Rapid Hope Loss

“Think of one moment you can call
the happiest moment of your life.
It’s gone.”
-Moneen

It was never supposed to end like this.

It may have been awhile since I honestly and objectively thought this team would win a World Series – it hasn’t felt like that kind of team since June – but it also didn’t feel like a team that would spend the last week of September playing out the string and looking like they can’t wait for the season to be over.

And at this point, neither can I. Because rooting for a good baseball team that’s completely falling apart isn’t like the same experience with football or basketball. It’s more like having a crappy job or being in a bad relationship – you can try not to think about it, but because it’s there almost every day this really doesn’t work. In a lot of ways, it’s almost better to root for a team that’s downright embarrassing, because you can relax fairly early in the season and almost make them into a running joke.

I shouldn’t complain much, because there are a lot of sports fans who wait their entire lives and never have something like we got last year, and quite frankly a lot of baseball fans who will have a long wait to get a season like this year was. But as far as seasons go, this has to be one of the toughest kinds to take – the one that goes from “crazy optimism” to “justified optimism” to “ok, there are some problems, but there’s still time to fix them” to “oh crap, I guess there wasn’t” in seven months. Yeah, some things in sports are worse, but not by a whole ton, at least not over this kind of period of time.

Frank Thomas and Magglio Ordonez absolutely killed us last week. In some ways, it was a weird sort of justice – the Sox had to get rid of Magglio to win a championship, and the hubris of victory was part of what enabled them to get rid of Frank. I have no problem with what happened with Magglio – he deliberately lied about his health to make money, and they found a replacement who was superior in every possible way – but the Frank Thomas thing was grossly mishandled. Yes, he was a self-centered a-hole, but he bled black and white and could have been kept relatively cheaply, and I think sometimes franchises take the “sports is a business” thing too far with their franchise players (although when I tried to avoid this with Ek’s Machine, Priest Holmes ran me into the ground for two years with injuries, so there might be a reason). I’m just honestly shocked we had to face both of those guys that late in the season – I’ll put it this way: from 2000 to 2004, the White Sox were a lock to make the playoffs as long as both Thomas and Ordonez could avoid major injuries (the Sox made the playoffs one time during that stretch).

The thing that’s a little vexing is that I have no idea how to go about fixing or improving this team – yes, it was dumb to not have a backup outfielder, especially since we had to watch The Adventures of Rob Mackowiak and Pablo Ozuna in the outfield all year, which made me jump in stark terror more times than the trailer for “The Descent.” And another middle reliever or two would help, except that middle relief guys are like kickers in fantasy football: they’re relatively cheap, there are usually decent ones available, they absolutely cannot be relied on from one year to the next, and it’s dumb to invest too much into that part of the team for those reasons. As frustrating as the lack of fundamentals was offensively, any Sox fan that would rather have the 2005 lineup than the 2006 one is a moron, and despite the fact that the rotation underachieved, I still wouldn’t trade our five starters for anyone else’s in the AL except for Oakland and maybe Minnesota.

Minnesota – ugh. I hate that we lost to those guys. I’ve always thought that the Cubs-White Sox “rivalry” was stupid and overblown: our real rivals are the Twins. Ironically, it seemed like all the injuries the Twins had actually helped them, as every underperforming veteran that went down was replaced by one of those young guys who doesn’t put up great numbers, but manages to hit in the .250s to .280s, plays with a ton of energy every day, and seems to come through when it matters a little more often than they should (the White Sox had a ton of those guys last season, and basically none this year, even though it was mostly the same players). I’ll also let you in on a secret that I’ve observed. Are you ready for it? Here it comes...

Minneapolis is a crappy sports town! It’s true! In the United States, the only other city in its league for crappy, disinterested fans is Atlanta (sorry Lewis, but you can’t really deny it). Now your first thought is going to be “wait, what about those crazy loud fans?” It’s because of that freaking Metrodome. All of those huge indoor stadiums amplify crowd noise, but the Metrodome seems to be among the worst/best in this respect, to the point that when Rex Grossman threw the game winner last Sunday, it sounded like it had happened at a Bears home game. Unless half of the people there were starting Rasheid Davis in their fantasy leagues that week, it should have been a tomb at that point. That place has to be the worst venue in American sports, and I’ll even include IHL rinks and minor-league baseball stadiums in the mix. Like most combo stadiums, it’s positively awful for baseball – they fold up the seats like at a high school gym and cover them with a big plastic tarp. This is defensible given the architectural problems involved, but what I don’t get is why they decided to make the roof the same color as the baseball, ensuring that the Metrodome ceiling will be involved in at least five “worst gems” every year (and it seems to happen to the Twins as often as the road team, so it’s not really an advantage). Everything they tried with the fake grass there has been a disaster, and I can’t remember the last time the Bears played there without somebody getting a turf-related injury.

Plus, the attendance numbers are awful for both the Timberwolves (which is defensible since they were awful for years and just finished wasting KG’s prime) and the Twins, who at one point were drawing so poorly that MLB was openly considering contracting the team, even though they were winning the AL Central every year at that point. They also had barely over 18,000 for their playoff clincher, after arguably their most enjoyable season since the 80s…I mean, could you even imagine that happening at a potential clincher in Chicago, or New York, or Boston, or Seattle or Miami or Anaheim? Or anywhere else besides maybe Atlanta? I actually don’t like to put a lot of stock in attendance to measure a fan base – Sox fans were unfairly ripped for this for years – but the other problem is that, with a few exceptions, the people I know from Minnesota are the people who I actually can’t just talk trash to when their teams tank: I have to inform them their team is tanking, then talk trash to them. That’s not even true of anyone I know from the South or the West coast (I should mention now that everyone I’ve met from that area has been very nice, and I know several cool people from around there…it’s just that it IS a bad sports town, and everyone assumes it isn’t because it’s in the Midwest).

After enough time goes by, I will look back fondly on this season, and you won’t hear me using this space to call for the Sox to get rid of Kenny Williams, Ozzie, or any of the hitters or rotation guys – for the most part, they were part of a championship team and I’ll hate to see any of them go. And I don’t think this happened because of bad pitchers or bad hitters or even bad fielders…but the Sox had something special, and sometime this summer, for reasons unexplained, they lost it.

Ok, I’m done. The Bears look fantastic, don’t they?