By Ricky O’Donnell
As great as John Danks, Jim Thome and Brian Anderson were last night, the White Sox aren’t AL Central champs without assistant general manager Rick Hahn’s five-year-old son. When the Sox and Twins flipped a coin months ago to see which team would play at home if a play-in game was needed, Hahn’s son told his dad to call heads.
I can say with near certainty that if the kid got it wrong, the Sox wouldn’t be headed to Tampa Bay. If last night’s game were held in the Metrodome, you could bet A.J. would have dropped the ball during his collision with Michael Cuddyer at home plate, Danks would have gone down in the third inning with shoulder trouble, and Carlos Gomez would have hit for the cycle. Is there a worse building on the planet than the home baseball stadium of the Minnesota Twins? I think not.
Still, after the complete dismantling we saw less than a week ago in Minnesota, I’m glad the Sox had to go through the Twins to clinch. Had Kansas City swept the Twins earlier this week, and the Sox backed into the playoffs by losing two of three to Cleveland and defeating a feistier than expected Tigers team, a division title would have felt a little tainted.
There is a school of thought in sports that division titles and conference championships are meaningless; as a Bulls campaign famously said during the 72-10 season of 1996, “It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got the ring.”
Maybe it was true of those Bulls teams who set an impossibly high standard, but I find that approach bogus under any other circumstance. Sports should be fun. They may be the only thing in our lives to take our mind off the fact that our life savings had to be pulled out of a bank and placed in several shoe boxes under a bed. Two other side effects of a division title? Partying and t-shirts. Who could argue with that?
Now the Sox take on the Rays in the ALDS, a team that is better than them. Javier Vazquez will start Game One in Tampa, and it’s safe to that he has a better chance of pulling a McNabb and hurling all over the field than to match the effort Danks gave the team last night. But anyone who thinks the Sox don’t have a chance is kidding themselves. After all, this is baseball, a sport where teams are built to win over the course of 162 games, not three of five. There is simply too much luck involved in the sport to say any team couldn’t beat any other three times in five games. After seeing what’s happened the last few days, maybe the Sox are getting hot at the right time.
And for the record, I predicted a White Sox-Cubs World Series on June 13. I want that to happen more than I’ve ever wanted anything in sports. So yeah: even though I hate the Cubs with every fiber of my existence, I’ll be rooting for them in these playoffs. At least for now, the dream is still alive.
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Week in Review: Well, that much anticipated series in the Metrodome wasn’t much fun. At least some good came out of it, though. Mark Buehrle gave us the perfect nickname for the Twins.
Week in Preview: Sox and Rays, first to three.
Fields on the Farm: I feel as if this category has never been more irrelevant.
The Missile Tracker: The quote Steve pulled from yesterday’s Greg Couch column is almost as great as that Rocky III-esque embrace at home plate between Alexei and Konerko.
Over/Under: 1-0. The score of yesterday’s game carries some significance to Sox fans. It was the score of the first game in 2005, the first game after the All-Star break that year, and Game 4 of the World Series. There is no better way for a baseball game to end.
Beachwood Sabermetics: A complex algorithm performed by The White Sox Report staff using all historical data made available by Major League Baseball has determined that cigar is almost certainly illegal.
The White Sox Report: Read ’em all.
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Ricky O’Donnell is the proprietor of Tremendous Upside Potential , a contributor to the Sun-Times’s Full Court Press and a lot of other things.
Posted on October 1, 2008