Lincicome: Making a whole weekend out of rivalries, real and imagined

As a concept, baseball’s Rivalry Weekend ranks somewhere between Pet Rocks and Scented Toilet Paper, although an argument can be made for the latter.

First of all, it is impossible to confine a true rivalry into a couple of days, recalling a question asked by the dowager duchess, “What’s a weekend?”

For baseball the answer is a gimmick, harmless but phony, tricking the faithful into believing emotion is more important than the scoreboard, which it usually is no matter the opponent.

The Cubs and the White Sox are not natural rivals, nor even historical rivals; the fate of one is not tied to the fortunes of the other. They are irrational irritants, like two sides of a wedding party or suspects for an odor in an elevator.

What happens from here for either the White Sox or the Cubs will have little to do with what happens this weekend. In each of their World Series winning seasons, easily counted on one thumb, 2005 for the Sox, 2016 for the Cubs, the two teams split the Crosstown Series, neutering its significance.

Baseball is now divided into three seasons, regular, interleague and post, the last two diluting the first. This is all a marketing device created from desperation long past its usefulness.

Crosstown rivalries, as compared to cross-border afterthoughts (Detroit-Toronto? Is this hockey?) may enrich baseball because of temporary local enthusiasm, but even they undermine the natural order of things.

Baseball uses the built-in curiosities and preferences of fans for no other good reason than it can. This is just shameful exploitation. Years of separation and anticipation are dismissed because one stadium is within driving distance of the other.

(This is excluding the Yankees and Mets, where parking is not only discouraged but impossible.)

It is as if teams that are running in different races have to stop and try on each other’s shoes before they can get to the finish line.

All of this seems a shabby waste of precious goods, tossing away the distinctiveness of baseball for a brief and calculated come-on.

Rivalries are contrived, ignoring the real for the devious. The true rival of the Cubs is, of course, St. Louis, while the White Sox’ true rival is the Reinsdorf family.

How Seattle and San Diego got to be rivals is the real stretcher. Chicago’s own Eddie Vedder apparently lived in both cities, creating the Vedder Trophy, when the honor could just as easily have gone to Shamu.

The Yankees and Red Sox are true rivals, bleeding one onto the other for a casual side-eye, but the Red Sox are deemed to be the natural rivals of Atlanta, the logic lost somewhere in time and the Carolinas.

San Francisco keeps its rivalry with the A’s, which started when one team was in New York and the other in Philadelphia, now no longer even across the bay from each other but one temporarily in Sacramento, an unnatural wayside to Las Vegas.

The Battle for Florida between Miami and Tampa Bay may be considered important in that the winner gets to decide who leaves the state first. Hello, Portland? Seattle needs a real rival.

We know real rivalries and we are not fooled. Ali-Frazier, Palmer-Nicklaus, Nadal-Federer, Ohio State-Michigan. None needed separate hype.

The Cubs and Sox may putter at their petty pace, and all those hopeful springs and endless summers, those empty autumns that have come and gone, all those promises unkept, each team without the other, all of that is used as bait as if it were no more significant than free sunglasses or desk calendars.

The emotion invested in the Cubs and the Sox over time becomes just idle decoration for the hungry promotion of an anxious notion.

They could hold a séance or run a shell game for all the virtue connected to this whole Rivalry Weekend sham.

Not that the baseball isn't worthwhile, but if this were Detroit or Boston instead of the Cubs at Rate Field, it would be just another piece of the pile, and it certainly would have been a lot more compelling if it had been the Yankees or the Guardians.

In short, there are true rivals and there are invented rivals, and it is better that the two never meet until it matters.