When I suggested the name Vagaries of Man-Love for this blog a couple months ago, I had no idea how keenly I’d feel that concept, and how aptly it would describe the last week of White Sox baseball.
The idea is that Man-Love, for all it’s tremendous and exhilarating highs… also comes with crushing lows. For every 90 win season, there’s a 90 loss season. For every stunning walk-off homer… there’s the 4 run lead blown in the 9th.
I think it really gets to the root of why sports are so compelling. That gut-wrenching sense of loss is just as real and visceral as the glory of victory. At times it seems that losses are much more affecting and long lasting. The glow of a victory last days, even months, but tends to be an evanescent, shimmering warmth. But wondering what could have been? That pinched, gut-shot feeling, can inform a lifetime.
I love the White Sox. To an extent that is impossible to describe or share with anyone that doesn’t feel the same about another team. It defies reason, logic, social conditioning. I’ve loved them since as long as I can remember. It is what it is.
Last week the Sox reached their nadir and I had grown into the classic self-hate and weltshmerz that attends to nearly all Chicago sports fans. Several weeks of uninspired, futile baseball had sucked the life and fun out of our playoff hunt. I won’t belabor the details here, but it was painful.
But over the last three days the White Sox pulled off an increasingly unlikely comeback. Knocked to the mat, eyes bloodied and blue, they lifted themselves up for one desperate swing, and connected. Then another. Then another.
With Jim Thome’s TOWERING shot. With John Danks’ heroic effort on short rest. And with the unlikely double play combo of Griffey and AJ.
We’re in.
Both Chicago teams won their divisions and the faint prospect of a Crosstown Series looms impossibly large over the city. (A topic for another day)
For now, my blind obsession with a group of petulant, overpaid man-children, whose only connection to me is the color of the cloth on their backs, is paying dividends. I’ve been to the bottom, and after flirting with despondency, when all hope seemed lost… I’m back on top.
Thank you White Sox.
On a side note, here’s an impossibly poignant series of Dugouts:
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3 comments:
damn...i'm torn here. i havea man-love for longoria (as i've expressed here before) and he went yard twice today. rookie with big aspirations i suppose.
and then there's griffey. always loved that duder adn even with allt he bantering and hate he would get from cincy fans (the reds are my team and i may have been the only 15 year old swearing the dynasty A's would be swept (probably can chalk that up to general 15 year old cockiness but damn...i sure wanted that to happen!)....and they were.
but alas, there was no griffey on that wire-to-wire team in 90. i want very much for griffey to get his ring. longoria will have his day - eventually - but i sure would like to see the white sox win.
if only to further piss off the fucking cub's fans -- the most despised fan in the nation (red sox fan is close adn i don't so much care about the yankees fans anymore as they're harmless to everyone but themselves).
dar
I'm with you Dar. I wish the Sox were playing anyone else. I totally dig that Rays team and if the Sox can't, I want them to win it all.
But you're right about Griff, and lump Thome in there you've got a compelling backstory. Two old school, roid free, class acts making perhaps their last run at the series.
I have a lot of reasons to root for the Sox. That's a good one.
-bb13
The White Sox got in because of a ridiculous schedule this year w/ the Twins playing 24 of 30 games down the stretch on the road, the ridiculous coin flip to determine home-field in the playoff, and AJP's cheating in the 8/28 game against the Rays.
Basically, bull-shit, and the way the Rays handed their asses to them in every game except for the one started by Danks proved what everybody knew: they were a shit team.
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