Twenty years later, how do you remember the 2005 White Sox’s epic World Series run?
Twenty years ago this week, the Chicago White Sox returned to the World Series for the first time since 1959.
Their series against the Houston Astros, the culmination of a wire-to-wire season of unexpected joy and rejuvenation, began in Chicago on a Saturday night, and by Wednesday, it was over. The history-making win — Chicago hadn’t seen a World Series winner since 1917 — took four games and five days, including a travel day and a 14-inning Game 3 that ended on the same day as Game 4.
With a 1-0 victory in Houston on Oct. 26, the Sox swept the four-game series, breaking an 88-year drought with one of the most dominating playoff runs in modern baseball history. They went 11-1 that postseason, winning seven times by two or fewer runs. They gave their fans a lifetime of made-for-history moments along with a pitching feat that will never, ever be topped.
The future president threw out a first pitch. The future pope was in the stands.
“It should go down in history as one of the greatest teams of all time, wire to wire,” said A.J. Pierzynski, the catcher on that team.
And yet, on a national scale, no one really talks about the 2005 White Sox as one of the most dominant playoff teams. And in some cases, the Sox are completely forgotten. Outside of Chicago, who thinks of the 2005 White Sox?
In 2016, national outlets outright forgot about the Sox as they previewed a Cubs World Series. It was a running joke that Sox fans had grown tired of.
Just this past July, an ESPN graphic listed a former Astros player as being a World Series champion in 2005.
So when the Sox had their 20-year reunion this summer, their unsure place in history was certainly brought up. Like the fans and the organization they represent, this is a team with a chip on its collective shoulder.
“We don’t get all the respect that I think we should,” 2005 World Series MVP Jermaine Dye said that weekend in July. “It’s hard to win a World Series, but to do what we did, to go 11-1 in a playoff run, is pretty special.”
While the 2004 Red Sox have been immortalized over and over again — in the last two years, both Netflix and ESPN have debuted documentary series about the team — the ’05 White Sox have always been more of a provincial story. Every five to 10 years, they do the requisite interviews with the team-owned RSN, and they relive the moments over again. But these Sox are the wrong color to get a spot on the national stage. And they’re not the Cubs, who have more fans and are known nationally as “Chicago’s team.”
“It would be kind of cool if we could get to do one like (the Red Sox),” Pierzynski said, “where we could also tell some stories that may or may not be true.”
Starting Friday, the Los Angeles Dodgers (9-1 through the NLCS) will face the Toronto Blue Jays in the World Series and try to join the Sox and the 1999 Yankees as the only teams to make it through a wild-card era postseason with a World Series trophy and just one loss. (The Dodgers had to play a fourth series.)
So with that context in mind, will Fox even mention the 20th anniversary of the Sox’s dominant Series on the television broadcast?
“Maybe if I call Joe Davis and have him say something,” Pierzynski said of the play-by-play man.
More than anyone else, it’s Pierzynski who carries the torch for the ’05 club. He has his own streaming show, “Foul Territory,” which is popular with players and fans. He’s got a job calling national games for Fox. And, well, he’s got the personality to do it.
Outside of former manager Ozzie Guillen, no one represents that team more than its catcher, who joined the team as a free agent after an unhappy one-year stint in San Francisco. Both his winning ways and confidence were sorely needed, and his brashness (not to mention his surname) appealed to the South Side fan base.
One thing Pierzynski loves is when fans send him pictures of people wearing his jerseys at Sox games. Like anyone else, he wants to be remembered. The same goes for the White Sox. They have a statue outside the ballpark, a trophy on display in the lobby, rings at home and memories in their heads. But they wonder why the Sox get short shrift on a national level.
So why is it?
For one, as I described above, the series just went by too quickly.
“Four-game sweeps don’t help,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.
That was Joe Buck, and no one is more qualified to discuss modern World Series champions. Buck called every World Series for Fox from 2000 through 2021 (along with 1996 and 1998). He was in the booth with Tim McCarver in 2005.
“I think legends are made in Game 6 and 7,” he said. “And (a sweep) is like, ‘Oh wait, did it start? Oh, it’s over.’ It hurts the TV ratings, it hurts the national storylines. If you get seven games, that’s when the sport is at its best. That’s why the first round of playoffs is so compelling now, because every pitch feels so important. I mean, they blew through the playoffs. It was just utter dominance. And so your gut tells you, well, that should lead to people realizing how good that team really was. And because it just happened so fast, I don’t think you get the national buy-in. The non-White Sox fans, at least viewership-wise, weren’t even exposed to it, really.”
Out of nowhere, the Sox blew into first place at the beginning of the season. Led by second-year manager Guillen, the Sox had the core of a winning team, but Kenny Williams’ unconventional moves like trading Carlos Lee for Scott Podsednik and adding Pierzynski turned a second- or third-place team into an instant contender.
The sports world took notice. Everyone wanted to talk to Ozzie. An ESPN The Magazine photo spread still hangs in the press box. So it’s not like the Sox were being ignored. They finished with 99 wins, the best record in the AL.
But everyone pays attention to baseball in the World Series, and their run was over so quickly. They weren’t blowouts. The Sox won Games 1 and 3 by two runs and Games 2 and 4 by one, but they won.
As my colleague Tyler Kepner, who covered the World Series for The New York Times, told me: “Maybe the dominance that October hurt, too — not just the World Series sweep, but the quick series against Boston and Anaheim didn’t leave much room for drama.”
