Hopes build for a White Sox, Cubs meeting in Series

We are deep into the baseball season, with a little more than six weeks to go before postseason play, and a weird thing is appearing on the sports pages of the nation's newspapers. Specifically, it's occurring in the standings. As of Friday morning, the Chicago White Sox were in first place in the American League Central, and the Chicago Cubs, flirting with first place all season, were one-and-one-half games behind Houston in the National League Central.

This is still a long way from either team making it to the playoffs, let alone meeting in a cross-town World Series. They did it for the first and only time during the Teddy Roosevelt administration, in 1906, with the Hitless Wonder White Sox the victors. But Chicago fans can dream, can't they?

In fact, it's what Chicago baseball fans have done best, or second best. Best may just be drowning their sorrows either in the beverage of their choice, or Lake Michigan, whichever is more handy. For it is no secret that the Cubs have not won a World Series since 1908 and the White Sox have not won a World Series since 1917.

I was in Chicago a few days ago and I can tell you from first-hand experience that no one was dancing on State Street, that great street, in anticipation of baseball glories this October. They weren't breathless with expectation on the brownstone rooftops on Sheffield and Waveland avenues that overlook Wrigley Field. I saw no conga lines of ecstasy anywhere near US Cellular Field, where the White Sox cavort. Didn't see any sign of it on 35th Street, or Cermak Road, or Prairie Avenue.

That's because Chicago baseball fans have been fooled before, about a thousand times. Cubs fans often became excited with success in early spring, and then came the inevitable June Swoon. I'm from Chicago and was one of those who followed the teams for years. I remember as a boy, for example, the wonderful Go-Go Sox teams of the 1950s, with Jungle Jim Rivera and Minnie Minoso and Billy Pierce and Nellie Fox. But, as an overthrow to the plate invariably followed a muffed fly ball, the Yankees, or the Indians, would wipe them out by this time on the calendar in those years.

You'd listening to a game on radio at night in bed and hear that the White Sox were leading the Yankees in the ninth inning, and you became all tingly, until some Bronx Bomber like Gil McDougald or Yogi Berra or Hank Bauer, with two runners on, would crack a game-winning double. You turned off the radio and pulled the covers over your head.

Statistics, when they come to the Chicago professional ball clubs, can be staggering. The last time the Cubs were in a World Series was 1945, a year when many of the best players were in foxholes, or at least wearing olive drab. The last time the White Sox were in the World Series was 1959. It had been 40 years since their previous appearance, and that one ended with the 1919 White Sox switching hosiery to become the Black Sox with several players fixing games against the Cincinnati Reds. So on the night that the White Sox clinched the pennant in 1959, the Chicago fire chief joyously issued an order to have all the air-raid sirens turned on full blast.

The problem was that no one else in the city was alerted to this. It scared people out of their wits, and they ran into the streets screaming, believing that the Martians were attacking. Or worse, one of the street gangs.

In an enterprising book, "The Million-to-One Team," the Chicago author George Castle looked into reasons why the Cubs have not had an NL pennant fly at Wrigley Field for more than a half-century. Mostly, he concluded, it was bad management (as in the case of the White Sox). But Castle wondered what the odds were of a team not achieving this goal for so long. He asked John Avello, head of the sports book at Bally's Hotel in Las Vegas, about the Cubs.

"It's got to be a million to one," Avello told Castle. "It would be off the board."