O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!

Sir Walter Scott penned those lines more than two hundred years ago. If I hadn’t learned that already, I would’ve thought he was writing about Tom Ricketts and his courtiers in the office tower looming over Clark Street. You know the place: 125,000 square feet of corporate glitz at Waveland and Clark on the former site of a coal yard. And it faces the $200 million hotel across the street that was previously a McDonald’s parking lot.

Add to that the new commercial building on Addison that replaced a string of locally owned storefronts. And don’t forget the acquisition of most of those three-flats behind the outfield that serve now as party rooms. If Chuck E. Cheese adopted a baseball theme, you’d have the model for “Wrigleyville.” Quotation marks are appropriate because there’s no neighborhood by that name – it’s more like Brigadoon or Camelot: not a place, but a state of mind.

All this avarice brought to mind those lines from Scott’s poem. The Cubs aren’t a ballclub as much as they are an ATM for the owners. The team pulled off a World Series win, boasted of a dynasty, and when the team’s fortunes waned the owners focused on their other fortunes. Instead of putting money on the field, they’re fielding money in a sportsbook building while cutting the team payroll in a series of disemboweling trades.

I have to admit it’s fun to watch air leak out of the Cubs’ hubris balloon. We’re Sox fans and we lived through several years of a rebuild, which to Rick Hahn’s credit he never tried to deny, unlike Jed Hoyer’s double-talk about it being different now. Yeah, it’s different, all right.

As I write this, the White Sox are decisively winning the interleague series against the Cubs. Steve Greenberg wrote in the Sun-Times, “There are ships passing in the night, and then there are the Sox and Cubs. One team an ocean liner steaming for the deep...

Sox fans have been waiting twelve years for today - twelve long frustrating years. Along the way we've seen our share of bad baseball. We've had to endure so many bad players, partial rebuilds and finally a full tear down to start from scratch with a bunch of kids. Last year we started to see some of the fruits as young players came on to show promise and help give a glimpse of the future and then everything got put on hold. The whole world got put on hold and all we could do is scratch our heads and say, "what now?" As Bill Veeck once quipped ""If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan frees a man from any other form of penance."

But the season finally got going in late July and after a slow start and a lot of hand wringing and questions, much of it brought on by our nemesis from Minnesota in the first week of the season, the Sox took off. The young kids started hitting and the defense looked solid and they had not one but two or even three MVP candidates at various times. Entering these final two weeks against much tougher competition the Sox were the #1 team in the American League, but standing in our way was that very same Twinkies team. Some were convinced this would be the moment the Sox proved to be pretenders, getting fat on weak competition and now the butchers bill was due. Monday they won a squeaker. Tuesday was easier as rookie Pitcher Dane Dunning in only his 5th start rose up and led the team to victory. Wednesday our ace let us down a bit and the offense couldn't get anything going and the Sox took a painful loss, more so with the match-up coming Thursday day with Minnesota sending an ace to the mound as the Sox went with Renaldo "Mr. Wishy-Washy" Lopez. ...