Sports, like politics, is local. We can enjoy the skills of a Michael Jordan wherever we live, but it means something entirely different when Jordan plays in your town for your team. And in Chicago baseball is not merely local, in the sense of the hazy boundary line between the north and south sides, but tribal. It’s something at once deeply personal and intensely public, and I heard that something erupt as I never had before–no, not even during the Bulls’ six championships–with the final out of the World Series in the packed Bridgeport bar Cobblestones.
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Less than a week before, on the day before the World Series began, elder statesman Paul Konerko explained the Sox’ growing appeal by saying, “I think winning, people relate to that more than anything.” But although the team attracted its share of bandwagon jumpers as it neared the championship, success wasn’t exactly what made this year’s Sox so captivating. That is, it wasn’t just that winning created fans–the fans gave the championship its full significance. This World Series at last atoned for the Black Sox scandal, and for the Go-Go Sox teams of the 50s and 60s that could never get past the New York Yankees (and the one time they did couldn’t get past the Los Angeles Dodgers). This series wiped away the frustration of the 1983 playoffs, when the Winnin’ Ugly team was enchanted by the Baltimore Orioles’ Mike Boddicker and the Jerry Dybzinski fuckhead catastrophe spoiled Britt Burns’s courageous pitching performance. In the end, at the ticker-tape rally when Konerko presented Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf with the ball that made the final out, this series even rehabilitated Reinsdorf, who held the Sox hostage to get a publicly funded stadium 15 years ago and played a big role in cutting short the 1994 season, when the Sox had what looked like their best chance in years to win a title.
Again there was that mix of destiny, ability, and camaraderie. Manager Ozzie Guillen said Contreras fulfilled his potential “not because we speak the same language but because he knows he has a friend in the manager.” Guillen’s way was to show faith in his players and protect them at all costs, even if it meant acting the fool from time to time to distract the media. Everyone from Contreras to the lowest benchwarmer responded, including Geoff Blum, who hit the game-winning homer in the 14th inning of game three, and Willie Harris, who led off the eighth inning of game four with a pinch-hit single, went to second on Scott Podsednik’s bunt, advanced to third on a grounder to the right side by pinch hitter Carl Everett, and scored the game’s only run on a trickler up the middle by Jermaine Dye–vintage Guillen small ball. That hit clinched MVP honors for Dye, but the honor could have gone to any of several players.
I certainly wasn’t alone in my reverie. It seems that all Sox fans were thinking of others near and dear, whether they could share in the moment or could not.
