There is a forlornness to the White Sox, and although some people believe it has to do with being No. 2 in town, I believe it’s due to a strand of DNA that carries the genetic message, “We are, like, so doomed.”
Where there should be a feistiness to the franchise, there’s a heaviness. Where there should be an energy, there’s a look that says 14 hours of sleep just isn’t going to cut it.
But it’s more than that. It’s that things don’t go right for the Sox. Even when their intentions are good, as they seemed to be in the recent Magglio Ordonez-for-Nomar Garciaparra trade-that-wasn’t, they get a lump of nothing for their efforts.
Trading for David Wells was a great move two years ago, but it turned into a catastrophe. Billy Koch was a nice acquisition last year until he turned into a fraction of the closer he used to be. The Sox gave Paul Konerko a big contract extension after the 2002 season and he responded with a career year, the only problem being that it was Mike Caruso’s career year.
Is all this misfortune a function of not being shrewd enough or is it simply that fate has decided the Sox have been put on earth to be kicked around? A little of both, with a lethal dose of cheapness added. If you prefer that your losers be loveable, the team on the North Side is a magnet for people drawn to three-legged puppies. There is nothing loveable about these Sox, unless you’re into bruised shins.
They are beyond the concept of “whatever can go wrong will go wrong.” Everything already has gone wrong. Now it’s all reruns.
Maybe that’s why this feels so much like the White Flag trade of 1997. Say goodbye to Bartolo Colon, Carl Everett and Tony Graffanino. And say hello to subtraction by subtraction.
The Sox believe Ordonez, who is scheduled to make $14 million next season, is too expensive. Then again, it was the Sox who gave him that contract and the Sox who decided on a middling $57 million payroll for 2004.
There doesn’t seem to be a long-term plan here, other than to dump contracts. Right now, the Sox have four players (Frank Thomas, Ordonez, Koch and Konerko) on the line for $34 million of that $57 million. You won’t be surprised to learn the Sox were willing to move all of them.
The only way the Ordonez trade would have worked is if general manager Ken Williams had planned on trading Garciaparra to the Dodgers for pitchers. Otherwise, the Sox were trading one guy who would play one season in Chicago for another, and that made absolutely no sense. We’ll give Williams the benefit of the doubt that he was trying to make something out of nothing. He was trying to get pitching.
These are the Sox, so of course the Alex Rodriguez trade that would have sent Garciaparra to Chicago on Thursday didn’t happen.
Allow me to wander for a moment, though the wandering will lead us back to the problem with the Sox, which is their inherent cheapness. This is the franchise that got a ballpark built with public funds and then, after finally acknowledging years later that the design it picked was poor, auctioned off some of its history to pay for renovations. They dumped the name Comiskey Park in favor of U.S. Cellular Field for $68 million over 20 years. Jerry Reinsdorf fix the park with his own money? Are you nuts?
(The renovations, by the way, don’t solve the upper-deck problem. The Sox are lopping off the top eight rows of the deck, but the remaining 21 rows still have the same 35-degree slope. It’s just as steep, folks. Welcome to the renovated optical illusion.)
Reinsdorf’s message to the fans always has been the same: or else. Either show up at the park in large numbers or else he’s not going to spend large numbers on better players. The thinking is so backward that it beeps like a truck in reverse.
Consistently field a playoff-caliber team, Jerry, and people will come. Field an underachieving group, as you did last season, and the discerning fan will realize it’s more of the same. Go cheap, as you are now while prettying up the stadium, and fed-up fans will stay away.
They would have come to the park next season if the Sox, say, had gotten into the bidding for Miguel Tejada, the way resurrected Baltimore did. Then again, that would have cost money, the non-taxpayer kind of money, the kind of money Reinsdorf hates to spend. His own.
