White Sox fans do not want your pity. They do not want you clogging the U.S. Cellular parking lots before a game, not knowing where you’re going, especially if you keep stepping in the middle of their pre-game beanbag. (Beanbag is a horseshoes-like game in which you try to toss a beanbag through a hole in a wooden ramp. It's often accompanied by beer and Italian beef sandwiches. You mess with such games at your peril.)

The South Side as a region of Chicago is not trendy, and the people who live there like it that way. As much as White Sox fans got visibly embarrassed at nutjobs like William Ligue, who led a father-son excursion onto the field a few years ago to beat up Kansas City’s first-base coach, or the rioters at the infamous 1979 Disco Demolition promotion, they served a purpose — scaring the non-hardcore, bandwagon-jumping fans away. The Cubs got associated with happy drunks; the Sox got associated with angry drunks.

So that’s why Sox fans get a little nervous and nonplussed at the sight of uber-Cubs fan Ronnie “Woo” Wickers — who dresses up in a Cubs uniform and cheers by yelling the team’s name and player’s names, followed by “Woo!” — showing up during the playoffs at U.S. Cellular Field in full Woo-galia. “White Sox! Woo! Buehrle! Woo! Konerko! Woo!” Famous Cubs fans such as John Cusack and Jeremy Piven are now calling the White Sox offices, begging for playoff tickets. Go back to Wrigley, you stinkin’ Cubs fans!

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Perhaps this trendiness was inevitable, even without the World Series appearance. Consider that the neighborhoods around Sox Park (as the locals call it) are themselves starting to become more — gasp! — charming. In the Sox’s neighborhood of Bridgeport, where Mayor Daley grew up, urban gentrification is tearing down the humble homes and two-flats of Daley’s youth and replacing them with $600,000-plus homes and $250,000-plus condos. The kind of North Side hipster enclaves that gentrified Wrigley Field’s neighborhood — independent bookstores, upscale bars — are moving into Bridgeport, as they moved into Lincoln Park and Lakeview when the Cubs’ neighborhoods gentrified in the 1980s.

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Meanwhile, to the north, Chinatown has spilled its old borders and is lapping up to the edge of U.S. Cellular Field. To the east, the Robert Taylor Homes — one of the country’s most infamous housing projects — is almost completely torn down, and the surrounding neighborhood of Bronzeville is becoming an enclave of black yuppiedom, with teardowns and upscale businesses moving in there as they are in Bridgeport.

Even U.S. Cellular Field, long derided as a soulless "ball mall," could end up becoming trendy just because it's not, unlike stadiums these days, a clone of Camden Yards. In its lack of style, it becomes stylish.

All of this attention and trendiness, once the World Series is over, is going to become a crisis for White Sox fans used to feeling like second-class citizens. Their team is hot, their ballpark’s neighborhood is hot, even the ballpark might be hot. It’s like they're turning into the… the… Cubs!

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