When Ozzie Guillen was asked Friday what he feared most about World Series opponent Houston, he replied without hesitation: “The most dangerous thing about the Astros is they’re the wild card.”
Guillen is no dummy when it comes to baseball history. He was third-base coach for the Florida Marlins in 2003, the second of three straight wild-card teams to win the World Series, following the 2002 Angels and preceding the 2004 Boston Red Sox.
Including the Mets in 2000 and the Astros this season, five of the last six World Series have involved a wild-card team.
Doesn’t make any difference to White Sox general manager Ken Williams.
“I didn’t even know [the Astros] were the wild card,” he said. “I forgot they were.”
Why has one of the extra entrants been the star of the last three fall shows?
“I ain’t that smart,” Williams said. “If you’re in, you’ve got a chance. Certainly, when people think you’re not supposed to be here, you have a bit of a chip on your shoulder and something to prove. People still feel the same way about us, too, so we aren’t ever going to lose that chip.”
Whoa, hold on. Maybe the White Sox weren’t picked by many to win the Central Division, and they weren’t favored to beat Boston, and maybe not even the Angels, but they surely will lose their underdog label for Saturday night’s start of the Series.
Williams wasn’t buying it, at least publicly.
“Whoopee,” he said. “If this were 2006 right now, today, we’d be picked second in our division and you know it. Even if we win [the Series], I’ll bet we’d be picked second in our division if we brought back the same people.
“So how seriously can you take all this? We’re here and we’re one of two teams that have a shot at the World Series. We’ll take our chances.”
Sorry, but the woe-is-us gig is up. There’s nothing wrong with being the favorite, and the White Sox should gladly accept it.
In a very informal poll of several visiting national baseball writers at U. S. Cellular Field for Thursday’s White Sox workout, eight picked the White Sox to win it all, three the Astros.
Most said the White Sox were the better team with a deeper lineup, and two more said it was destiny after the Red Sox won last year–you know, all that 1918 and 1917 stuff. Everyone said it should be a very close series between two very similar teams, and even Williams won’t argue that.
“This is going to be a good one,” he said. “They’re going to be some of the closest games in recent World Series history.”
Recent World Series history, obviously, gives the Astros a very good chance. So why do wild-card winners, second-place finishers in their divisions, play so well in postseason?
“They spend the whole year fighting and scrapping [to get in],” Jermaine Dye said. “It has come down to the wire for a lot of them.”
“They were good teams, the Angels, Marlins and Red Sox,” said A.J. Pierzynski, another White Sox player with extensive postseason experience. “It always helps to come down to the end and play meaningful games.”
Many times division winners have clinched so early that the last two weeks lacked intensity. That’s a difficult element to turn on and off.
If that’s the case, then the White Sox are almost like a wild card, having gone to the final four games before clinching. They have won 12 of their last 13 games, including seven of eight in the postseason.
“That’s one thing that helped us,” Pierzynski said. “We came down to the end and we were playing meaningful games, even though we clinched the division before we went into Cleveland [for the final three].
“But we wanted to go in there and play well because we wanted to play spoiler [for the wild card]. That got us focused and kept us focused for those last three games, which is huge.”
So the White Sox feel they scrapped and battled to get where they are as much as any wild-card team.
“That was the good thing about the Indians having the run they did,” Pierzynski said. “They put pressure on us and it definitely helped us.”
