Say It's So: The Chicago White Sox's Magical Season

INTRODUCTION

Hitting Kelvim Escobar in the backside with a baseball is no mean feat. His rear end is almost as big as your average heliport. No wonder the Los Angeles Angels reliever uses it as knights once used shields.

When A.J. Pierzynski hit a wicked one-hopper back to him, Escobar twisted in front of the mound and put his massive caboose in the way of the baseball. It dropped off his rear end and rolled only a few feet away, making Pierzynski a dead duck.

As sure as the Chicago White Sox had thrown a World Series since they had last won one, Escobar was going to toss the ball to Darin Erstad, and the White Sox’s half of the eighth inning would be over, the score still tied 3-3. But, no, this time Escobar had another idea. He was going to do it all himself. He didn’t need no stinking first baseman.

Escobar, who is charitably listed at 230 pounds on a 6-foot-1-inch frame, lumbered toward the first-base line, where Pierzynski was motoring toward the bag. Escobar was in position to tag Pierzynski, no problem.

But there was a problem.

Escobar had picked up the baseball with his bare hand. As he ran toward the line, he pounded the ball into the palm of his glove but then pulled it out, still cradled in his massive fingers. He didn’t want to collide with Pierzynski, so he took a little step to his right as Pierzynski ran past him. He tagged him with the glove, which was on his left hand, about a foot away from the ball, which dangled in the Southern California air in his right hand. That hand never touched Pierzynski.

The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.

Decade after long, disappointing decade, through the 1960s and into the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and beyond—and we don’t even want to talk about 1919 and the misery that followed those dark days—that description had fit the White Sox, a franchise that sometimes seemed like such an afterthought it didn’t even have its own curse.

Sure, the White Sox had gone 88 years since they had last won the World Series, two more than the Boston Red Sox had in 2004 when they captured the hearts of a nation—not to mention the ones in New England that had so often been broken—but they had no Curse of the Bambino to rally around. They didn’t even have a Billy Goat Curse, the one that has followed their cross-town rivals since the 1945 World Series, when Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley would not allow Sam Sianis’ goat into Wrigley Field for Game 4 against the Detroit Tigers.

When the White Sox lost, they were just losers, nothing else. There was nothing lovable about them. And year after year, owner after owner, from the Old Roman, Charles Comiskey, to the widely vilified Jerry Reinsdorf, with Arthur Allyn and John Allyn and Bill Veeck in between, it seemed that when it came to running a baseball team, the left hand never knew what the right was doing.

But, hey, this time it was a good thing.

After Escobar tagged Pierzynski with his empty glove, umpire Randy Marsh called Pierzynski out, meaning Escobar didn’t have to pay for walking Aaron Rowand with two outs after starting him out with two strikes.

Escobar and his teammates ran off the field toward the third-base dugout at Angel Stadium. But long before most of them got there, Ozzie Guillen, the firebrand who had played shortstop for the White Sox for 13 seasons and was now their manager, was on the field and in Marsh’s face.

He had rocketed out of the dugout immediately after the call. Guillen was telling Marsh something that Escobar knew to be true—Pierzynski should be safe because he had been tagged with an empty glove, not one containing a ball.

I knew I didn’t tag him, Escobar would say later. They got all the breaks in this series, but that could have been a break for us. I wasn’t surprised.

Second-base umpire Jerry Crawford, who was the chief of the six-man crew of umpires, and home-plate ump Ed Rapuano quickly joined Marsh and Guillen. They huddled for a moment before waving him to first base.

The crowd of 44,712 roared, thinking the umpires were reaffirming the out at first base. But that wasn’t it at all. They were saying Pierzynski was entitled to the base, that there were runners on first and second and two outs. That the Angels were going to have to come back out of the dugout onto the field, and Escobar was going to have to try once again to get the third out.

It’s never a good thing to have to get the second out twice. The Angels had lived through one of the worst examples of that nightmare four days earlier in Chicago, when Pierzynski—according to Mark Whicker of the Orange County Register, he comes up 11 percent of the time but is in the middle of the death scene 99 percent of the time—had taken first base on Angels catcher Josh Paul’s controversial dropped third strike and then watched the teammate running for him, Pablo Ozuna, steal second and score the winning run when Joe Crede smashed an Escobar pitch off the left-field wall at U.S. Cellular Field, the Sox’s home park.

That stunning turn of events was so fresh that the Angels must have gotten goose flesh when the umpires put Pierzynski back on first base.

Angels manager Mike Scioscia wasn’t going to risk an exact replay. This time he pulled Escobar and summoned Francisco Rodriguez, his closer, to face Crede.

