"Twenty-five men in"

The headline on one of the Chicago Tribune's stories this morning said it all: "Twenty-five Men In." As opposed to "Eight Men Out," you see.

The White Sox are going to the World Series.

Congratulations. There, I said it.

This is a hard day to be a Cubs fan. It's much harder this time than it was the last time the Sox won the American League pennant, in 1959. Nobody had any expectations for the Cubs back then, and it wasn't a mere two years after the Cubs came within five outs of doing what the Sox did last night- and failed.

I wonder if the Cubs' front office realizes the urgency of the situation, the depths of the humiliation. Only two years ago, we were almost there. Instead of replacing Sammy Sosa and hanging on to Moises Alou, Cubs GM Jim Hendry got rid of both, inadequately replaced perhaps one of them- and failed to even address our glaring need for a closer.

Sure, we've been hit with an unbelievable series of injuries to key players two years in a row. Sure, Troy Percival inexplicably signed with Detroit before Hendry could make his pitch- and then had a rotten season. But the fact remains that the Cubs have been going backwards ever since the heartbreak of 2003- and, well... the Sox have not.

We were the team with the money. We were the team that was supposed to be almost there. The Sox were the poverty-stricken team in rebuilding mode, that couldn't even fill its own stadium.

But now the Sox are in the World Series for the first time since my age was in single digits and dinosaurs ruled the earth, and the Cubs are watching at home. We will have to live with this for years, as things stand- and if the White Sox actually win the Series, we may never live it down. Yes, I hope Hendry and company realize the depth of the humiliation, and how much they have to answer for.

I have lived as a Cubs fan in St. Louis. I grew up as a Cubs fan on the South Side of Chicago. There is simply no comparison. We must win it all, and win it quickly, because if the Sox win the World Series life will be unbearable until they do. White Sox fans as a group will see to it.

At bottom, there is, by and large, a good-heartedness in Cardinal fans' sense of rivalry with the Cubs- the result, perhaps, of their team succeeding so often where ours has failed. That can be even harder to take than the outright anomosity of Sox fans sometimes; better to be scorned than patronized. But the fact remains that, despite the ribbing, a Cubs fan at Busch Stadium will encounter a a basically good-natured hostility, ready if it's returned in the spirit in which it's intended to give the Cubs and their players every bit of their due when they play well- and on those rare occasions when the Cubs are playing in October and the Redbirds aren't, most Cardinal fans, in my experience, pull for the Cubs instinctively.

Not so Sox fans. Chicago is, and always has been, a Cubs town. The Sox are the city's step-children, and their fans know it. Wrigley Field is a trendy place to be seen; U.S. Cellular Field...well, isn't. The national media have a soft spot in their hearts for the Cubs, and barely acknowledge the fact that there's a big league team on the other side of town, too.

Then, too, there's the element of class warfare. The stereotype (which, like most stereotypes, contains a grain of truth, even if it is mostly bunk) is that the Sox are the working man's team, and the Cubs, that of Chicago's Yuppie community. The Sox play on the border between the ethnic neighborhood where the Daleys hold forth and the South Side ghetto adjoins, whereas Wrigleyville is one of Chicago's more gentrified neighborhoods.

Resentment runs deep on the South Side, and Sox fans, by and large, don't simply dislike the Cubs. They hate them. During the 2003 National League Championship Series with the Marlins, at least one South Side bar stood the house to a free beer for every Florida home run. I doubt that any such thing happened this year on the North Side. Cub fans have no great love for the Sox, but there tends to be less venom in their dislike. The Cubs, after all, are the team everybody fawns over. And it's not as if the White Sox had exactly set the American League on fire during the Bruins' century-long slumber. Whatever else Cub fans may have to live with, a sense of being the Second City's second team isn't one of them.

I was born the child of a mixed marriage. Dad- a cousin by marriage of Cubs Hall of Fame catcher Gabby Hartnett- grew up across the street from the old Cubs Park on the city's West Side. He actually lived there when the Cubs won their last World Series, in 1908. On summer afternoons, the TV was always turned on to Jack Brickhouse on WGN-TV, at least when the Cubs were in town. When the Cubs hit the road and Brickhouse and the TV cameras moved over to Comiskey, we tuned in Jack Quinlan and Lou Boudreau and the Cubs' radio broadcast.

It always seemed strange to go downstairs to my maternal grandparents' store in the afternoon and see Grandpa Elart watching that other team. It seemed even stranger hearing Brickhouse do the play-by-play. Sometimes some cousins and aunts and uncles from Mom's side of the family joined them, and I was left to wonder how anybody could find a baseball game interesting if the Cubs weren't involved.

Every year the Cubs and Sox would play an exhibition game. For me, it was a matter of life and death, even if it didn't count in the standings. After all, the kids I played with and went to school with were Sox fans. All-Star Games and World Series were largely proxy matches between the two Chicago teams, at least in the circles I frequented. To this day, it's amazing how many Chicago baseball fans, when asked whether they'd rather have a division championship or victory over the other Chicago team in their season series opt for the latter- especially on the South Side.

And then there came that awful night in the early autumn of 1959, when Chicago had its own Orson Welles "War of the Worlds-" type scare. The air raid sirens went off shortly before ten that night, but Khrushchev hadn't launched a sneak attack. The Sox had clinched the pennant, and Chicago's fire commissioner had decided that this would be an appropriate way to celebrate (this is the same man who had decided to demonstrate the physical fitness of Chicago's firemen by having them jog down the middle of a major expressway during rush hour).

I wanted in the worst way to root for the Dodgers in the Series. But Dad appealed to my sense of civic pride. and so I did the unthinkable: I rooted for Aparichio and Fox and the rest of the Pale Hose.

They lost. Which may have been just as well; if they'd won, I would never have heard the end of it.

As the Cub fans back home won't if the Sox win this time.

So congratulations, White Sox. Congratulations, South Side.

There. I said it. Now I'm going to wash my mouth out with Old Style.