An Exciting—If Un-Sexy—World Series Awaits

PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. –

This is a World Series featuring a team that has not won in 88 years and another that, in 43 years, has never even played in one of these games. It’s got a tortured franchise with a legitimate impetus for a “curse” against another who puts the greatest right-handed pitcher of this generation on the mound tonight.

So why all this talk about this being a down year for the World Series? My boy, Dave Sheinin, explains:

Somewhere along the line, the poets and bards of baseball decided there were better stories out there, better tales of endearing futility that unfolded under more mystical circumstances, than the Chicago White Sox and Houston Astros, two relatively boring franchises that simply never won. So, the poets and bards turned teams like the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs into the darlings of folklorists and merchandise salesmen, while the White Sox and Astros merely kept losing in relative obscurity.

But now, as the Astros and White Sox prepare to meet in the World Series beginning here Saturday night, perhaps it is time to celebrate a matchup that has all the historical impact of the more celebrated stories—plus the delicious potential to go down in history as one of the greatest pitching battles of all time.

This series, in other words, lacks for nothing—except buzz from a nation that has come to equate the World Series with pinstriped gazillionaires padding their ample résumés, or a perpetually cursed franchise exorcising its demons.

I’m looking forward to a great series, with Jerry Reinsdorf, a G.W. alumnus, clutching the trophy in Chicago next Sunday night.

White Sox in seven.

This postseason: 4-2.