Crede took the first pitch from Rodriguez for a ball, then the next for a strike. He swung and missed the next one but wouldn’t go fishing for the next two, getting the count to 3-2. Not wanting a walk that would have loaded the bases, Rodriguez delivered a slider that lacked its usual bite. Crede went down and golfed it into center field, scoring Rowand to give the White Sox a 4-3 lead and take the last bit of air out of the Angels and their fans.

Back in Chicago, at trendy places like the ESPN Zone, at hard-core Sox haunts like Jimbo’s on 33rd Street and at a few thousand taverns in between, celebrations were turning rowdy.

The White Sox were going to the World Series for the first time since 1959. The left hand did know what the right was doing. Both were raised in the air, all across the South Side, in the suburbs and even at a few resistance strongholds up north, in Cubs country.

Seven postseason wins down: three against Boston, four against the Los Angeles Angels. Four more to go.

Four more to do what neither of Chicago’s major-league teams had done since 1917, when Woodrow Wilson was in the White House: win the World Series. Guillen and his players were on one of the most amazing October runs in history.

You would have to go back to Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine to find a team rolling through the postseason like these White Sox. But really there never had been one, as the Reds were a powerhouse team that was expected to dominate. The Sox were given the longest odds of the four American League teams when the playoffs began.

Yet before they were through, after first baseman Paul Konerko cradled the throw from Juan Uribe that defied the odds to arrive at first base before Houston’s Orlando Palmeiro, they would match the best postseason record (11-1) since Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez and their Cincinnati teammates swept the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Yankees to go 7-0 in 1976, some 19 years before the playoff field was expanded from four teams to eight.

The White Sox would outscore their opponents by 67-34 in the postseason, the biggest margin of any team ever. They earned this success with their talent, their sweat and their manager’s daring, but they also got a lot of the good luck that had eluded them while struggling through a past filled with heartache.

Ozzie Guillen and his 25 players made history and, more important, they changed the baseball history of their city. This is their story.

CHAPTER 1

Thrifty business

Operating on a shoestring for decades, Sox watch other teams win it all

If you were a White Sox general manager back in the day, you were multitasking before the expression had been invented.

Roland Hemond, the Sox GM from 1971 through ’85, was in charge of a whole lot more than providing a 25-man roster for one of the most intriguing casts of managers known to man. In those years Hemond worked with Chuck Tanner, Paul Richards, Bob Lemon, Larry Doby, player-manager Don Kessinger and Tony La Russa, who was 34 when he was given his chance in 1979. Hemond also was in charge of Comiskey Park, a jewel at one time that was in irreversible decay, as well as elements of marketing, media relations, ticket sales and, on a given day, plumbing and groundskeeping.

A scene at Comiskey on a weekend in late August 1979 would seem out of place in the $4-billion industry that major-league baseball has become, but it was not that unusual at the time, especially not in Chicago.

Bill Veeck had twice come forward to rescue the White Sox franchise from ownership crises, first putting an end to fighting among the Comiskey family heirs in early 1959, when the team was coming off a second-place season and would wind up in the World Series, and again in 1975, when John Allyn wanted out and it appeared the team could wind up in Seattle.

Veeck was many things. A robber baron with bottomless pockets wasn’t one of them.

Money was always an issue with Veeck, as it was with the White Sox owners who preceded him and those who would follow him. This was a working-class franchise without an O’Malley or a Steinbrenner, one that had to make a dollar before it could spend one. Consider it the legacy of Charles Comiskey, the Old Roman.

Comiskey had the vision to build Comiskey Park, which, when it opened in 1910, fit its billing as the Baseball Palace of the World. But he ran his operation on a shoestring. The Sox often played in dirty uniforms as Comiskey saved on laundry bills. He gave his players only $3 a day in meal money, $1 less than the standard. He was notoriously tight-fisted in salary negotiations with his players, even stars like Buck Weaver, Joe Jackson, Lefty Williams and Ed Cicotte. He had promised players bonuses if they won the World Series in 1917 but delivered only a case of inexpensive champagne at the team party. His payback would come two years later, when a gambling syndicate got the ear of first baseman Chick Gandil and hatched a plot to have the Sox throw games in the 1919 World Series.

While it was the players who ultimately paid the price for baseball’s most disgraceful chapter---eight players, including Jackson, Weaver and Cicotte, were banned for life by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis---the stain clung to the franchise, which stayed in the hands of the Comiskey family for almost 40 years after the Black Sox scandal.

Chicago had two major-league teams, sure, but never an ownership group that would or could outspend rivals to build a championship club. The Cubs had the more stable ownership, with the Wrigley family running Chicago’s National League team for 65 years before selling to the city’s largest media group, Tribune Co., which owned WGN-TV and WGN Radio in addition to its newspaper. Fans could complain about the teams that were put on the field, but there was never a question about opening the door.

