ESPN has done it again. No, they didn’t lay off a wave of top talent that will create the core of the next great The Athletic regional site, but they did forget about the White Sox’s 2005 World Series championship again.
ESPN deleted its annual forgetting of the 2005 White Sox but not before I photocopied it! pic.twitter.com/DV9Q5gSHtD
— Dave Booooooooo!rown (@AnswerDave) October 24, 2017
Better yet, they made the exact same blunder on the exact same day last year.
@SSS_joshnelson @SouthSideSox @WriteSox pic.twitter.com/StNbGTobjc
— Sean Bilodeau (@chisoxfan30) October 25, 2016
Now, I love a good gag, and while there may indeed be a fanbase out there more paranoid about being overlooked than the White Sox’s, I have yet to see it with my own eyes. Finding a new way to gaslight Sox fans on an annual basis is the type of evil that has to be appreciated on a small level for its sheer craft.
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But beyond the small tragedy of forgetting a club as great as the ’05 White Sox — 99 wins, a dominant playoff run, a rotation with four 200-inning workhorses, the end of a drought every bit as “I didn’t think I would see this in my lifetime” as the one the Cubs killed last fall — their run feels like it came slightly ahead of its time to be a true sensation.
Prime Ozzie would have broken Twitter
We got a little bit of it near the end of his run in Chicago and in Miami, but the legend of Ozzie Guillen among reporters is that his pregame briefings lasted up to 45 minutes, and you could never leave because he might blurt out the lead story amid an otherwise unprintable rant at any point in time. I’ve sat in on one Guillen scrum. It lasted for over an hour, I laughed harder than at any other point in the season and he gave me three stories’ worth of material (from about 15 percent of what he said).
Now imagine his excerpts being live-tweeted from his open press conferences every day before every playoff game. He threatened to retire if the White Sox won the World Series in the middle of the ’05 playoffs, and not just in a Clayton Kershaw way, but multiple times. And this was in his second season as manager, when at the very least the national media had no idea how seriously to take him yet and was giddily filling entire stories centered around his ramblings.
A falling out between Ozzie Guillen and Kenny Williams ultimately led to the end of Guillen’s time in Chicago. (Brad Mangin/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
Kenny Williams’ team-building was an array of incredibly bold gambles that paid off
Entering 2004, the Sox were built around their monstrous lineup core of Frank Thomas, Magglio Ordonez and Carlos Lee. The next year, Ordonez and Lee were gone, and injury kept Thomas off the playoff roster as the White Sox made their remarkable run. Considering that the Sox let Ordonez walk and replaced him with a 30-year-old, injury-prone Jermaine Dye, and that they traded Carlos Lee in his prime as he came off a 5.5 fWAR season in the name of adding speed and base-stealing, FanGraphs might have hired a writer-in-residence just to insult Williams for a month straight.
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Between signing A.J. Pierzynski after a nightmare season in San Francisco, bringing Tadahito Iguchi over from Japan and banking on Jon Garland figuring it out in year six, there was upside all over, but guaranteed production pretty much nowhere. And those moves were more popular than giving a two-year extension to Cliff Politte or taking a chance on Dustin Hermanson right after he had been pushed to the bullpen. Their best returning reliever was Shingo Takatsu, and he was off the team by August. Anyone who was fully confident in this team in March 2005 and not on the team payroll deserved to be ignored.
Something you learn while watching an entire season in person is that there’s just too much work, and baseball is too damn hard, for a true fluke to ever exist. But the assembly of this team is still insane — a still-unbelievable conquest of major league scouting for bounce-back candidates, coaching work to install vital tweaks, and just guys having their absolute best years.
Their bullpen was cobbled out of nothing
Neal Cotts had just been moved to the bullpen the previous year and was bad. Politte was just OK in 2004 and they gave him an extension. Hermanson had just been moved to the bullpen and was mediocre. Damaso Marte was good but drove Guillen insane, and Bobby Jenks was still wearing out his welcome and sneaking beer onto team buses as a minor league starting prospect for the Angels when the 2005 season kicked off.
Neal Cotts improved his ERA from 5.65 in 2004 to 1.94 in 2005. (G. N. Lowrance/Getty Images)
As we sit now comparing contending teams’ armies of super relievers, this is the group that made up the core of the Sox’s late-inning relief corps during the best year in franchise history. Whenever Baseball Twitter stopped having a conniption over Williams seemingly selling Lee off for pennies on the dollar, it might have given him credit for helping build the idea (or myth) of a viable bullpen being something you could build on the fly through available journeymen.
It’s taken awhile to get over that perception, just like it’s taken awhile to get over the idea that every team should build themselves like the Royals and try to live off great outfield defense, which is an effect great teams can have on people.
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However much you appreciated the four straight complete games in the ALCS, it’s not enough
Justin Verlander’s complete-game effort in Game 2 of this year’s ALCS was just the second complete game in any ALCS after Jose Contreras capped the Sox’s starter run 12 years ago, and the game is only moving further away from letting starters work through high-leverage jams on their own.
Contreras threw 114 pitches for the pennant-clincher, and he wasn’t even dominating. He allowed back-to-back hits to lead off the fifth inning and coughed up a 2-1 lead, and Guillen let him pitch another four frames after that. Today, there would be 10,000 signatures on a Change.org petition to fire Guillen by the sixth, and it would be taken down by the eighth.
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As much as Guillen’s disinterest in sabermetrics fueled some of his downfall and current struggles to find a new position, and as much as the Sox’s belief in their ability to cobble together a contender out of the right combination of spare veterans led to flops and disappointments in the following years, this is what happens when baseball men build such an incredible season based entirely on their own feelings and instincts.
The White Sox disappeared quickly from the playoff stage after their win. They’re a red-headed stepchild of a franchise in terms of national visibility and their only superstar was 37 years old and nursing a broken foot when they won it all. There are reasons why they’re forgotten. But the 2005 team was weird and crazy as hell, so they really shouldn’t be.
(Top photo: G. N. Lowrance/Getty Images)