Exile in Wrigleyville

It's the last dance

I don't want to belabor the obvious, so here goes: After a three-year run, I've decided to end Exile in Wrigleyville. Of course, I wouldn't complain if someone cracks that my blog ended about the same time that the playoff hopes for the 2006 White Sox died. That's basically true, but now I'm making it official.

When I started Exile in January 2004, the Cubs were ascendant, and I felt a bit helpless as the team that I loved was largely forgotten amid the Cubs-are-going-to-the-Series-this-time hype. I thought that I could combat those feelings by writing about the Sox.

Of course, subsequent events have removed those feelings of helplessness. I didn't think of it consciously as I worked on Exile, but those feelings were at the root of my determination to keep writing the blog. I think I made it through last year because the 2006 season seemed like a continuation of 2005: Could the Sox repeat? Could they dispel some of the doubt about the 2005 team by making the playoffs? Once that opportunity was gone, my well of motivation ran dry.

At this point, I also feel like I don't have much original to say. I can interpret statistical analysis, but I am not skilled enough to do anything but very basic research myself. So that's one avenue of providing interesting, original content that isn't open to me. Another is to make interesting observations, but to do that, one has to be completely engaged, seeking out material from far and wide. I don't have the motivation or the time to do that anymore. I used to do a lot of commentary on the media coverage of the Sox, but I grew bored with that (although the idea of a running critique of Chicago sports media in general sounds like a good idea for a blog, and one that I may even be willing to participate in).

Moreover, there are plenty of good Sox blogs out there, starting right here with Sox Machine. South Side Sox is the other blog with which I'm most familiar, and it's going strong, too.

The only thing that I have been eager to write about lately -- as one reader noted with disdain in the comment section -- is English football, so I'm starting a new blog on my favorite football team, West Ham United: The Pride of the East End. The Pride of the East End is a slogan on the West Ham scarf that TMG's sister and brother-in-law gave to me as a gift when we visited them in London in February. English football teams play only once or twice a week, for the most part, so maybe that will be the right speed for me. Plus, I'm still in that discovery phase about football, so that makes me more inclined to work on it. I've always enjoyed new challenges.

Jim, the highly capable writer and designer behind Sox Machine, has invited me to occasionally write about the Sox here as I please, and I hope to take him up on that offer from time to time, starting with a State of the Sox recap of Sunday's game.

To all those who have followed this blog around the four URLs that it called home, I thank you for reading. Your feedback -- whether praise or scorn -- helped me as a blogger and let me know that it was a worthwhile endeavor. I wish that I could continue to reward your loyalty by continuing to write Exile, but it's been six months since I was worthy of your attention. It's time to put an end to Exile and make a new beginning elsewhere.

It's down to clichés

West Ham played their first game since the Feb. 10 match that I attended on Saturday. They visited Charlton Athletic, another London-area club mired near the bottom of the table, and it was an even bigger disaster than the loss I attended against last-place Watford.

Charlton are managed by Alan Pardew, who was West Ham's manager at the start of this season -- the manager who led them to the FA Cup final last year and to a rise back into the Premiership the year before. Pardew was fired in December and replaced by Alan Curbishley, who retired last spring after 15 years as manager of Charlton. Got that? Imagine if the White Sox had fired Jerry Manuel in 2002 and then he came back later that season as the manager of the Cleveland Indians. Meanwhile, the Sox had hired Mike Hargrove. That's the best analogy that I can draw. (It's a scary one, too, contemplating Hargrove as Sox manager.)

Charlton scored the first goal in the 23rd minute. While the game was on Saturday, TMG and I were watching it Sunday morning. After the goal -- which wasn't much of a surprise, because Charlton pressured the Irons from the get-go -- I got up and went into the kitchen to start making breakfast for us. I was still watching it, but I had a bad feeling. That feeling was proven true, unfortuately, in the 33rd and 40th minutes, as Charlton went up 3-0. They tacked on another goal late in the game for a 4-0 final.

West Ham hosts Tottenham Hotspurs on Sunday. Tottenham, of course, is playing some of its best football of late, having won three games in a row. Just the sort of luck the Hammers have had this year. Once again, the game will be broadcast on Fox Soccer Channel. I won't be able to watch it live because I have to leave on a business trip Sunday morning, but I'll record it and watch it when I get back. I'm a sucker that way.