The players, of course, look at it differently. They don’t care about TV ratings and manufactured drama. When I noted the differences between the Sox’s efficiency and how the Cubs needed a rain delay in Game 7, Pierzynski agreed that it all helped make the 2016 ending more memorable.
“But at the same time,” he said, “don’t you want to look at it and say, ‘Man, we didn’t have to have any of those gimmicks. We just won.'”
It’s a good point.
“There were moments in that World Series that would have been a much bigger part of World Series folklore if the Series had even been remotely competitive,” Hall of Fame baseball writer Jayson Stark remarked to me.
He’s not wrong either. And it wasn’t just in the World Series.
After not homering all season, Podsednik hit one in the Sox’s first playoff game, a 14-2 slaughtering of the defending champion Red Sox. Podsednik would hit an even bigger homer in Game 2 of the World Series, smacking a walk-off shot against Astros closer Brad Lidge to win 7-6.
Podsednik hit 12 homers with the Brewers in 2004 but changed his approach at the advice of Sox hitting coach Greg Walker and went 507 regular-season at-bats with none in his All-Star season. He got MVP votes that year.
“It’s funny and crazy to talk about that I hit none during the season and then hit two in the postseason,” he said. “But a lot of things have to go right to win a World Series, and that’s one of the crazy things that happened that year.”
In Game 3 of the ALDS, the Red Sox were trailing by one run in the bottom of the sixth when they loaded the bases with no outs. In came Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, the ageless Cuban legend.
On the first day of spring training, El Duque made a promise to his friend José Contreras that the Sox were going to win a World Series that year. Contreras laughed. But when El Duque came into that game, Contreras swears, he felt something spiritual.
“The memory that I have in my mind, it was like he was being held by two angels going to the mound,” Contreras said through an interpreter this summer. “When I saw that in my head, I just said, yeah, this is the moment, he’s going to do it.”
Hernandez got three outs, and the Sox won a playoff series for the first time since 1917.
In Game 2 of the ALCS, there was the Pierzynski moment, where he raced to first on a dropped third strike by Angels catcher Josh Paul with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. The Sox had lost Game 1 and were tied 1-1. Pablo Ozuna ran for him and stole second with Joe Crede at the plate. Crede then hit a double to left field to win the game.
In the World Series, the Sox knocked out Roger Clemens early in Game 1. In Game 2, Paul Konerko hit a go-ahead grand slam in the seventh, and Podsednik won it in the ninth. Game 3 was when Geoff Blum, the Sox’s trade-deadline acquisition, homered in the 14th inning of a game that lasted 5 hours, 41 minutes.
And in Game 4, the Sox had just enough in the tank to finish the job. In the ninth, Juan Uribe made a spectacular diving catch in the stands and then closed the game with a bullet throw to Konerko at first as closer Bobby Jenks celebrated.
All of those moments are ingrained in the minds of the White Sox and their fans.
But if the 2005 White Sox will be remembered for anything on a national scale, it’s what happened in the ALCS.
That’s when Sox pitchers threw four consecutive complete games. Mark Buehrle, Jon Garland, Freddy Garcia and Contreras (who got the loss in Game 1) all went the distance to send the Sox to the World Series.
In this year’s NLCS, Blake Snell and Yoshinobu Yamamoto were lionized for almost throwing two complete games in a row. (Snell went eight innings.) And rightfully so. In today’s game, a starting pitcher gets a standing ovation for going five. But even 20 years ago, when complete games weren’t unheard of, four in a row was remarkable.
It had never happened before. It will never happen again. Pierzynski credited Guillen and pitching coach Don Cooper for having the guts and the faith to let it happen.
“I’ll beat that drum, we’ll never, ever see that happen again in baseball,” Pierzynski said. “The way teams are run, the way bullpens are run, the way front offices and managers script everything. … So trust me, as a catcher, that was special.”
So if there’s a reason to mention the ’05 Sox this October and every October as we link the past to the present, that’s the hook.
“That World Series and that team’s run through the postseason are going to resonate in one way that is guaranteed to loom larger as we go along,” Stark told me. “Any time any rotation has an old-school run in October, what rotation will it be compared with? The ’05 White Sox!”
Maybe that’s enough recognition. But it doesn’t tell the whole story of a team that did everything right from April to October.
So sure, the Sox would like the recognition that the Yankees and Red Sox teams from that era get, but what can they do? Pierzynski said his only regret is that the team didn’t win anything at home. He would’ve loved to have celebrated in Chicago, like the Cubs did in the 2016 NLCS. But I suppose they were just too great for their own good.
“We know what we did, and we have a ring forever, and we have a special place in the city of Chicago and White Sox fans’ hearts,” Pierzynski said. “And that’s the most important thing.”
As for the conversation of the best playoff team ever, if the Dodgers somehow sweep the Blue Jays, they’ll probably get the nod. If not …
“In terms of stacking that team up against other World Series winners, you guys are going to have to debate that and figure that out for yourselves,” Podsednik said.
There’s no debate to me. To paraphrase former Sox TV voice Hawk Harrelson, you might say there’s been a playoff team as good as the 2005 White Sox, but you won’t find any that were better.
© 2025 The Athletic Media Company. All Rights Reserved. Distributed by New York Times Licensing.