, a native from Venezuela who is never at a loss for words.
Now comes the cold winter. But spring training starts in only three and a half months.
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