A friend of mine asked me the other day why I
stopped being a Cubs fan five years ago and converted to the White
Sox. There were many reasons, but the most
important one is that I had grown tired of rooting for a team that
didn’t seem to care about winning. I have the same attitude about politics. The Libertarian Party makes many good points,
but I don’t think I’ve ever written anything nice about
them because they are so embarrassingly clueless when it comes to
nuts-and-bolts politics. The party couldn’t organize a
one-car caravan, yet its members speak of “moral
victories” when one of their candidates scores 3 percent on
Election Day — kind of like my friends and I used to do
whenever the Cubs played .500 ball. Alan Keyes gave us all another Cubslike
experience. Keyes was obviously not in last year’s U.S.
Senate race to win; he was in it to help expand his national
fundraising base and get his mug on TV. The Cubs love to make
money, and their fans revel in the team’s overhyped media
exposure, but they never come out on top in the really important
category: winning. Democrat Dawn Clark Netsch ran one of the
worst gubernatorial campaigns ever in 1994. It was almost as if she
didn’t really want to win, so I wrote lots of nasty things
about that campaign. I have long despised this sort of loser
behavior in politics, and when that great friend of mine finally
sat me down five years ago and pointed out how wrong-headed I was
in my choice of baseball team, it was like being hit by a lightning
bolt. It took a little while to act on my new
revelation. A baseball team is almost like a religion, and people don’t change their
religions on a moment’s notice. I became a White Sox fan pretty much by
default. I was living in Chicago, I wouldn’t be going to
Wrigley Field anytime soon, and the Sox were handy. It didn’t
take me long to fall in love with the Pale Hose, however. It was a young, scrappy team that zoomed into
the American League Division Series in 2000, the first year of my
conversion. “The Kids Can Play” was the slogan that
year, and, man, could they ever, winning 95 games during the
regular season. Their roster was the definition of
“clutch,” but they didn’t have a great pitching
staff and were swept in the first round of the playoffs. No matter, I thought. This is an organization
I can root for. A little fine-tuning here and there, and
we’ll win it all. Some disappointing seasons followed, but I
stayed with the Sox. Unlike that other team, the Sox looked as if
they wanted to win, and management always seemed to be trying to
find just the right formula to get them back on top. When the Cubs
allowed a dropped foul ball to rattle them to the bone in the 2003
National League Championship series, I knew that I could never,
ever go back.
Everything came together this year, of course,
with White Sox in their first World Series since 1959. I love this team. Our batting average
wasn’t the greatest and we stranded a lot of men on base, but
our overpowering pitching staff baffled the opposition all year and
our players found a way to eke out win after win. Yeah, the Sox
struggled after the All-Star break, but they never, never gave up,
and management kept a cool head and didn’t rely on
late-season trades for some big-name superstars to come in and bail
everyone out. They did it all themselves. For years, the political candidates who fought
their hearts out to win, who found a way to come out ahead even
when nobody believed they had a chance, who didn’t panic when
things started slipping away from them were the ones I’ve
given the most favorable coverage. Those who are in it for an ego boost, who
assume that people will support them no matter what, who coast when
they should work have always received harsh treatment from me. I
simply learned five years ago that I should apply these rules to
baseball. Go Sox.
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 2, 2005.
