Bob Cook

The key to the Chicago White Sox repeating as World Series champions isn’t talent, good health or organist Nancy Faust’s gentle musical needling of opponents. To hear players, coaches, team executives and even your friendly neighborhood sports pundits talk, the key is staying hungry. Not the kind of hungry Latrell Sprewell’s family is on $14 million a year, but metaphorically hungry, starving, ravenous for the mouth-watering taste of titledom.

The Arizona Diamondbacks, Anaheim Angels, Florida Marlins and Boston Red Sox — the White Sox’s predecessors as World Series champs — apparently weren’t hungry enough, given they didn’t repeat. Offered the chance to refill at the buffet of champions, they pushed their plate away and said, no thanks (BRRRRAAPPPPPP!!!!!), I’m full.

The White Sox are pledging that, right now, their eyes are not bigger than their stomachs. Leading the way, as he does in the Chicago batting order, is Scott Podsednik, who got no guff, unlike manager Ozzie Guillen, for missing the Sox’s White House ceremony, what with the understandable excuse of honeymooning with his Playboy Playmate wife.

"Seeing what that’s like and playing in that atmosphere makes you even more hungry," Podsednik told reporters at White Sox spring training in Tucson, Ariz. Later, he added, talking about general manager Kenny Williams and Guillen: "(Williams is) hungry. Ozzie’s hungry. This team is going to be just as hungry."

The thing is, anybody can say they’re still hungry. But how do you actually keep from feeling a little full after a title? How do you keep from being in a position such as the Detroit Pistons’ Richard Hamilton, who said losing the title in 2005 after winning one in 2004 only served to make his team hungry?

Well, one way is to launch a few surgical strikes to the roster, bringing in players who, while presumably talented and all that, are hungry. Designated hitter Jim Thome must be starving, having played for more than a decade without a World Series ring. Pitcher Javier Vazquez, judging by his performance, couldn’t get hungry enough with the Yankees, but the White Sox are hoping this time is different. Utility infielder Rob Mackowiak sure is hungry, what with having played for perpetually dreadful Pittsburgh, and growing up in the Sox stronghold of Oak Lawn, Ill., hungering for a title that was not yet to come during his childhood.

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Guillen told reporters at spring training: "It’s hard to say (you’re hungry) when you win 99 plus 11, but we have six or seven guys who weren’t here last year, and they are …"

I think you know what they are.

But even with a few new, Oliver Twist-hungry faces, what’s to keep everyone else from figuring they’re bellies are a tad stuffed? New England Patriots linebacker Willie McGinest related the following tale to Sports Illustrated in 2002, the training camp after the Patriots won their first Super Bowl. The Patriots brought former Boston Celtics great Bill Russell, the hollowest leg in sports history with 11 championships in 13 seasons, to talk about summoning the will to repeat, and re-repeat, and so on.

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McGinest said, "Someone asked (Russell), ‘After eight or nine championships, how did you stay hungry? He said, ‘by being aggressive.’"

Russell was presumably talking about the players, not the management.

Though in the White Sox’s case, Guillen and Williams have taken such advice to heart.

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