Rooting against the Sox
by J. Weintraub
The first baseball game I ever attended was in old Connie Mack Stadium at 35th and Lehigh. My father had taken me and three others from my Cub Scout troop to see Saul Rogovin, one of the few Jews then playing professional ball, pitch against the Dodgers. In those days Brooklyn fielded a future Hall of Famer at almost every position, while Philadelphia’s Whiz Kids were growing gray around the edges and arthritic in the joints. Yet I was young and foolish enough to bet my cousin a quarter that Rogovin — an itinerant junkman who on rare occasions confused opposing batters with his slow meandering curves — would win the game. Surprisingly enough, he did, 12 to 3, and from that afternoon the Phillies became not only my team but also, through some strange process of psychic transference, Jewish.
Robin Roberts — in the year that he surrendered a record number of home runs and once had to be dragged kicking and screaming from the mound — became, for me, a Jew. Bob Miller and Ted Kazanski underwent conversion, too, because, I suppose, our rabbi’s name was Miller and my maternal grandmother was a Klavantski. Even Richie Ashburn — then a towheaded kid from Nebraska and one of the few bright spots on the team in the late fifties — was transformed by this peculiar alchemy into a Jew. (Sandy Koufax, incidentally, was not a Jew; he was, as far as I was concerned, just another Dodger.)
I often wondered whether a similar process had been at work in my wife’s psyche when she was coming of age. Cathy had been raised through her teenage years on Chicago’s South Side, back‑of‑the‑yards and almost in the shadows of Comiskey Park. The men and women of her family had been White Sox fans for two generations, even before Arnold Rothstein (a Jew) fixed the 1919 World Series and turned the finest team in baseball into national pariahs. The Sox did not win a world championship again until 2005, almost ninety years later, and long before that I remember overhearing Cathy’s mother explain this long drought in terms of divine retaliation, a sojourn in purgatory likely to endure long past her lifetime, which it did. Her shame, however, was almost redeemed in 1959 when the team reached the World Series only to lose to the Dodgers in six. Cathy was eleven then, and from the way she speaks of the heroes of that era, I suspect that in her eyes Ted Kluszewski, Luis Aparicio, and Minnie Minoso were all transformed, at least for a time, into Irish Catholics.
Even before we were married, I supported Cathy’s enthusiasm for the Sox. The affairs of the American League had always been remote to me, as if they were playing baseball on some other planet, and I sensed no conflict in one night accompanying Cathy to Comiskey, and the next afternoon, a crimson Phillies’ cap on my head, taking the el from the South Side up to Wrigleyville to cheer my team on against the Cubs whom Cathy and I both despised. There was occasionally some tension between us when the leagues were in direct competition — an All Star Game, say, or during the World Series. But these generic passions never ran deep, and after our wedding ceremony — both a rabbi and a priest in attendance — our best man toasted us with the assurance that our marriage would endure “so long as the sun rises in the east, Lake Michigan freezes in January, and the White Sox and the Phillies never meet in the World Series.”
Considering the past histories of these two clubs, it seemed more likely that the first two events would fail to take place before the third ever occurred. But in 1983 the impossible almost happened, and I’m sure our marriage hung in the balance.
I’d always been a good judge of baseball talent, and shortly after the 1983 winter meetings, I concluded that the White Sox — in Rich Dotson, LaMarr Hoyt, Floyd Bannister, and Britt Burns — had assembled an overpowering starting rotation. Pitching, as the pundits say, is 90% of the game, and that year I bought a season‑ticker plan that would qualify Cathy and me for playoff and World Series tickets should the Sox win their division and then the pennant. As it turned out, they clinched the American League West two weeks before the season ended.
Caught up in the excitement of a pennant race almost at our own front door, I hardly noticed that the Phillies — a cut‑and‑paste team of over‑the‑hill veterans, given little chance at the start of the season to contend — were making a run in the National League East, and sure enough, there they were in October at the top of their division, like the White Sox only one step away from the Series.
They were the least talented of the four teams in the playoffs, but they had been hot throughout September, and I had the fearful premonition, which proved to be accurate, that they would defeat the Dodgers and move on to face for the championship whichever team won the American League. Three pairs of World Series tickets lay in my safe deposit box, and should the White Sox also reach the Series, Cathy and I would be sitting side‑by‑side, through perhaps twenty‑seven innings of baseball, as the merits and deficiencies of the two teams inextricably linked with each of our pasts were displayed before us. Only inches apart physically, we would find stretched between us a vast, cratered terrain as mined and as dangerous as a no‑man’s land separating two entrenched armies, and it was therefore imperative that the Orioles eliminate the White Sox in the American League division playoffs.
I couldn’t bear to watch the first two games in Baltimore, which the Sox split. Fortunately, just before the best‑of‑five series moved to Chicago, I was recruited to chair a conference in Santa Fe. Feigning disappointment, I surrendered my playoff tickets to my father‑in‑law who would accompany Cathy to the remaining games.
Businessmen alone in strange cities, away from their families, often engage in despicable acts, and I don’t think that I ever experienced more shame than that afternoon in a Santa Fe hotel room, sitting on my bed in front of the TV set, rooting against the White Sox. In the seventies the Phillies lost three division playoffs and their nosedive in the last weeks of the ’64 season is still a painful memory, so I was well acquainted with the anguish my wife was suffering as she sat next to her father in our upper‑deck box gazing down at the carnage below as the Sox lost 11 to 1. On the other side of the country, I was filling in a scorecard, tallying each of the Orioles runs with the righteous determination of a surgeon lopping off dead limbs.
The following day when a utility infielder, with what proved to be the last of the Sox’ hopes riding on his back, ran through his coach’s sign and was thrown out at home, I leaped from the bed with a yelp. A few innings later as Tito Landrum parked a Britt Burns’ fastball in the upper deck to win the game and the playoffs, I managed to restrain myself, fearing that if I again expressed such exuberant joy, Cathy would sense my treachery all the way across the Great Plains.
She never redeemed our World Series tickets, preferring instead to store them along with her photo albums and other family keepsakes. And, on occasion over the next twenty years, she removed them from their niche in the breakfront, cradling them in her hands, shuffling them back and forth as if she were performing some ritual act of absolution. Relics, I suppose, of what might have been. For myself, I viewed them rather as tickets for a voyage never taken, a trip through a subterranean byway from which a man and a woman together could hardly emerge unscathed.
Originally published in The Cool Traveler, Winter 1992
Find J. Weintraub at http://jweintraub.weebly.com
