The Crosstown Comes to Comiskey
The visiting Chicago Cubs defeated the White Sox 8–3 on Wednesday night.
CHICAGO, ILL — — Interleague baseball is an interesting beast. Now that the leagues are balanced, it happens all season long. Some argue that makes it less special. Not that I necessarily agree, but the change was drastic: from seemingly random yearly matchups to organized divisional pairings, interleague play now represents something bizarre, for the sport: organized evolution to something that makes a decent amount of sense. Despite the change, annual protected rivalries remain. On years the entire NL and AL Central do not play as a whole, the Cubs and White Sox play four games, as opposed to six.
To save some time: that means weekday, night-time games.
In my totally unbiased opinion, I think baseball is meant to be enjoyed in the summertime sunshine. Maybe it’s because I grew up going to Wrigley in the afternoons, but nighttime baseball just doesn’t cut it. Or, I should say, I’d rather not take the Green Line at night and parking costs $50 because they can gouge visitors and home fans alike. Inherently, if I am so lucky to get tickets to a game, we’re fighting a lot of aggravation here.
Once I finally got to my seat in distant section 556, which I did not know existed, I was about where the top of the light towers are at Wrigley. A bad caricature of a Californian twenty-something was sitting behind me, who happened to be a medical school student. I was having a great night. Ah, yes, you came to hear what happened. My bad.
Jake Arrieta, he of Cy Young fame, took a no-hitter into the fifth. To say he outdueled James Shields, who took a no-hitter into the fourth, barely, is something of an understatement. Shields, who pitches slower than molasses in wintertime (and it’s July!), was roughed up for five runs, with one coming on three straight singles by Anthony Rizzo, Ben Zobrist and the suddenly white-hot Kyle Schwarber. Three more came in on a double by Anthony Rizzo to deep center field, which wedged itself between the wall and the ground on the fly, in the top of the fifth. A note on that — I am wholly unused to the Cubs being the away team in Chicago. That was weird. One final run scored when John Jay singled off of David Holmberg, with the run charged to Shields.
The Crosstown Classic is one of the rare games every year that sells out at Comiskey Park, which is the only decent name that park has ever had. And, as you’d expect, after winning the World Series last year, it was mostly Cubs fans. After that four-run fourth, they were surely making their presence known.
Up 5–0, the Sox were able to plate a run, when super-hyped prospect Yoan Moncada, in Chicago following the Chris Sale deal, crossed the plate on a sacrifice fly after walking and a ground-rule double by Omar Narvaez, the first hit off of Arrieta on the night. That’s already a better night for Sox catching than the game in 2006, where A.J. Pierzynski brawled Michael Barrett for…baseball reasons?
The Cubs and Sox then traded runs, with the Cubs scoring with some small ball in the top of the sixth, and the Sox grabbing one back with Moncada’s first big-league dinger. And that was all for Arrieta, who was more Jake Arrieta! Than he’s been all year. I don’t usually miss 2015 A.D., or 1 B.W.S. (Before World Series), but Arrieta was absolutely electric. A nice throwback.
The Cubs, however, weren’t done and scored another run in the top of the eighth. Alen Hanson, White Sox center fielder, and Addison Russell, Cubs shortstop, traded a pair of home runs and that was all she wrote. A clean 8–3 win for the Northsiders.
The game was not a quick one. Though the game started with the typical South Side 7:10 start, one minute earlier than the 7:11 starts from the years the team was sponsored by the large convenience store chain, by 10:11, the game still was still in the seventh. The game finally ended 3 hours and 53 minutes later. The good news for the home fans was that Chicago won. Sadly for them, it was the Chicago Cubs.
Comiskey Park is a nice place. It’s no Wrigley; the neighborhood has mostly yielded to parking lots and the seats are farther away, but the concessions aren’t awful and, unlike SunTrust Park, the friendly publications sellers actually sell pencils along with scorecards that aren’t buried in media guides no one really wants. Amazing how that works. Though it’s not home for North Side fans, it’s a decent home away from it. The crowd surely made it feel that way for the visiting Cubs.
All in all, a good game. It’s always a nice, cordial, and competitive series when the two Chicago ball clubs meet. This past week was no different. Having seen the Red Line Series two years in a row, I can safely say that it’s a nice little hallmark of two of the great things about Chicago: it’s a diverse, but tight-knit city. It is always a four game series that is a guaranteed win for Chicago.
