When a team doesn’t win a World Series for generations, inevitably the idea of a “curse” pops up. Curses like the Chicago Cubs’ Curse of the Billy Goat, Boston’s Curse of the Bambino, Houston’s Curse of … um … there’s got to be one somewhere … Rusty Staub? Joe Morgan? The Ghost Mosquitoes of Colt Stadium? Any other suggestions?

For the Chicago White Sox, the presumed curse is the Curse of the Black Sox. The Black Sox, as has been referenced many times over the past few weeks, is the nickname given to the 1919 team that threw the World Series. (Technically, only eight of them were involved in throwing the World Series — that’s why the book and movie about them was called “Eight Men Out.”) For all the talk about 1959 being the last time the White Sox were in the World Series, that year also was the first American League championship the team had won since the dreaded 1919 season.

I say “presumed curse” because the last ones to bring up curses are Sox fans themselves. To them, the Sox’s dismal history is a result of bad players led by bad management, and a few unlucky breaks in the few good years. It wasn’t a curse that made the White Sox trade a young, up-and-coming Sammy Sosa for an old, breaking-down George Bell. Curses are for Cubs.

Still, it’s hard to put aside the idea that the White Sox have been paying a penance, and a justifiable one, for 86 years over their forebears’ misdeeds. After all, what could be worse than deliberately losing the World Series?

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How about having an owner responsible for the cancellation of one?

If there’s a reason for a curse to be visited upon the White Sox, that reason would be Jerry Reinsdorf’s key role in forcing the 1994 players’ strike that abruptly ended that season in early August, instead of late October. If the White Sox lose the Series, the Curse of Jerry is officially on.

Reinsdorf is the most successful and most hated owner in Chicago sports history. As an owner of the Chicago Bulls, his teams won six championships in the 1990s, which in any other city would qualify an owner for permanent deity status. Yet fans blame Reinsdorf, along with then-General Manager Jerry Krause, for chasing Michael Jordan out of town. His 1998 retirement from the Bulls was supposed to allow Krause to show his managerial brilliance without Jordan taking the spotlight. (Synopsis of Krause’s post-Jordan tenure: he didn’t show it.)

But by then, Reinsdorf already was experienced at finding ways to alienate fans of the White Sox, which he bought with partner Eddie Einhorn in 1981. First, after the 1981 season, the Sox owners decided to yank their games off of WGN-TV — available over-the-air locally and on cable systems throughout the country — in favor of putting them on a pay-TV network. Because of that decision, announcer Harry Caray jumped across town to the Cubs, which he single-handedly turned into Chicago’s baseball darling thanks to his ebullient, tipsy charm blasted across the nation’s TV screens. There’s a reason the Cubs built a statue of Caray outside Wrigley Field.

Then in 1988, Reinsdorf (with the help of Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson) bent ears and twisted arms from St. Petersburg, Fla., where he threatened to move the team, to Chicago to get a new publicly financed Comiskey Park for the White Sox. Old Comiskey was a semi-charming dump; the immediate verdict on new Comiskey was that it was an uncharming, sterile palace. It didn’t help that the new stadium opened soon before Oriole Park at Camden Yards ushered in a new era of retro, Wrigley Field-like stadiums.

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