Those real-world realities of business were among the harsh facts of life for the White Sox, however.

So it was that Hemond found himself sweating a major financial crisis late in the 1979 season, which had been a lean one. Harry Chappas, a 5-foot-3-inch infielder, had made it onto the cover of Sports Illustrated in March but into only 26 games at shortstop. That was fewer than Kessinger, who served as player-manager until La Russa was promoted from Triple-A Iowa on Aug. 3, after a seven-game losing streak dropped the White Sox 14 games below .500.

Veeck, like every owner before and after him, understood the importance of maximizing revenues in the summer. Chicago’s weather often limited crowds in the spring, and only the heartiest fans turned out to see the Sox play out the string in September. But there was a way to make money when the team was out of town: renting out the ballpark for concerts and other events.

The Beatles’ visits to Comiskey Park in 1965 and ’66 are still among the most talked-about concerts in the history of a city with a rich musical history. But Veeck didn’t care if the acts were groundbreaking; he just needed them to be money-paying. In the summers of 1978 and ’79, concerts called the Summer Jam series drew many more fans to Comiskey than the Sox did. The stage was generally set up at the edge of the infield, with fans allowed to sit or stand in the outfield grass, as well as the two decks of seating.

Rock bands had played at Comiskey while the White Sox, in their first month under La Russa, were off on a trip to Baltimore, Boston and Milwaukee.

Downpours, however, plagued the concerts. There was almost no grass left in the outfield, which more closely resembled a mud bog than a baseball field after the final loadout of the music series.

Downpours, however, plagued the concerts. There was almost no grass left in the outfield, which more closely resembled a mud bog than a baseball field after the final loadout of the music series.

Veeck, who had lost his right leg while serving with the Marines during World War II, was expecting good crowds for a weekend series against the Baltimore Orioles, who featured young hitting star Eddie Murray and were on their way to an AL pennant and the World Series. Hemond understood that this was a time when the most important thing was that the games be played, not how his team played in those games.

When I went out on the field that afternoon, there was Bill in center field, Hemond said. "He had his shirt off, like he always did, and he was using a rake on the field. There were shovels, all kinds of tools all around the field. There was no grass on the field, none, not anywhere. It was just mud. Everywhere you looked there was mud. I went out there knowing we were in big trouble.

Bill said to me, ‘Roland, we’ve got to get the game in tonight. If we don’t, I can’t make the payroll.’ He told me to go to the clubhouse and make sure none of the players came out on the field, to keep Tony [La Russa] and the players from seeing it for as long as I could. So I head back toward the dugout. When I looked back, I saw Bill’s wooden leg was sinking into the mud. He was getting shorter and shorter, and I had to go back out there and help him get out of that hole. That’s so funny now, thinking about it. But at the time I’m thinking I can’t laugh, I can’t even smile, because he’ll kill me.

An owner stuck in the mud. What a fitting analogy for the White Sox franchise.

As dire as the straits in which Veeck and Hemond found themselves during the late 1970s, there would come a time a couple of decades later when some would look back on those as the good old days for Chicago baseball.

The White Sox, at least, would provide periodic excitement for their fans. And as bad as things tended to be for them, they were often worse on the other side of town.

After the big tease of 1969, the Cubs wasted the opportunity they were given by the confluence of Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ron Santo and Ferguson Jenkins under manager Leo Durocher. Those teams had six consecutive winning seasons from 1967–1972, but there wouldn’t be another one at Clark and Addison Streets until 1984.

Phil Wrigley, king of the gum empire, and later William Wrigley, his son, didn’t seem interested in competing with Walter O’Malley, August Busch, John Galbreath and other NL owners. But a lot can change in 20 years.

Or nothing at all.

When Tribune Co. purchased 81 percent of the Cubs from Wrigley in the summer of 1981, Mike North made a living out of a hot dog cart. He worked ballgames in the summer, always rooting for his home team.

Like many of his friends, the opinionated vendor was excited when one of Chicago’s most powerful companies put its financial might behind a franchise that had become synonymous with losing.

We had been through so many years of the Wrigleys, said North, who finagled his way onto the air at WSCR Radio and has become the city’s top sports-talker. With the Wrigleys gone, we thought they would win.

That widely held assumption was reinforced when the Cubs got within three innings of a pennant in ’84, the third season of Tribune Co. control. Between them, though, the Jerry Reinsdorf and Tribune Co. ownership groups would go a combined 47 seasons without getting to the World Series, let alone winning one.

