Well!

Well! Hats off to the team from Chicago's South Side. The White Sox sweep of the Astros has finally blotted from the books a curse that's shadowed that Chicago team for nearly nine decades.

This year’s World Series, while not the most exciting, did provide at least some fodder for the record book with a six hour, 14 inning Game 3, the longest game in World Series history. The sweep came last night, a Game 4, 1-0 victory for the White Sox in a standard 9 innings. It was a nail biter, but the deal was finally clinched and fans from Hyde Park to the Stockyards can now die happy. Across the South Side today, hundreds of elderly folk who've hung tenaciously to life hoping to survive to see this moment may now serenely order their affairs ahead of pneumonia season.

This has been quite a time for baseball. In 2004 Boston killed the Curse of the Bambino. I'm glad I lived to see it if only to enjoy the happiness of Bosox fans. Last night, the White Sox, or as those of us partisans of the North Side who are still trying to forget the College of Coaches refer to them, "the other team from Chicago", erased a far darker curse that sprouted from the infamous 1919 World Series.

The fallout from that World Series cleaned out some dirty corners that had bedeviled baseball for years prior. For those who don’t follow the sport, 1919 was the year that a combine of gangsters, led by New Yorker Arnold Rothstein, fixed the World Series. Eight White Sox players were paid to throw games to Cincinnati. Some historians now suggest that that wasn’t the first fixed World Series, but it was the first in which evidence was gathered to expose the scheme, thanks largely to a vigilant press.

After the scandal erupted, team owners anxious to impart some integrity to a business rapidly starting to look like a runaway horse, seated Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis as the sport’s first independent commish. Hizzoner promptly instituted a ban on gambling by players and managers that remains in effect to this day, although sports gambling has grown into a huge business that’s conducted openly.

Judge Landis banned for life eight White Sox players, including a guileless Shoeless Joe Jackson, from baseball as played by the collection of teams known as the Major Leagues. The prohibition against gambling more recently resulted in former Cincinnati star Pete Rose's ban, a ban lately showing some fair sized cracks around the edges. Imagine the weird symmetry if Rose were allowed to reassociate with Major League Baseball during the tenure of the White Sox 2005 Championship.

Lately, the gambling bogeyman has been replaced in the nightmares of MLB by steroids. On the heels of the '19 Series came a famous lament by a young Chicago fan, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" Allegedly, Joe -- i.e., Shoeless Joe Jackson -- was so overcome by emotion that he couldn't respond to the kid. How times have changed. A kid crying out similarly today to one of the players under suspicion for steroid use would risk being showered in the kind of curses usually reserved for the barracks and the schoolyard.

I was a customer of the schoolyard, nine years of age, when in 1959 the White Sox last played in the World Series. They lost that year to the Los Angeles (nee Brooklyn Trolley) Dodgers, a team that had moved to California just three years earlier after a bitter departure from Brooklyn. Those who nursed the bitterness of Walter O'Malley's betrayal of the borough are now dying off. Soon Brooklyn and Ebbets Field will be a forgotten chapter in Dodgers history. Time marches on.

Time indeed marches on. For there remains now only one team laboring under a legitimate major league curse: my team, the Chicago Cubs. That team last played in the World Series in 1945. When the Cubs last won the World Series in 1908, people who died some years ago of old age were muling, puking infants.

The weight to win and banish the Curse of the Billygoat rests more heavily than ever on the shoulders of the Baby Bears. I anticipate a mood in Wrigley Field next season of a desperate nature unknown for generations. The Cubs' "loveable losers" moniker isn't going to cut it any longer. Signs of growing impatience have been visible for the last couple of years, growing in volume and vindictiveness since the NLCS collapse against the Marlins, a series that gave us the hapless Steve Bartman, the spectators' answer to poor Bill Buckner. The Marlins then first baseman, Derrek Lee, now plays that corner for the Cubs, but none of that matters now.

Today the fans of the White Sox are turning cartwheels in the streets while Cubs fans are fermenting – seething – in the juices of the cry, “Wait 'til next year.” Next year for the South Side was this year, and if it doesn’t happen next year on the North Side of Chicago, I can’t answer for the consequences. In the meantime, at the risk of looking like a Bi-Sox-ual, I join other Cubs fans in a discrete tip of the hat to that other team from Chicago.