The White Sox have a terminal case of dull. If you hold to that idea, as I do, then it didn’t really matter what they did or didn’t do at the trade deadline Monday. For the record, they didn’t do doo-doo.
Those of you who wanted the Sox to trade Chris Sale for young players and prospects are profoundly disappointed, judging by social media. Those of us who wanted the team to keep its star pitcher can go back to sleep until his next start.
From the vantage point of today, the 2005 World Series title looks like a combination of flukiness and favorable planet alignment. It’s not only that the Sox have been to the playoffs just once since the championship season, though that’s bad enough. It’s that everywhere you turn with this franchise, you run into a wall of mind-numbing ordinariness. It’s like being sentenced to watch the local high school perform “Grease’’ year after year.
That’s why I didn’t want the Sox to trade Sale. Every five days, I get to watch a great pitcher. He is dull-proof. Every analytical bone in my body understands that this is no way to build a winner, that by saying no to a deal involving prospects and players, the Sox are doomed to a future in middle of the standings or below. In the middle of nowhere.
But I don’t trust the Sox to make the right moves. Or, given their history, even if they traded for what seemed like the right players, those players would hit the ground running, only to sink in quicksand. That’s what happens to everybody and everything that rubs up against the Sox.
So I’ll selfishly take Sale and Jose Quintana for entertainment purposes.
Hey, maybe Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf is waiting until the offseason to trade Sale — after he fires vice president Ken Williams and general manager Rick Hahn. I know: That’ll be the day.
Ever seen a pig fly? I haven’t either.
