COMMENTARY

By Jim Litke

updated 10:19 a.m. ET Oct. 27, 2005

Jim Litke

HOUSTON - Enough about the Chicago White Sox and their World Series championship already.

Yes, they waited 88 years for it. Yes, they swept the Boston Red Sox in the AL division series, brought the Los Angeles Angels crashing back to earth in the championship series and kept the Houston Astros from ever leaving the launching pad in this mercifully brief Series.

Neat little episodes all, but don’t waste too much time or too many brain cells figuring out whether this is the start of something big. It isn’t. We witnessed much the same thing just last season (see Boston, paragraph above), and at this rate we already know how the next one has to play out. The end of two XXXL-sized droughts in the first five years of the new century can only mean one thing:

The Chicago Cubs are on the clock.

So spare us the wrenching stories about how this World Series wipes away the stain of the 1919 Black Sox. And skip the debate about whether this team was destiny’s darlings, umpires’ pets or just so lucky that even the original Wizard of Oz — the one not named Guillen — could have pulled all the levers required to manage them to a title.

“It’s unbelievable, unbelievable! What a year!” said White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski, a talisman if there ever was one. Nicknamed “Captain Chaos” soon after coming to Chicago from San Francisco, he was the principal actor in both the contentious dropped third strike and phantom tag plays that led to improbable wins against the Angels. Small wonder he believes in omens.

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“To win 1-0,” Pierzynski said after Wednesday night’s clincher, “that’s the way we started the first half, that’s the way we started the second half and that’s the way we ended it.”

At a time like this, it’s worth remembering that while omens provide nice little flourishes in the retelling of any tale, they’re only validated by hindsight. There was a lunar eclipse, after all, on the night Boston won it all a season ago, and no shortage of predictions that after shedding the Curse of the Bambino, the Procrastination of Pesky and the Bobble of Buckner, the Red Sox would be taking another champagne shower at the end of this season and for many more to come.

Didn’t happen.

At its core, baseball is still a game of percentages. Curses and droughts that stretch across decades make titles seem more romantic, but all they mean in a quantifiable sense is that your team is probably overdue. The Red Sox and White Sox winning back to back may lend some urgency to the Cubs’ battle cry, “Wait till next year!” — but they’ll still have to defy some long odds.

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