A VERY GOOD YEAR

 

               This baseball season has been unusual in many respects, but for me one is worth celebrating. That would be the fact that the two diamond representatives of Chicago, the land of my birth, were alive and playing when regular-season hostilities ended.

               Since the city has had two shots at post-season glory annually since the official beginning of the sport’s recorded time —1901— such a thing might be expected to go unnoted in the ordinary course of things. But as any baseball fan knows, the National League Cubs and the American League White Sox have been extraordinary for most of their histories—extraordinarily bad.

The Cubs’ 108-year failure to capture a World Series title (1908 to 2016), baseball’s biggest prize, has been the stuff of legend, whispered around campfires by the likes of the Alaskan Inuit and the New Zealand Maori. The White Sox’s 88-year gap in that respect—1917 to 2005– would have been a bigger deal if it weren’t for their crosstown counterparts’ greater record of ineptitude.

The lesser prizes that were multiplied by the game’s playoff expansion starting in 1969 have been almost as elusive; each team has been only an occasional visitor to such proceedings. They’ve made it together just once before—in 2008—and that year shared a first-round exit. An “El World Series” matching the two Windy City franchises happened but once, in 1906.

That Series stands out in the event’s annals because it matched two quite-different teams. The Cubs, starting a three-year World Series run, recorded a regular-season winning percentage of .763 (116-36) enroute to the showdown, setting a record that still stands. The White Sox qualified despite an AL-worst team batting average of .230 that was anemic even in those “dead ball” days and earned them the enduring label of “Hitless Wonders.” Naturally in matters Chicago, perversity prevailed and the Sox won it, four games to two.

  History’s circularity has expressed itself again this year because it’s the Cubs who wear the “Hitless Wonders” tag. They won the NL Central Division title despite a team batting average of .220, the 27^th best among the Majors’ 30 teams. They distinguished themselves further by striking out 559 times, the fifth-worst mark, “Dead Ball Era” be damned.

The Cubs’ standings’ stature was all the more baffling because the team’s worst hitters were the ones who led them to the World Series and five straight winning seasons starting in 2015. Kris Bryant, the NL’s MVP in ’16, hit a measly .206 this season, Javier Baez, the MVP runnerup in 2018, hit .203, the usually trusty Anthony Rizzo came in at .222 and Kyle Schwarber, the young Ruthian, managed but a .188 mark. The team escaped covid-19 but its astonishing weakness at the plate suggests another contagion. No kidding.

 The Cubs really had two seasons this year, a 13-3 won-lost start and a sub-.500 (21-23) finish. They did as well as they did mostly because of their pitching, an historical oddity. Yu Darvish, the slim Japanese with a full deck of offerings, finally came through with the sorts of performances the team envisioned when it paid him $126 million (for six years) in 2018, and the estimable Kyle Hendricks continued to confound hitters with his off-speed tricks. The team’s bullpen, a pre-season question mark, got better as the season progressed. Sans a hitting miracle, if the Cubs are to advance in the playoffs it will be pitching that carries them.

The White Sox’ recent history has been worse than that of the Cubs’, that 2008 playoff appearance being their last post-season exposure and their last seven seasons being losing ones. Their turnaround began in 2014 when their front office implemented a BOP (bad on purpose) strategy, dumping veterans (and games) to improve via trades for prospects and the draft. It’s the same tack the Cubs used when Theo Epstein took them over in 2012, and involved some of the same people. Sox manager Rick Renteria was Epstein’s choice to manage the Cubs in 2014 before Joe Maddon became available, and the Sox got young super-prospect Eloy Jimenez from the Cubs in a 2017 deal for veteran pitcher Jose Quintana.

The 2020 Sox resemble the 2015 Cubs, a young bunch having fun and flexing new-found  muscles but maybe a year away from serious contention. Young hitters Jimenez, Tim Anderson, Yoan Moncada, Luis Robert and Nick Madrigal, abetted by vets Jose Abreu and Yasmani Grandal, can score, and led the American League in home runs with 96. They have a couple of top-tier starting pitchers in Lucas Giolito and Dallas Kuechel, and an up and down bullpen. They were the talk of the Majors through the season’s first 50 games, vying for the AL’s best record, but lost seven of their last eight games to drop to a No. 7 playoff seed. Still, the line on their graph is rising, while that of the Cubs seems to be heading in the opposite direction.

Except for the favored L.A. Dodgers, the current playoffs look up for grabs, so chances of an-all Chicago World Series are small—5%, I read somewhere, although I have no idea how that figure was reached. But that’s not bad, considering.

 Yes, 2020 has been a terrible time for some things and a difficult one for many others. Yes, more teams (16) made the MLB playoffs than didn’t (14). And yes, both the Cubs and Sox might be sidelined after first-round play.  For Chicago baseball, however, it’s still been a very good year.