West Ham midfielder Lee Bowyer could return Sunday from a shoulder injury sustained on New Year's Day (a brutal 6-0 loss at Reading). Some comments that he made reminded me of the comments you hear from a veteran baseball player on a team that is falling out of contention.

"We are obviously in a very difficult position at the moment, but there is no way we can just give up and throw the towel in. ... However bad things are, there are still 30 points to play for, and we just have to keep going in the hope we can turn it around. ... I'm a fan of this club and I can see what the supporters are going through. Everyone here has got to fight and do everything we possibly can to survive, because it's not over yet."

Maybe Bowyer is the Crash Davis of West Ham United. I wonder what he thinks of the novels of Susan Sontag.

Easy to overreact

A Spring Training opener like the one the White Sox had on Wednesday could make even the most level-headed fan uneasy. The Rockies beat the Sox 12-4 in the first game for both teams, but that wasn't what was so worrisome. Sox closer Bobby Jenks left the game after just nine pitches because of stiffness in his shoulder. The big right-hander apparently did not feel any pain, but could not loosen his shoulder up, either. Starter Mark Buehrle picked up right where he left off in 2006, which is unfortunate, and Jon Garland fared even worse (box score). And Darin Erstad was allowed to bat lead-off.

Jenks's situation is the most troubling. He said that he has had trouble getting his shoulder loose since he arrived at Spring Training. Former Sox starter Freddy García spoke of his trouble getting loose for much of last season, when he lost a lot of velocity and pitched horribly for the first five months of the season. It's not how I wanted the first game for the White Sox in five months to go, that's for sure.

Come on, you Irons!

You only get to go to your first baseball game once, but recently, I had the chance to replicate the experience, sort of. Let me back up a bit.

Until recently, I'd never been much of a fan of soccer. Other than a few times in gym class, I never played the game. The game wasn't on television much, and I didn't watch it when it was. In 1998, my friends and I went to a Chicago Fire game. It was my first professional soccer game. We went because we wanted to watch Bo Deans perform after the game.

Six years ago, I went to London with a couple of former co-workers. One of them had spent a summer studying in London when she was in college, and we stayed with an Englishman she had befriended during that summer named James. A few months after our trip, James visited Chicago, and at his urging, he and I went to a Fire game. He taught me a few things about the game that night. For instance, he explained the offsides rule to me. Having watched a fair amount of hockey, offsides, to me, had to do with a line on the field. It just had to. So I was wondering as we watched the game: Is it the center line? Is it the bigger box in front of the goal? (Yeah, I didn't even know that that was called the penalty box.) The game made a whole lot more sense to me after I stopped expecting the players to clear the offensive zone when the ball passed over the center line.

That was it until I watched some of the 2002 World Cup. I even got up early to watch the U.S. team play in the quarterfinals against Germany. The American team lost 1-0, but it was quite a game. They had plenty of chances, including one near-miss that I thought had gone in for the equalizer. I leaped out of my recliner and yelled, "Gooooooooooooooooooal!" It looked like it was in the back of the net, but the ball was just sitting on top of the side netting outside the goal.

After that, I didn't watch much soccer over the next few years. I recall tuning into a Fire playoff game a couple of years ago. I was just flipping around and stopped on the game, as there wasn't much else on. I think it went to extra time and the Fire won. I think. If I recall correctly, Justin Mapp came on as a substitute and made a great run down the right sideline and a good cross to the front of the net on the winner.

It was a similar situation last spring that brought me to watch West Ham United. I was just flipping around the dial on a weekend morning last spring when I came across an FA Cup match involving West Ham on Fox Soccer Channel. It's a part of my basic cable package on RCN. I decided to watch the game because I have a good friend named Phil who roots -- no, lives and dies -- with West Ham. Phil is an Aussie, but he lived in London for a few years and became a West Ham fan. "I'll watch Phil's team play," I thought. The Hammers (also known as the Irons, because they originated from the ironworks in the West Ham area in the East End of London) won that game and went on to lose a heartbreaker in the FA Cup 2006 finals to Liverpool, 3-3 on penalty kicks. Liverpool tied the game late with a spectacular goal from about 30 yards out, a simply unbelievable strike that made a lot of "goal of the year" highlight lists.

