For Chicago baseball fans, September is usually a month of calm and good cheer rivaled only by March and April for optimism. By the last month of most seasons both our teams have been all but eliminated from the pennant races, yet the grieving is over, acceptance has come, and with it an influx of prospects to spark our hopes for next year. This year, however, has seen an exceedingly harsh September. The Cubs were in the race for the expanded “wild-card” playoff spot into the last week, and the White Sox regained some respectability with a second half that was merely solid, but fans on both sides of town remained unresponsive. Most of the season we denied that last year’s strike had really altered the game, but by September it was undebatable: the game has been changed, irretrievably. With still no basic contract in place, the coming off-season packs more reasons for dread than for optimism, as the war between owners and players moves from the nuclear tactics of strike and lockout to the even more brutal hand-to-hand combat of cutting star players loose en masse and forcing them to negotiate new deals within the sport’s new realities, as the owners pass on their economic hardships. This year’s off-season should be far more chaotic than even last year’s was, and so there was good reason for fans to resist the normal September glibness that ends most baseball campaigns.
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We made our dutiful trips out to both ballparks this month, but our mood was epitomized by the squirrels we saw foraging in a graveyard as we walked down Clark Street to Wrigley Field last Sunday. For one thing, the Cubs, harboring hope against hope of passing two teams (the Houston Astros and either the Colorado Rockies or the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were battling it out for first in the West Division) in order to qualify for the playoffs, had left their star hitting prospects in the minors at season’s end and were going with the same old lineup. The bull pen had been filled out with the likes of Terry Adams and Dave Swartzbaugh, but otherwise there were no pitching phenoms of note, either.
The White Sox are more than a player or two away, right now, yet they actually have played fairly well since the All-Star break, putting together a record of 36-35–64-73 overall, going into the final week. But that has done little to improve either the team’s fortunes or the mood around Comiskey Park. The Cleveland Indians came to Comiskey a week ago with the best record in baseball, and they whipped the Sox twice before throwing them a victory in the third and final game of the series. That face-saving win pulled the Sox back within 31 games of the Indians in the American League’s Central Division.
Not even Thomas was immune to criticism in this, the most ill-tempered of all baseball seasons, but he did make the sport worth watching–whenever and wherever he played. At 27, he should be just beginning the prime years of a power hitter’s career. That is something a Chicago baseball fan can find solace in.
