The baseball season is over for the Cubs and White Sox.
Sadly for one, mercifully for the other.
I do not want, in any way, to prolong the agony for White Sox fans. You’ve suffered enough. You have suffered in a way that fans of no major league baseball team ever have before.
But I want to explain why there seems like such a chasm between the Sox and Cubs on and off the field.
To do that, we have to start with how the entities are similar.
Both franchises have rich histories.
Put an older Cubs fan in a room with an older Sox fan and ask them to name a famous player from their team’s history. They could go for hours.
Both have legendary teams in their histories.
Take those same two older fans or choose two others—your call. They call list off teams that every Cubs fan and every Sox fan will smile at the mention of their name.
Both have magic moments, and moments that haunt them for all those days.
For the Cubs, we have the 2016 World Championship, of course. But also, there is the Sammy Sosa home run spree, Gabby Harnett’s “homer in the gloamin’”, Tuffy Rhodes three home runs on opening day, “the Sandberg Game” and Kerry Wood’s 20 strike out game.
For the White Sox, three perfect games and 20 no-hitters are highlighted by Dewayne Wise robbing a home run that would have broken up Mark Buehrle’s perfect game in 2009.
And both have those not-so-fun times, too.
On the North Side, the ball that went through Leon Durham’s legs in 1984 and Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS.
On the other end of town, the 1983 ALCS home game in which Jerry Dybzinski failed to move runners over in the late innings with a bunt, and then overran second base to kill a rally that cost the Sox a real shot at going to the World Series.
I say all that to prove that the two franchises have some commonality.
So, then, why does it feel like the Cubs and White Sox are so much more than 10.7 miles apart?
Part of that is because one of our personality flaws, as a society, is that we have become “prisoners of the moment.” We tend to only focus on what has happened most recently and not see the whole picture.
Beyond that, there are some serious differences between the two.
The biggest difference is their ball parks.
There was a day most of you readers remember when both the Cubs and Sox had stadiums that were epic in their stature and were part of the allure of attending their home baseball games.
The old Comisky Park was in a class with Tiger Stadium in Detroit and the original Yankee Stadium. It had a character and a personality of its own. It wasn’t necessarily a classy joint, but it was a common-man’s place to gather and watch the Sox. It gave us fire works after homeruns when no one else did that. It was where the owner sat in the outfield with the fans…without a shirt on.
It was the pride of the South Side, and it was a perfect fit for the blue-collar nature of the White Sox fan base.
Then they tore it down.
The White Sox took the wrecking ball to Comiskey to build a brand new stadium.
It was slick. It was a shiny diamond in the middle of a growingly dark part of town. It could have offered hope and joy.
It had the opposite effect.
Fans never embraced the new park. It didn’t represent them like the old one did.
And there were features of the new stadium that were not fan friendly.
The designers tried to avoid posts to obstruct fans’ view of the playing field, so they constructed a park with most of its seating in the upper deck. The intimacy of the old park was lost and frankly, the upper level was so steep that a lot of fans didn’t feel safe going up and coming down the aisles.
Meanwhile, on North Clark Street, Wrigley Field is still standing. It embodies the collective personality of the people who pass through her turnstiles. It’s surrounded by a village of places to shop and eat that is considered one of the safest places in the city.
When Wrigley started to show her age, they fixed her. And they did it in such a way that didn’t ruin the charm of the place.
In many ways, it is the real-life Field of Dreams. Fans will come to Wrigley just to experience it when they would never go to the other side of town for that reason.
This is why Jerry Reinsdorf wants to build a new stadium.
Here is the problem: he wants the city and the state to help him pay for a good chunk of it, and he asked them for that that in the middle of a 121-loss season.
So far, no takers.
That being true, the chasm will just continue to get wider and wider between the Cubs and Sox, and the only thing that will change that is a change in ownership.