The Other Sox

are also losers, and I refer not to a record that will doubtless exclude the southsiders from the playoffs, but to their attitude toward that unpleasant and entirely unexpected state of affairs. Their captain and soi-disant Derek Jeter, Paul Konerko, explained their September swan-dive by noting that to win it all last year they had to play extra games (i.e. the postseason), which left them exhausted this year. "We just didn't have enough in the tank physically." Huh? The White Sox only played one game more than the minimum to win it all last year and anyway, this is baseball, the five months from Nov. to April are more than enoough rest to recover from the 10-15 minutes of actual physical exertion per game required of each regular. The Yankees have been to the playoffs 11 times in a row, including 6 World Series. Not once have I heard anyone in that perpetually aging organization worry that all that extra effort in October would come back to tire them out a year later. What a crock!

Then there's Bobby Jenk's the John Kruk shaped closer for the White Sox (seriously someone should do a study on baseball and obesity, but I digress). Jenks told a radioman that the Sox were fine with the premature end to their season. We feel okay he said, we're fine. We know we had a great year, we just came up a little bit short. I don't know, first of all, how missing the playoffs when you are favored to repeat as champions can be defined as a great year. Secondly, I've been to Comiskey a half dozen times or so and to the Sox fans' credit they are an intense lot (they are also twice as obnoxious as Boston and NY fans put together). I'm certain they are not fine with the Sox disappointing finish and are doubtless irritated beyond words by the fact that Jenks and his teammates are taking it so well. The Sox by the way are no small payroll enterprise. The collapse they have undergone, like that of Boston, illustrates how difficult it is to stay in the championship hunt year after year. Their acceptance of failure, like Theo's grand plan to win 90 games each season, illustrates that you cannot stay in the hunt if doing so, instead of winning it all, is your standard of acceptability.

As Yankee fans, we should be happy that we enter each postseason with a passionate rooting interest still alive. The price we pay for this privelege, however, is that we can no more be happy with that state of affairs in and by itself than the organization we support.

Show me a team, show me fans, that are just happy to be there every year and I will show something worse than mere losers, I will show you glorified losers. In other words, the Atlanta Braves.