I watched some of the World Cup last summer, too. The Marquette Grad and I watched the second half of the England-Portugal quarterfinal match in a bar near Wrigley Field on my birthday, which happened to fall during the Cubs-Sox series at Wrigley. We went to John Barleycorn to have lunch and meet some friends who had tickets to give us for the Sunday game -- the one in which Mark Buehrle got completely bombed in the first inning and gave up a home run to, embarrassingly, Neifi Pérez. The England-Portugal match captivated the entire bar -- and if you've been in the Wrigleyville John Barleycorn, you know that's a pretty big space. It was a scoreless tie after 120 minutes (90 minutes of regulation plus two 15-minute overtime periods). Portugal won on penalty kicks, but TMG and I had headed home by then to make the first pitch of the crosstown game. Still, the match reminded me how much fun it can be to watch top-notch soccer.

Last fall, I started watching English Premier League matches on FSC, including the Irons occasionally. About the same time, TMG and I began talking about visiting her sister and brother-in-law in London. They are about halfway through a three-year work stint for an American company's London-area operations. So as we were trying to pick a long weekend to make the trip, I consulted the West Ham schedule. A little over a month ago, we asked TMG's sister to buy us tickets to West Ham's home match against Watford on Feb. 10. There weren't many tickets available to the public beyond the season-ticket holders, but we managed to purchase four tickets near the top of the stadium. Boleyn Ground at Upton Park, as their pitch is known, seats just under 35,000 and is a short walk from the Upton Park stop on the London Underground.

We headed down Green Street from the train station with a huge crowd of fellow fans, including a few from Watford, another London-area club. The fans filled the sidewalks and spilled into the street, where cars and buses crawled along. My head might as well have been on a swivel, as I tried to take in the scene in all directions. After we picked up our tickets at the window -- we didn't receive tickets, actually, but little hard plastic cards with our names on them that we'll use if we ever return to Boleyn Ground; you place them in a reader that controls a turnstyle of metal bars similar to those that you might use to exit a CTA station -- we headed into the team shop. TMG's sister and brother-in-law had found a West Ham scarf for me before we arrived in London the day before the game. When I walked into our room and saw the scarf, I was floored. "Wow" and, eventually, "Thank you!" was all I could manage. To the scarf, I added a knit winter cap and a claret hoodie. TMG bought a knit cap with blue and gold polka dots on it that symbolize bubbles -- Irons fans sing a popular song from the 1920s called "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" before each home match -- a keychain and a nice postcard with a photo of Boleyn Ground.



Just a few minutes before 3 p.m., the four of us made our way up to our seats. Boleyn Ground was sold out and the fans were starting to get into it. I had learned the words to the chorus of "Bubbles" and proudly sang along with the rest of the fans before the match got under way: "I'm forever blowing bubbles/Pretty bubbles in the air/They fly so high/Nearly reach the sky/And like my dreams/They fade and die/Fortune's ever hiding/I've looked everywhere/I'm forever blowing bubbles/Pretty bubbles in the air." Then the fans clap their hands rapidly three times and shout, "United!" This is repeated twice more.

Unfortunately, this was the high point of the afternoon. The Hammers had plenty of chances against Watford, who were at the bottom of the standings (or table, as it is known in English football), but they essentially missed two scoring chances with wide-open nets and lost 1-0. I'm a novice fan and don't know a lot about the intricacies of the game, yet, even I knew that West Ham had missed on two great scoring opportunities. Looking at some of the pictures I was in that afternoon, I can tell that I was frustrated with the outcome, although I was having a great time and enjoying the experience immensely.

All of this is a very long set up to explain how much I'm enjoying this sport for the first time and how much my trip to Boleyn Ground reminds me of my first White Sox game nearly 30 years ago. Things didn't go nearly as well for the home team in the East End as they did for the Sox that day back in 1978, that's for sure. I had been to a couple of Chicago Fire games before. And, of course, I was only seven years old for the first Sox game, while today I'm 35 years old and supposedly less prone to wonder and amazement. Despite those differences, I still felt something close to the same excitement at beholding something for the first time -- in this case, top-level English football.