Between them, the two franchises had a collective losing streak of 183 seasons through 2004: 96 for the Cubs, who last won the World Series in 1908, and 87 for the Sox, who hadn’t won since Pants Rowland’s team beat the New York Giants in the 1917 Series.

Through 2004, 45 years had passed since the last World Series appearance by a Chicago team, that by the Go-Go White Sox in 1959. In the intervening years, when America’s sweethearts went from Ingrid Bergman and Olivia de Havilland to Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie, 22 different franchises went to the Series, including eight that didn’t exist in 1959 and two others that had moved between ’59 and their World Series appearances.

The Red Sox and the so-called Curse of the Bambino? Sorry, Boston had been to the World Series in 1967, ’75 and ’86 and to the league championship series in four other seasons before winning it all in 2004. Chicago fans could only wish for that kind of drought.

And what about all those expansion teams that swept in and did what the White Sox and Cubs couldn’t? The Toronto Blue Jays won back-to-back World Series in 1992 and ’93. The Mets, supposedly New York’s laughable franchise, won the World Series in 1969, only their eighth season in business, and again in ’86. They lost the Series in ’73 and 2000.

Most galling of all for Chicago fans was the instant success of the Florida Marlins and Arizona Diamondbacks. Buying up proven free agents with a reckless abandon that was unimaginable for fans of the Sox and Cubs, the Diamondbacks beat the Yankees in 2001, their fourth year of operation. Their ownership group was headed by Jerry Colangelo, a Chicago Heights native. The long-suffering Arizona fans had endured only one losing season, the very first.

Then there were the Florida Marlins, who created the short-sighted model Colangelo followed to give his fans instant gratification. The Marlins won in 1997, only their fifth season, stealing Game 7 from the long-suffering Cleveland Indians. In 2003, when the Marlins used an eight-run eighth inning to beat Mark Prior and the Cubs in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, there were 5-year-olds in Ft. Lauderdale who had never seen the Fighting Fish win in their lifetimes.

Imagine the inestimable disgust of Chicago fans watching the World Series in 1997, ’01 and ’03. Hard-core fans on both sides of town had given the Reinsdorf group and Tribune Co. their hearts, hoping, in some cases praying, that the end of their one-sided love affair would finally come to an end. Yet through 2004, when the Sox finished second for the seventh time in the last nine years and the Cubs stumbled down the stretch to miss a chance at back-to-back postseason appearances, the civic losing streak stretched to a combined 183 years.

I’m disappointed we couldn’t have won more, former Tribune Co. Chief Executive Officer John Madigan said. We have the ingredients to win [the World Series]. I’m disappointed that we haven’t.

Reinsdorf, partner Eddie Einhorn and their group of investors purchased the Sox from Veeck before the 1981 season. They got the team on the rebound, after American League owners had rejected Edward J. DeBartolo, paying the same $20 million price DeBartolo had agreed to.

At one point, when it looked as if the DeBartolo deal might fly, then-Sox President Andrew McKenna told Reinsdorf that Chicago’s other team might soon become available. He knew Reinsdorf had grown up following his hometown Brooklyn Dodgers before attending Northwestern University Law School. He was a National League man, and he lived in NL territory. In those days, if Reinsdorf wanted to take in a baseball game, he usually did so at Wrigley Field.

So McKenna wondered if Reinsdorf would be interested in the Cubs. I said to Jerry, ‘You know, there’s another team in town,’ McKenna said. I had no knowledge at the time. I said that half in jest, not expecting anything could happen.

Less than six months after Reinsdorf’s purchase of the Sox closed, control of the Cubs passed from the landmark building on the west side of North Michigan Avenue to the tower across the street. Estate taxes and the advent of baseball’s free-agency era contributed to William Wrigley’s decision to sell the ballclub he had inherited from his father, Phil. Tribune Co. paid $20.5 million.

The afternoon the Cubs sale was announced, I got a call from Jerry, McKenna said. He said, ‘You were right.’.

McKenna now says there was no way Reinsdorf could have wound up with the Cubs. Published reports indicate that Reinsdorf owns only 12 percent of the Sox, which means he would have put in no more than $2.4 million when he assembled his investment group.

The Wrigleys were very private people, McKenna said. If they were going to sell, they would only sell to somebody who could put down a check for the entire team.

Both purchases have proved to be wise investments. In April 2005, Forbes magazine estimated the Cubs’ value at $398 million, the sixth highest figure in baseball behind the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, Dodgers and Seattle Mariners. The Sox, who had slipped from 16th in 2002 to 20th, were estimated to be worth $262 million.

When Reinsdorf and Tribune Co. joined the major-league fraternity, it consisted of 26 teams. The only other franchises not to win a pennant between 1981 and 2004 were Houston, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Seattle and