A friend of mine asked me
the other day why I stopped being a Cubs fan five years ago and converted to
the White Sox.
There were many reasons,
but the most important one is that I had grown tired of rooting for a team that
didn't seem to care about winning.
I have the same attitude
about politics.
The Libertarian Party
makes a lot of good points, but I don't think I've ever written anything nice
about them because they are so embarrassingly clueless when it comes to nuts
and bolts politics. The party couldn't organize a one-car caravan, yet they
speak of "moral victories" when one of their candidates scores 3
percent on election day - kind of like my friends and I used to do whenever the
Cubs played .500 ball.
Alan Keyes gave us all
another Cubs-like experience. Keyes was obviously not in last year's US Senate
race to win, he was in it to help expand his national fundraising base and get
his mug on TV. The Cubs love to make money and their fans revel in the team's
overhyped media exposure, but they never come out on top in the really
important category: Winning.
Democrat Dawn Clark Netsch
ran one of the worst gubernatorial campaigns ever in 1994. It was almost like
she didn't really want to win, so I wrote lots of nasty things about that
campaign.
I have long despise this
sort of loser behavior in politics and when that great friend of mine finally
sat me down five years ago and pointed out how wrong-headed I was in my choice
of baseball teams, it was like being hit by a lightning bolt.
It took a little while to
act on my new revelation. A baseball team is almost like a religion, and people
don't change their religions on a moment's notice.
I became a White Sox fan
pretty much by default. I was living in Chicago and since I wouldn't be going
to Wrigley Field any time soon, the Sox were handy. It didn't take me long to
fall in love with the Pale Hose, however.
It was a young, scrappy
team that zoomed into the American League Division Series in 2000, the first
year of my conversion. "The Kids Can Play" was the slogan that year,
and, man, could they ever, winning 95 games in the regular season. Their roster
was the definition of "clutch," but they didn't have a great pitching
staff and were swept in the first round of the playoffs.
No matter, I thought. This
is an organization I can root for. A little fine-tuning here and there and
we'll win it all.
Some disappointing seasons
followed, but I stayed with the Sox. Unlike that other team, the Sox looked
like they wanted to win, and management always seemed to be trying to find just
the right formula to get them back on top. When the Cubs allowed a dropped foul
ball to rattle them to the bone in the 2003 National League Championship
series, I knew I could never, ever go back.
Everything came together
for the Sox this year, of course, and as I write this the White Sox are
entering their first World Series since 1959.
I love this team. Our
batting average wasn't the greatest, we stranded a lot of men on base, but our
overpowering pitching staff baffled the opposition all year and our players
found a way to eke out win after win. Yeah, the Sox struggled after the
All-Star break, but they never never gave up, and management kept a cool head
and didn't rely on late-season trades for some big name superstars to come in
and bail everyone out. They did it all themselves.
For years, the political
candidates who fought their hearts out to win, who found a way to come out
ahead even when nobody believed they had a chance, who didn't panic when things
started slipping away from them were the ones I've given the most favorable
coverage.
Those who are in it for an
ego boost, who assume people will support them no matter what, who coast when
they should work have always received harsh treatment from me. I simply learned
five years ago that I should apply these rules to baseball.
Go Sox.
-30-
Rich Miller also publishes
Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter. He can be reached at
capitolfax.blogspot.com.com