I'm at a stage where I'm soaking up information about the game as rapidly as I can. I watch as many games as I can through FSC and ESPN's coverage of the European Champions League (I'm watching a recording of Porto-Chelsea in the Champions League as we speak). I'm a newly minted subscriber to Four-Four-Two, a copy of which I picked up in London and read nearly cover-to-cover on our flight home from London. I just purchased The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football, which came in the mail today. The reviewer in Four-Four-Two made it sound like something that I couldn't pass up as a new fan of the game. I'll let you know how it is after I read it.

West Ham's season is not unlike that of the 1978 White Sox, a season of disappointment after a surprisingly good season the year before (especially regarding West Ham's runner-up finish in the FA Cup). The Irons are fighting relegation -- demotion to the second English league, known as the Championship -- and the cause does not look good at the moment. West Ham are one of the bottom three as I write this, and the bottom three are relegated to the Championship (while three Championship clubs qualify to move up to the Premiership each season to take their place).

Maybe West Ham's predictament is one of the things that is making me such a devoted fan in such a short time. Maybe it's the idea that, like with the Sox, I'm not picking up on a top-level team that is a perennial winner, so if they someday come through, the reward will be all the sweeter. I'll keep you posted as West Ham fights to avoid relegation.

(Music to write by: "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah" by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, "The Good, the Bad and the Queen" by The Good, the Bad and the Queen and "Good News for People Who Love Bad News" by Modest Mouse.)

A modest trade

The acquisition of David Aardsma and Carlos Vásquez from the Cubs for lefty reliever Neal Cotts is a small plus for the White Sox. Mostly, it's a financial plus, as Cotts is eligible for arbitration while Aardsma has less than two years of major-league service time.

Aardsma is a lot like Cotts was a couple of years ago. Aardsma can strike out a fair amount of batters (8.3 per 9 innings in the minors and 7.6 per 9 in the majors) but he walks a lot of batters, too (4.2 per 9 in the minors and 5.4 per 9 in the majors). Sox pitching coach Don Cooper has had some success working with pitchers with this profile: Cotts, Bobby Jenks, Matt Thornton and José Contreras are the best examples.

Sox GM Ken Williams said that Vásquez was just as important to him as Aardsma. I don't see it looking at Vásquez's numbers. He is left-handed and appears to have the good stuff/bad control profile. I have to imagine that the Sox think they can work with him the same way they have with the other pitchers that I have mentioned. According to his page on the Baseball Cube, Vásquez did not play during the 2001 season, so I'm assuming that he was injured. He served a steroids suspension during 2005. If he provides any decent, cheap relief for the Sox in the next year or two, he'll exceed my expectations. Vásquez was among five players added to the 40-man roster on Monday, bringing the Sox roster to a full 40 men.

While he said he would be happy to return to the bullpen, Cotts also said he hopes to get an opportunity to be a starting pitcher with the Cubs, something he knew he wasn't going to get with the White Sox. I wish him well if he gets the chance, but I doubt he would have much success, unless he's been secretly working on a change-up that he's never thrown (to my knowledge, anyway) at the major-league level. A fastball and a slider, neither of them devastating, isn't enough for a starting pitcher.

Rumor patrol

I'm always wary to start chasing down every Hot Stove rumor because, well, I'm kinda lazy. It seems like a lot of wasted effort to me, because most of the rumors don't turn out to be true. This one, however, seems worth mentioning: The Sox are supposedly close to trading Jon Garland and the Texas Rangers are the rumored trading partner. This report (which I saw at Baseball Think Factory) also suggests that the Orioles are interested. The Rangers may also be interested in Brian Anderson. Minor league lefty John Danks is the Rangers' prize that the Sox are interested in, according to the report.

The Sox are known to be shopping a starting pitcher in order to clear a spot for Brandon McCarthy in the rotation and get some young pitching in return, so the Garland-to-the-Rangers-for-Danks rumor is at least plausible. I'd prefer not to trade Anderson. I think he'll give the Sox more on offense next year (his minor league numbers suggest that he can do better than 2006). I participated in a roundtable discussion at South Side Sox last week, and my prediction there for a big trade by the Sox was to go for Vernon Wells of the Blue Jays. I would still want to keep Anderson in such a trade if possible. At worst, Anderson and Ryan Sweeney can be the options for left field in 2007. Anderson may end up as a fourth outfielder at some point, but I think he's worth keeping to find out if he can be an every day player.

