Starr Gazing: Chicago's Legacy of Baseball Misery

When I moved to Chicago in the mid-1970s, all my friends there--I'd say all my baseball friends, but frankly that would be redundant--assured me that I would be smitten with the Cubs.

The Cubbies were, after all, viewed as the National League counterpart of my hometown Red Sox--from the friendly confines of their ancient ballparks to the ceaseless futility of their baseball quests. Moreover, embracing the Cubs would require no betrayal of my first love since--this was before interleague play--the Red Sox and Cubs could never meet except in a World Series. Today that possibility remains decidedly against the odds, but back then it was a truly laughable notion.

But even though I settled in on Chicago's North Side, just a few miles from the Cubs home, the relationship never took hold. There were no lights yet at Wrigley Field and every game felt like the adult version of Ferris Buehler--hookey with sausage and beer on the side. It was altogether too happy a place for this East Coast curmudgeon. The fans rooted for the Cubs to win, but didn't seem bent out of shape, let alone as if their lives had been ruined, when the team lost. Any day at Wrigley was a swell day, win or lose. (This was, of course, long before the infamous Steve Bartman, who can be credited with the birth of killer rage at Wrigley.)

Contrarian to the end, I found myself gravitating to the South Side where there was another team playing equally bad baseball in a crummier neighborhood at a truly dreary ballpark. But back then, the Chicago White Sox boasted two major advantages over the fair-haired Cubs. The first was ownership. Instead of indifferent corporate bosses to whom the Cubs were a less important brand than Juicy Fruit, the White Sox had the legendary Bill Veeck who believed that baseball should be the ultimate carnival. And the fans, while not quite as intemperate as those wolfpacks that had raised me, had some expectations along with some edge when, inevitably, they weren't met.

In 1979, those two virtues collided in apocalyptic fashion courtesy of the infamous "Disco Demolition Night" at Comiskey Park. It was a brilliant idea, at least conceptually: demonstrate that "disco sucks" (long before anyone ever suggested the Yankees did) by having fans collectively trash their records by Donna Summer and others of that ilk. The purge was held between games of a doubleheader. But things went amok, thanks to the combination of beer and heartfelt disdain for both disco and the crummy White Sox team. The field became a free-fire zone and, soon thereafter, a disaster area with smoke billowing from the field. The White Sox had to forfeit the second game.

To some it remains an enduring symbol of the on-field mess that has perennially been the Chicago White Sox. Certainly in baseball's annals of mythic suffering, White Sox fans have never gotten their due. While the Red Sox assault on its "1918" curse became a national obsession, the plight of the White Sox, championship-free since 1917, has been largely ignored, even in Chicago. It is the White Sox's eternal fate to be the second team in the hearts of its city; even their failure lags behind that of a Cubs franchise, which hasn't won since 1908.