Sometimes baseball has no idea of the power it can wield. How it can ofttimes, depending on the circumstances that surround it, transcend a loss or a win, even one 21 years in the making.
“Sport has the power to change the world,” Nelson Mandela once said. “Sport can create hope where there was once only despair.”
Welcome to October. Welcome to the South Side, where despair has finally come to die.
Two seasons ago, the White Sox represented the bottomless and bottom-feeding “pit” of major-league baseball.
Today they come from a different place. Still the same side of town. Being in the American League Division Series, light-years ahead of anyone’s unrealistic thoughts, can do that to a community.
There’s the “know everything’s” claim that this is elation. That what skipper Will Venable likes to refer to as the “spirit of the team” belongs only to them. Thinking, possibly, that Munetaka Murakami’s champaign-soaked postgame meme-fest speaks only to the feeling of the team, short-sighting how an entire side of the third-largest city in America is drunk with him in that joy.
Not realizing what that team just accomplished exceeds way past baseball.
From inside Grandstand to outside on the street-level deck of Turtle’s. This ain’t just specific to 35th & Shields. This is how for a day — or seven — the people and patients walking about the Victory Center in Roseland can smile and how the kids in Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Paideia Academy in South Shore, until at least Wednesday night, can be infected with pride.
A feeling seeping inside Han Cha and Yunomi in the Stony Island Arts Bank to creeping outside Pressbox in Printer’s Row. In those eating dinner on a rainy Thursday in Ken’s on Western in Evergreen Park and getting an Italian beef or Nacho Supreme at the EZ Market outside O Block.
The Sox playing World Series-seeking baseball in October for the first time since they snatched the crown in 2005 to rewrite Chicago baseball history (a reminder: 11 years before the Cubs finally decided to shed their self-accepted “lovable losers” identity) is, as this newspaper put it, “what you don’t see in the box score.” Where we “understand how the Sox got here, what changed along the way and what the moment means to the people living it.”
It don’t rain in Southern California, but it rains bullets in the southern region of the Chi. Annie don’t live here because the sun never comes out tomorrow once you get south of Soldier Field and McCormick Place. Black being the Sox’ primary hex color because it goes with the funeral outfits so many of us on the South Side wear as customary uniforms based on the amount of services people believe we attend.
Antawun Carter and Jalil Sumerset are young diehard South Side residents and baseball savants who are finding ways to get tickets to the game Wednesday to be inside the Rate. Chance, Barack and Don C. searching their closets for postseason Sox pieces with tags still on them that they’ve been saving for just this moment. The Pope calling New Era for a new fitted.
It’s a hero’s journey that just happened to find baseball as its guide.
The first team in major-league history to lead every inning in a multiple-game postseason series is cute. But the depth of exactly what this is and reps remains far more profound than that. This isn’t about fans; this is about feelings. Feelings specific to an entire side of the city that has been continuously painted as those who are supposed to be numb to everything because of what our lives are supposed to be like on an everyday basis.
This win, this advance to the DS, this come-up before any type of come-up was thought to be logical, this culture Venable has created has infiltrated all blocks Commercial to Western, Lake Meadows to The Gardens, 18th and Blue Island Ave. to 119th and Cicero.
A less than 1% chance in April to make the postseason is the predicted market we walk around reminding ourselves of. Blurring the lines of the Sox with the lines of our lives. Happy to be trapped in their moment. Anything for the outside world to attach us to something different. To attach something positive inside of humanity to us.
For right now, for this momentary lapse in our perceived but hard to act like it doesn’t exist South Side societal anguish, the rain — at least in our minds — stops. The sun appears, if only for a week. The black we wear to match our Sox ’47s represents flyness, not funerals.
All championship teams have spirit. But until the Sox win one or even enter into that level of conversation, the true spirit of who they are, what they mean and how their impact resonates rests and breathes throughout the neighborhoods that have shouldered their burden for decades. Knowing the weight that 121 losses carries, knowing now what it feels like to have that weight lifted.
Like a roof that ain’t the ceiling. And the sun comes out. Tomorrow.