These better not be true

I was glad to read Saturday that Sox GM Ken Williams was denying a report in Friday's Boston Globe (which I can't seem to find online) that the Sox were close to signing free-agent shortstop Alex González to a three-year, $15 million contract. The Reds have reportedly signed González to a three-year, $14 million contract. I wouldn't be interested in González at almost any price. I was also glad to read that Williams said there was no truth to a report in Friday's Sun-Times that said that the Angels were offering a package starting with pitcher Ervin Santana in return for Freddy García. I'm glad that that's not true, because if it were and the deal wasn't being announced Friday, I would be worried that Williams was losing it. I would be ecstatic if the Angels offered Santana for García straight up. But that's not going to happen.

That same Sun-Times article, written by Chris De Luca, suggests that the Sox may be interested in reacquiring Aaron Rowand to add some offensive punch to the outfield. The Sox may be interested in hearing what the Phillies want for Rowand, but I doubt he's their solution to improving the offense that the Sox will get out of the outfield. Despite Brian Anderson's struggles with the bat in 2006, he and Rowand really profile very similarly at this point offensively. It would be silly to get an older, more expensive version of that.

Time flies

It didn't occur to me that Thursday was the first anniversary of the White Sox clinching the 2005 World Series in Houston till the afternoon, when one of my co-workers said, "Happy anniversary," to me. It took me a second, but then I got it.

I guess I haven't allowed myself to look back in the last few weeks, because I've been planning to watch the six games available on the commemorative edition DVD set after the baseball season is complete. (Those games are: the clinchers of the series against the Red Sox and Angels and the four World Series games.) I did think about last season for a few moments Wednesday night, because I walked through the intersection of LaSalle and Wacker on the way to meet some friends for a beer. I'll always think of the rally when I walk through that intersection.

All the emotions about that day a year ago come back in a flood when I read the post that I wrote after Game 4. It's occurred to me, looking back at that post, and a short one that I wrote after Game 3, that I never really wrote about the actual games. I plan to do that, with quotes from the game notes that I took the first time, when I watch the DVDs over the next few weeks. I've been waiting till the end of the season to tear off the plastic on that DVD set. No matter who prevails in the World Series, it won't be long now. Pretty soon, FOX will stop showing A.J. Pierzynski jumping into the arms of Bobby Jenks, replacing them with a similar scene involving Tigers or Cardinals. That's OK. I'll be able to watch Pierzynski and Jenks as often as I want to.

(Music to write by, "And This Is Our Music," Brian Jonestown Massacre.)

Old and new

First off, my apologies for taking three weeks between posts after launching this new home for EIW. I've been extraordinarily busy the last month. I appreciate your indulgence. Second, this is just a quick post to get back into the swing of things. I'm hoping I'll be like a shooter in basketball who has missed a few shots to start the game and this post is like getting to the line for a couple of free throws -- make 'em, and the shooter sometimes gets on a roll.

A few weeks ago, baseball-reference.com released its 2006 update, adding the statistics of the regular season to one of the most useful sites on the web. I have sponsored a handful of pages on bb-ref, but I was down to just two: Mark Buehrle and Ed Farmer. I let sponsorships of Neal Cotts, Aaron Rowand and Juan Uribe lapse this summer and one of José Valentín in 2005. Over time, the pages become more expensive if you keep sponsoring them, much like real players do as they accrue service time, or they leave the Sox, like Valentín. So I was looking forward not only to the updated stats, but also to the pages of players who made their debuts during the 2006 season. In particular, I was interested in Sox rookie third baseman Josh Fields. Now, I wasn't willing to pay the $200 price tag to sponsor the site for a year that was initially posted there. So I waited. I wrote Fields's name on a calendar so I would remember to check it Monday, knowing that it would be down to $10 -- the prices count down at $10 per day until someone pays to sponsor the page. Thankfully, no one beat me to his page.

I wanted to support bb-ref more than just $10. I wanted, too, to sponsor a page that makes a nod toward the early Sox teams that I cheered for. I started with the 1977 South Side Hit Men page, but I barely remember that team, truthfully. The 1978 White Sox were the first team that I was able to follow in any detail. I found a player on that team who was perfect for my purposes -- Thad Bosley. Bosley was the star of the first game that I attended, so of course, he was my favorite player for a while. Coincidentally, for a North Side Sox fan, Bosley made his way to the Cubs and probably had the best season or two of his career with them. I remember looking his page up a couple of years ago, and a Cubs fan sponsored his page. I'm glad to have the opportunity to sponsor it now.

