Cubs and Sox chase blues from Chicago

AMERICA AT LARGE:The most frustrated city in baseball is suddenly looking at a post-season of rare promise, writes George Kimball

Do they still play the blues in Chicago

When baseball season rolls around When the snow melts away

Do the Cubbies still play

In their ivy-covered burial ground

When I was a boy they were my pride and joy

Now they only bring fatigue

To the home of the brave

The land of the free

And the doormat of the National League

- Steve Goodman's The Dying Cub Fan's Last Request

THE LATE Steve Goodman was the author of hundreds of songs, including The City of New Orleans, but a quarter-century after his demise the Chicago folksinger's most oft-performed composition is Go, Cubs, Go!, which is played at Wrigley Field following each Cubs win.

Until recently, there hadn't been many occasions to play it, but as the play-offs get under way this week Chicago baseball fans find themselves contemplating the possibility of a crosstown World Series, with both the Cubs and the White Sox involved in post-season play for the first time in 102 years.

The collective frustration of Chicago baseball fans is perhaps unmatched in all of sport. In the 100 years since they won one, the Cubs have appeared in just one World Series (1945, which they dutifully lost), and their southside rivals haven't done much better. Their championship three years ago was the White Sox' first since 1917. Their loss to the Cincinnati Reds in the 1919 World Series was revealed, after details of a betting coup emerged, to have been deliberate.

The eight players accused in what is still known as the Black Sox scandal were ultimately barred from baseball for life. Although both comprised a like number of defendants, the prosecution of the Black Sox should not be confused with the 1968 Trial of the Chicago Eight, who eventually became the Chicago Seven after the presiding judge, Julius Hoffman, ordered Black Panther leader Bobby Seale chained and gagged before eventually severing his trial from that of his co-defendants.

The town Carl Sandburg described as the "city of the big shoulders" has long nurtured a well-deserved inferiority complex. Chicagoans, for instance, seem to take a measure of civic pride in describing their hometown as America's "Second City", but in fact it hasn't even been that since 1981, when it was overtaken in population by Los Angeles.

To put this in perspective, in 1906, when the White Sox won their first World Series by defeating the Cubs, the games were not broadcast on radio, which had yet to be invented. Al Capone was seven years old and wouldn't move to Chicago for another 15 years.

Although the result was considered a significant upset (popularly known as "The Hitless Wonders", the White Sox had the lowest batting average in the American League, and in fact batted a collective .198 in dispatching their crosstown rivals, 4 games to 2), it did not occur to anyone at the time that the convergence of the two Chicago franchises might be a historical oddity. In fact, 102 years would elapse before both Chicago teams would find themselves in the post-season again. Halley's Comet has come and gone twice since.

It was two years later that the Cubs beat the Detroit Tigers in five games to win the World Series. They have not won one since, but as the late broadcaster Jack Brickhouse once noted, "anybody can have a bad century."

That both Chicago teams would be playing in October this year was not assured until Tuesday, two days after what was supposed to have been the final day of the regular season. While the Cubs had nailed down the National League Central title with 10 days to spare, the White Sox, trailing the Twins by half a game, had to make up a rained-out date against the Tigers on Monday. When they won that one to pull even with Minnesota, it occasioned a one-game play-off. The White Sox' 1-0 win ensured their post-season place, and they will open against Tampa Bay in St Petersburg tonight.

If the White Sox had to claw their way into the post-season, the Cubs' turnaround has been even more impressive, considering that just two years ago the team lost a National League-high 96 games and finished dead last, a performance that cost manager Dusty Baker his job.

The 2008 rejuvenation at Wrigley Field has been presided over by Lou Piniella, who had previously managed the Yankees, Reds, Mariners and Devil Rays, and whose principal claim to fame was that he had been ejected on 61 separate occasions in which he lost arguments with umpires.

To advance in the post-season, the Cubs must contend not only with the Dodgers, but with the 64-year-old "Curse of the Billy Goat". According to legend, the imprecation was cast during the 1945 World Series by a Greek-immigrant saloon-keeper named William Sianis, who had been ejected from Wrigley Field, along with his pet goat, after sensitive patrons complained to stadium ushers of its foul odour.

Sianis's Billy Goat Tavern on Michigan Avenue remains one of Chicago's most noted historical landmarks, but when he was ejected that day its owner vowed that the Cubs would never win a championship.

The "curse" became a self-fulfilling prophecy when the Cubs were swept at home and lost the '45 series, at the conclusion of which Sianis dispatched a pithy three-word cable to team owner Philip K Wrigley: "Who stinks now?"