Constable: Sox advice for Cubs fans
After more than a century of going into every baseball season hoping that, just maybe, "this is the year," we Chicago Cubs fans start the 2017 season Sunday in St. Louis, not with dreams but with expectations of winning back-to-back World Series championships.
We're sailing into uncharted seas. I still see my new Cubs hat with the World Series championship logo and have to remind myself that it's not an April Fool's leftover. After a lifetime of ending seasons with wails of "Wait 'Til Next Year," it's odd to go into a new season chanting, "Be Like Last Year." Fans who experienced the Cubs' World Series championships of 1907 and '08 aren't around to offer advice. So we turn to those in town who know what it means to start a baseball season as the reigning champions - White Sox fans.
"The entire White Sox experience changed forever because of that 2005 World Series experience," says Tim Gambro, a Wheeling firefighter and member of an extended family of several generations of die-hard Sox fans. "The pressure's gone."
Lots of Chicago baseball fans were born, lived, had kids, saw their kids have kids, and even saw their kids' kids' kids have kids, and died without ever seeing their team win a World Series. The Sox were championship-free from 1917 until that glorious 2005 season, and the Cubs' drought stretched from 1908 until last fall. So just seeing your team win once qualifies you for a lifetime achievement award as a Chicago baseball fan. That "at least I got to see my team hoist that trophy" sentiment has the power to make everything a little better.
"Even the Cubs World Series wasn't horrible because of the White Sox World Series experience. If the Sox hadn't already won it, it would have been 20 times worse," admits Gambro, who was far more accepting of the Cubs coming home with a Commissioner's Trophy than he once might have been. "Yes, you're dating her now, but we dated her 12 years ago. It takes so much stress out of it."
Cubs fans are prone to illusions of grandeur (I still have a 2003 Wrigley Field giveaway Bobby Hill card just in case the hotshot second-baseman ever makes it big). But White Sox fans tend to be more realistic. Even in the glow of the 2005 championship, longtime Sox fan Howard Jaffe of Libertyville headed into the 2006 season with a level head.
"I wouldn't go around saying, 'We're going to win the World Series again,'" Jaffe says. "It's a long season. You won. You got that monkey off your back. And now you have expectations, hopeful expectations, that it wasn't just a flash in the pan."
White Sox fans roared as the World Series banners unfurled on a rainy 2006 Opening Night at U.S. Cellular Field, and the team, led by a homer from newcomer Jim Thome, pounded Cleveland 10-4. In first place often until the middle of May, the White Sox won 90 games and just missed the playoffs.
But the team lost 90 in the 2007 season, were eliminated in the first round of the 2008 playoffs, haven't been back since, and are now rebuilding.
While Cubs fans aren't scheduling any weddings in October or even early November to avoid conflicts with the Cubs in the World Series, Sox fans are taking a different approach.
"I'm hoping they (the Sox) go 2-160 and get the No. 1 draft pick and we get our Kris Bryant," Gambro says, aware of how the Cubs' disastrous seasons at the start of this decade led to the draft picks that Cubs President Theo Epstein used to acquire young stars such as last year's National League Most Valuable Player Bryant and other pieces of the championship team. New Sox Manager Rick Renteria originally was hired by Epstein to manage the Cubs before current Cubs skipper Joe Maddon came on the market, so Gambro thinks that is a good sign.
In the meantime, Cubs fans should live in the present. "Enjoy the victory lap," Gambro advises, remembering how every time the 2006 White Sox took the field, the announcer "would say, 'The World Champs,' and that was so cool."
The Cubs joining the White Sox as champs in this new century was good for Chicago, says Nancy Faust, the Mundelein resident and legendary Sox organist from 1970 through 2010. But she notes that she's wearing her 2005 World Series ring as we chat.
"Now we're back to Cubs fans versus Sox fans again," Faust says. Fans can debate whether the Sox' 11-1 dominance in the playoffs was more impressive than the Cubs coming back from a 3-games-to-1 deficit to win the World Series in an extra-inning Game 7. They can argue about whether the 2016 Cubs would have beaten the 2005 Sox.
The race now is to see which team can be crowned champs again, and Faust suggests Sox fans might be a tad hungrier than Cubs fans.
"Breaking that 108-year streak should hold them for a couple of decades," Faust says of Cubs fans, "or maybe even a century."