Another Year, Another Curse

Well, that’s it. The season is over and Chicago made us all wonder how on Earth did Houston get passed St Louis? In what was billed as a battle of two vaunted pitching staffs ended up being a lesson in what makes a champion and its not pitching, its not defence and its not offence. Its having the right blend of all of those things and Chicago had great pitching, played excellent D (maybe people will start echoing my championing of Joe Crede as the premier defensive third baseman in the AL and possibly all of MLB) and had the ability to create runs in several ways…and it also didn’t hurt that their manager seems to have instilled a sense of invincibility in the club house. Whenever Houston actually conjured up a run or two, the White Sox answered straight back and then some.

So last year it was Boston doing away with the apparent ghost of some George Herman Ruth guy (I think he was in The Munsters) and this year a skid dating back to 1917 has been bounced so what does that mean? Will the Cubs win it all next year? Wouldn’t that be thoroughly ludicrous, unlikely and strangely poetic. Cleveland seems like a more likely candidate having torn up most of the AL in the second half of this season before being felled by Ozzie’s boys in the last few days of the regular season (if their bats had been awake in the first month and a half then we would likely have a different champion now) but that would be too obvious a choice to maintain the trend.

Its been a funny start to the 21st century with a different champion every year. It will be interesting to see if Chicago can buck the trend by repeating, and if they can re-sign Paul Konerko there is no reason they can’t, but it would be great to have yet another team crop up and surprise us all by denying Boston and New York their expected end of year parade (you know everyone will be saying how one of the two will be the class of the field next season). So let me be the first to say that the 2006 season will end with Milwaukee winning in six against Tampa…wouldn’t that be something?