Why I'm here

When I titled this entry, I didn't think it would be such a tough question to answer. I mean, ultimately, I'm here because as a six-year-old living in the near north suburbs, I somehow latched on to the Chicago White Sox. I'm sure the great season the 1977 South Side Hitmen were having had something to do with it, but no one in my family really remembers. The big dash of stubbornness that I inherited from my father explains why I remained a White Sox fan even as everyone around me went for the Cubs in 1984.

In a more direct way, I'm here because, after two years and eight months of writing a White Sox blog on my own, the burden of trying to write enough to make it worthwhile for readers to check out my blog overwhelmed me. I'm lucky that I have a good friend and fine blogger like Jim willing to take me in and let me be a part of Sox Machine. With that burden of flying solo now lifted off me, I hope that I'll be able to resume writing more in-depth articles about the White Sox -- where they've been and where they're headed. I hope you'll take the time to read my posts, intermittent though they may be.

Who I'm rooting for

The Oakland A's are easily my favorite team among the eight teams that qualified for the playoffs this season. The biggest reason is that Frank Thomas bats clean-up for the A's. I was so happy this afternoon as I followed along during Oakland's 3-2 win over the Twins. Thomas hit a pair of solo home runs, one in the second and one in the ninth, that proved the difference in the game. The ninth-inning home run gave the A's a 3-1 lead and provided the cushion that Oakland closer Huston Street needed in the bottom of the ninth.

I want Thomas to have a great time of it in the playoffs this year. He wasn't able to play for the White Sox last postseason, and too many people focus solely on his struggles in the 2000 American League Division Series loss to the Seattle Mariners (0-for-9 with four walks) and forget what he did in the 1993 AL Championship Series (.353/.593/.529 with 10 walks). I want him to have the chance to squelch the nonsense talk that the White Sox won last year becaue he wasn't playing. The 2005 Sox had their best offensive stretch of the season when Thomas played. As for the team's past failures, it sure as hell wasn't Frank Thomas's fault that the White Sox employed a manager like Terry Bevington during some of Thomas's most productive years in the mid-1990s or that the team ran through an awful collection of fifth starters in 2003 that killed their chances to overtake the Twins.

Speaking of Minnesota, that's another good reason to root for the A's. I liked the Twins fans that I met in Minneapolis when I went there in 2004, but the Twins fans who come to the Cell are a different breed: loud, obnoxious, cocky. I told a friend who grew up in the Boston area and loves the Red Sox that I would root for any team against the Twins, including the Yankees. I'm sure he wasn't too happy to read that in an email from me, but that's how much I dislike Twins fans. I have a fairly positive view of the Yankees, actually, as I really enjoyed the three games I saw at Yankee Stadium last year. The fans there were outstanding -- friendly, good baseball fans who were a lot more welcoming of a guy walking around in a White Sox jersey and cap than I expected. I probably would still root for the Tigers against the Yankees if I thought the Tigers had a prayer of winning that series. I found most of the Tigers fans who came to the Cell this year to be good fans, fun to be around and not obnoxious. I wish I had more optimism for their chances, but Tuesday night's 8-4 win by the Yankees is what I expect this series to look like.

In the National League, I'm rooting for the San Diego Padres. For one, the Padres have never won the World Series, while the other three NL playoff teams all won the Series in the 1980s. Two, I met some great Padres fans through Baseball Think Factory about a year and a half ago, and I'd love to see their team deliver for them the way the Sox delivered for us last year. Well, unless the Padres play Frank Thomas and the A's. The Padres dropped the first game of their series against St. Louis, 5-1. I have nothing against the Los Angels Dodgers or Cardinals. I have nothing for them, either, although I do enjoy watching Greg Maddux and Albert Pujols. As for the New York Mets, I don't really have anything against them, either, and they even employ one of my favorite former White Sox, Orland "El Duque" Hernández (who injured his calf Tuesday and may miss his expected start in Wednesday's series opener). The only thing is, I know a Mets fan who would never stop talking about it if the Mets won, so I'll be rooting against them. Unless they face the Twins.