On the one hand, Ozzie Guillen was ticked off at his Cubs counterpart, manager Dusty Baker, for telling ESPN the Magazine he wasn’t rooting for the White Sox in the playoffs.
“That’s OK,” Guillen said in the Sun-Times before Game 3 of the 2005 World Series in Houston, his Sox two wins from 88-year-drought-ending glory. “We’ll see who owns Chicago now.”
But maybe Guillen already knew better, because earlier that October, when asked how a Sox championship might alter the balance of baseball prominence in a city where Cubs fandom clearly loomed larger, he’d opined, no doubt embellishing for effect, “You’ve got to win seven World Series in a row.”
Then-general manager Ken Williams put the number at only two. Win a pair of trophies, and watch the populace — and the media — turn their attention to the South Side. Guillen didn’t buy it.
“Seven,” he repeated.
We’ll never know. Alas, we know this: Twenty years after the Sox completed a sweep of the Astros on Oct. 26, 2005, they exist in the shadows of the Cubs as much as ever. Certainly more so than they did during that run to the championship, when The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell wrote — in a sweeping dismissal of the Sox’ entire history — “For 105 seasons, they’ve been baseball’s most overlooked, ignored and almost utterly invisible team.”
There have been moments since then — maybe one or two — when it appeared our baseball scene might be shifting just a little. As recently as January of 2020, one over-his-skis writer actually devoted an entire column to the notion of “Soxtown,” the gist being the Sox were on the rise with an exciting, likable roster while the Cubs were cashing checks and their fans, spoiled after a World Series title of their own, were perhaps beginning to sour. A journalism highlight, this wasn’t. (You’re welcome, readers.)
There was Sox playoff baseball in both 2020 and 2021, but since then the team has lost 324 games — one more than the pitiful Rockies — for the worst three-year record in the big leagues. There’s a pretty good chance you had some idea of this already.
Over recent months, I’ve had chances to ask several 2005 team members about both ends of the Sox spectrum, the blissful memories and the abject miseries.
“I still got it here, what we did,” said Freddy Garcia, the winning pitcher in the Game 4 clincher, pointing to his heart.
He never saw it getting this bad.
“Hell no,” he said.
Jose Contreras, another starting pitcher who shined that October, believed those Sox would win “a couple” more World Series.
“It was a great team, you know?” he said. “A great organization.”
But watching the Sox bottom out with a record 121 losses in 2024 was “crazy” and “painful,” Contreras said.
Twenty years ago, Paul Konerko had a second straight 40-homer season and Jermaine Dye, A.J. Pierzynski, Scott Podsednik and others came on board to round out what became a 99-win regular-season team whose 11-1 blitz through the postseason was the stuff of legend. Or should have been. ESPN alone has forgotten about the 2005 Sox often enough that one is left to wonder if people even noticed.
“Say what you will about Chicago, it’s kind of a Cubs majority around here,” said catcher Pierzynski. “People were kind of like, ‘Hey, that’s a cute little story that the White Sox won. We’re just going to brush this under the rug.’ ”
Said right fielder Dye, “Obviously, with two teams in one big city, we’re kind of the forgotten child over here. It’s tough to hear, but I know what we’ve done. The people of Chicago know that.”
As the Dodgers and Blue Jays duke it out in this year’s Fall Classic, it’s a wonder where the time goes and how vastly different things are in terms of both the quality of the Sox and the manner in which October games unfold. Just the blink of an eye ago — OK, 20 years — four Sox starting pitchers threw back-to-back-to-back-to-back complete games in the American League Championship Series and each went at least seven innings deep in the World Series. No offense to Guillen, but his job was easy.
If you’ve never spent hours on end down the bottomless rabbit hole of newspaper archives, consider yourself normal. Some of us enjoy nerding out this way once in a while, although it can make one feel mighty old to read a 20-year-old Sox story referencing an anniversary from 20 years before that. An especially fun Sun-Times piece featured fans who watched the Bears beat the Ravens at Soldier Field — with a halftime ceremony honoring the 1985 Super Bowl squad — before heading straight to the ballpark to see the Sox win Game 2 of the World Series in walk-off fashion. By God, what a doubleheader it must’ve been for those folks.
The Soldier Field stands contained many fans clad in Sox gear that day, an unusual site, indeed. A sign read, “Go Bears! Play Ozzie ball!”
In the champions’ clubhouse in Houston a few nights later, Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said, “This is for all the fans in Chicago — South Side, North Side, West Side.”
But the Sox never captured a whole city, did they?
Reinsdorf also said, “I hope it’s not a dream when I wake up in the morning.”
All this time later, it sort of seems like it was.