Blasphemy, right? Don't drink and post? Fear not, gentle readers, as always, my madness is well coated with method.
For umpteen years, outside of one glorious season, the Chicago White Sox have been mired in mediocrity and irrelevancy. In some cases, like the strike that took away what could have been a world championship in 1994, owner Jerry Reinsdorf seemed to be complicit in not pushing for his team to compete for championships, spending more of his focus on Michael Jordan and NBA glory.
But for all those years, Reinsdorf and his predecessors enjoyed insulation from the consequences of their idiocy -- the equally malfeasant performance of the ownership on the other side of town. Between the Wrigley family and the Chicago Tribune, the Cubs were content in their "lovable losers" mantle, and felt free to bleed their fandom dry financially while not doing a whole hell of a lot on or off the field. Single-season blips here and there aside, they put no pressure on the Sox to up their game.
Before the dark times. Before the Ricketts.
Tom Ricketts had the vision to raise their franchise to the next level, and the courage to do what needed to be done -- completely implode the current model and build a competent one from the ground up. They went after the best operations manager in the game, were content with caretaker managers while they used draft picks and competent player evaluation personnel to build a deep, quality roster, and when the plan was ready to be implemented, went after the best manager available to get it done.
Granted, the sheep-like compliance of a fan base willing to endure almost a century of losing helped hedge the bets on the success of the endeavor. After all, the Cubs were selling out Wrigley for last-place teams for decades, so even if the plan took longer than estimated to implement, the money would still be there.
But the Cubs' plan has come to fruition. They enter the playoffs as the odds-on favorite to win their first World Series championship in 108 years. And with the youth and favorable contracts in place, their fans will go into the next couple seasons with reasonable expectations of meaningful baseball being played by their team in September at the very least, if not beyond.
And at 35th and Shields? Not so much. This year's bunch squandered a fantastic April with a craptastic May, and were spared finishing last in their division only by the Minnesota Twins being even worse. Reinsdorf's incompetence continues to reign supreme. His experiment with Robin Ventura reportedly is reaching a blessed ending for both sides, but rather than push for excellence, he seems content to promote bench coach Rick Renteria -- whose presence this season was supposed to ameliorate Ventura's shortcomings, and yet fell short -- to the top spot. Abject failures Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams benefit from Reinsdorf's excessive loyalty to hack away at the franchise for another day. As Paul Sullivan said in the Trib today, Sox fans deserve better than this mess.
Before the Cubs renaissance, that's likely as far as it would have gone. But not now. Now the gloves are off. The veneer has been stripped bare. There's no safety net of lovable losers to deflect the harsh spotlight shining on the south side, and hopefully the beat writers and fans will put on the much-deserved pressure.
The Ricketts have shown how it can be done. It takes money and it takes effort, and probably a little bit of luck. In the short term, there will be pain, and the fans may make ownership share in that pain before it's all over.
But that's why you own a team. That's why you put your money out there -- to win. If you're not in it to win, you shouldn't be in it at all.
If it takes a Cubs World Series win to push my Sox out of mediocrity and into some kind of effort to win, it'll have been worth it. Not by a lot, but worth it still.
I don't know if Alan would do it or not, but I've no doubt he'd see the practicality of it.
