Letters to the Editor
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Buck
William, some of the neighborhoods he could have mentioned:
Woodlawn
Washington Park
Grnad Boulevard
Kenwood
Oakland
Englewood
Catham
Roseland
South Shore
Deering
Bronzeville
South Loop
Pilsen
Little Village
South Chicago
Auburn Gresham
I work in fair housing. Trust me, I know the neighborhoods.
Also, Alison, this is a common complaint from African American south siders. Although, I suppose white south siders have the same complaint. And, if anyone took the time to explore the southside, they would find some great neighborhoods and some not so great neighborhoods just like anywhere else.
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Buck's neighborhoods
I must not have been listening when Buck made that little neighborhood speech. My guess -- and it's only a guess, especially since I still haven't heard it, though I'll look for it later -- is that he avoided mentioning blacks out of reflex, or instinct.
Live TV is a dangerous place. You say something off the cuff and it stays said forever. People who get in trouble for the things they say on live TV are very often white guys saying things about African-Americans. I can understand a white guy putting a "do not go there" filter on all off-the-cuff discussion of African-Americans.
I don't know if Buck has that filter, somehow doesn't know that the South Side has a lot of black folks living there, was reading someone else's copy or just didn't get around to African-Americans before the subject changed. Or something else.
Similar topic, but slightlyl off: A long time ago, like in the mid-'70s I heard Vin Scully address this on a local Dodgers telecast. Shot of two relievers in a pen, one white, one black. Don't remember who they were but he said, "There's Smith and Jones warming up. Smith closer to the foul line." Then there was a little pause and he said, "Now, why do we do that?" I remember that quote distinctly. Then he said, paraphrasing from memory, "Here's Smith, who's white, and Jones, who's obviously a black man, and I'm going out of my way not to say that."
It was a great point, a great question. And to this day I've never heard anyone, including Scully, identify a player by color in that situation, even though in real life almost everyone would say either "Smith is the white guy" or "Jones is the black guy."
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Chris' letter
Definitely a great letter. I'm trying to find out if Salon has a way yet (I know one is planned) to highlight great letters.
Meanwhile, everyone meandering by here should go to the second to the last page of this thread and read the letter headlined "At last."
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Best Team Ever?
Perhaps I was hearing things last night during the game, but, I thought, I *thought* I heard Tim McCarver say something to the effect that the 2005 White Sox were 'the best team from any era.' Now, even as I wrote that I was strongly tempted to insert 'one of' prior to 'the best', but I think that's more or less what he said verbatim.
Now, I'm not a baseball scholar by any means, but that seems an awfully ridiculous thing to say, especially if you aren't going to elaborate, which he didn't, beyond a few incomplete sentences about how they have very deep pitching and hitting. I really feel as though I've seen better teams, although that is just my own impression, but I am sort of curious as to how one might even make an educated guess as to the best team 'from any era' or for that matter the best team from a particular era.
It seems to me that a large piece of evidence in favor of greatness ought to be the ability of a team to win several championships in a row, or at least frequently during a stretch of a few years without any major changes in the roster. Several posters have mentioned that they felt the Astros were a poor team to begin with, and it appears King believes that they went ice cold during the series, so in the White Sox case, I think for them to even be considered as a great team from this era, they will probably have to win again next year against a team that's a bit better, assuming they don't trade away several key players in Red Sox fashion during the offseason. Anyway, I'm just wondering what you all thought, and did McCarver really say that?
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Ever?
Did McCarver really say that? Anyone? That would be insane.
So, how do you measure? There's no perfect way, of course.
One way might be how dominant a team was viz. the rest of the league. In this year's American League, a bunch of teams were pretty bunched up, with the White Sox winning 99, the Red Sox, Yanks and Angels 95 and the Indians 93. The difference between 93 and 95 is a bad hop here and there. The difference between 95 and 99 isn't much more, if there is a difference.
It's certainly a very different thing than, say, the '98 Yankees, who won 114 games while nobody else won more than 92, or the '27 Yankees, who won 110 while nobody else won more than 91. That's kicking butt. The White Sox didn't kick butt.
You could use run differential. Did a team just abuse people? Run differential (runs scored minus allowed) is a pretty good predictor of wins. Runs scored and allowed can be put into a formula to determine a team's Pythagorean winning percentage, or Pyth. record, which is, arguably, a better measure of how good they are than their actual won-loss percentage, which is affected by luck. (And which is always very similar anyway.) I've never really decided if I agree with this theory. Anyway, according to Pythagorean winning percentage, the best team in the American League this year was ... Cleveland.
I don't think a team has to win the next year to somehow "prove" they were a great team. That's a different topic, dynasties or sustained success or whatever. But the 2005 White Sox were exactly as good as they were, as were all other 2005 teams. The season's over. The book's closed. The '06 Sox going in the tank, or winning 120 games, wouldn't change how good the '05 Sox were.
But anyway, I don't think there's any reasonable way to argue the White Sox were the best team of any era, and you might have to do some fancy arguing to argue they were the best team of this era, however you want to decide era other than "2005." They were a very good team that got hot in the postseason. A worthy champion. But I don't think they were among the elite teams of the last quarter century or so.