What was I saying about the White Sox being dangerous? The Sox turned on the Cubs like a wounded animal in their home-and-home series, winning the first two games at Wrigley Field two weeks ago before the Cubs salvaged the finale, and doing the same last weekend at Sox Park. These series were a source of great joy to Sox fans, and anguished their Cubs counterparts. There are Sox fans who hate the Cubs and Cubs fans who hate the Sox, and when their team wins and the other loses they say, “We took two today.” Yet many more fans of one team are ambivalent about the other, their feelings dependent on when and where they grew up and which players they took a shining to. If pressed, I’d have to say I’m more of a Cubs fan than a Sox fan, because when I arrived in Chicago as a boy in 1968, the Sox opened the season with ten straight losses and the Cubs were on the ascent. The following year sealed my lot with the dysfunctional Cubs family. Yet as a professional I’ve tried to maintain a certain objectivity. This year I was rooting for the Cubs, because they’d played better early and entered their first series with the Sox leading the NL Central Division, while the Sox had played poorly and lethargically, squandering their abundant abilities. Even so, I believed the Sox had the more talented team, and I was half hoping the intense rivalry with the Cubs would awaken them to make a run in the second half. The six games produced some tremendous baseball, and the Sox earned their victories and their loyal fans’ allegiance. How could any Chicago fan begrudge them that?
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The series were an initiation for the Cubs’ new manager, Dusty Baker. I don’t know what the Bay Area series were like when he was managing the San Francisco Giants against the Oakland Athletics, but he seemed unprepared for what was at stake here in Chicago. He juggled his pitching rotation to get twin aces Kerry Wood and Mark Prior into the interleague series with the New York Yankees, and they responded with back-to-back victories. But it turned out that this made neither available for the first series with the Sox, at Wrigley. In 1998, Sox manager Jerry Manuel had been caught unawares by his first interleague series, and the following year he plotted from the middle of the winter to arrange his staff for maximum efficiency against the Cubs. The Sox proceeded to embarrass the Cubs, dragging them down from their wild-card playoff perch of the previous year and jump-starting the Sox toward the 2000 AL Central title. Baker sent Shawn Estes, his most erratic starter, against the Sox in the Wrigley Field opener two weeks ago, and Estes didn’t have it, getting pounded in a 12-3 loss. The next day the almost equally erratic Matt Clement–less so only because he’s been more dependably mediocre than Estes, nothing like the 12-game winner he was last year–staked the Sox and their struggling former ace Mark Buehrle to a 6-0 lead. Buehrle staggered a bit, as did the bullpen down the stretch, but the Sox held on for a 7-6 victory, thanks to a play in which Cubs catcher Damian Miller, waved home by third base coach Wendell Kim, was thrown out at the plate.
But Manuel, as ever working almost systematically to undermine the confidence of his bullpen closer–in this case Billy Koch, who’d lost a game earlier in the week on an 11th-inning homer–left Gordon in to finish. He couldn’t, and the bases were loaded with no one out when Manuel finally called on Koch. He got Patterson on a low curveball. Then Sosa hit a sacrifice fly, and Alou came up and hit the first pitch into the hole between third base and shortstop to tie the game. The Cubs’ Antonio Alfonseca, who remained in the game after finishing the eighth, got Lee to lead off the bottom of the ninth. Then Valentin dropped his bat on a low fastball and drilled it. No sooner had he finished his swing than he let the bat drop and threw his hands in the air, signaling touchdown. The ball landed in the right-field seats; the Sox had won again.
