The doomsday scenario averted

Tyler gets credit for referring to a Yankees win over the Angels in tonight's Game Five as the "Doomsday Scenario," and with good cause. Check out these LCS matchups:

ALCS: Yankees vs. White Sox
NLCS: Cardinals vs. Astros

Shudder. As a Cubs fan, that set of matchups really doesn't get any worse, so fortunately the Angels beat the Yankees again, making them, between this and 2002, the only team to do so in a divisional series since 1997 and the Indians (I had convinced myself that the Chuck Knoblauch Game came in that series, but actually it wasn't until the 1998 ALCS, which the Yankees - sigh - won despite his little hissy fit).

Of course, I can't really root for the Angels, can I? For starters, they just won three years ago - yeah, that may have only been partial karmic payback for 40 years of general futility and the 1986 Stomach Punch series against the Red Sox (when they came within one strike of the World Series only to have Dave Henderson's homer put them behind - though I think everyone forgets that the Angels actually tied that game in the bottom of the ninth and the Red Sox won on a sac fly in the 11th, hit by none other than Dave Henderson), but come on: BORING. Seriously, you guys.

On the other hand, who the crap else am I going to root for? There's no way I want either St. Louis or Houston to win - while one school of thought says the Cubs might look a little better if the WS champ comes out of their division, I say fuck that. I hate both those teams and have no interest in seeing them raising any banners.

And then there's the White Sox, a special case here in every sense of the word. Let's break down the pros and cons, shall we?

PROS
* First of all, just getting some new blood in there. Okay, so the Astros would be new blood too and the Cardinals actually have won just once (1982 over the Brewers) since they squashed the Impossible Dream in 1967, but we've already established what the deal is there.

* A positive baseball-related experience for the city of Chicago for the first time since Woodrow Wilson was President.

* If 1918 and 1917 go down in consecutive years, can 1908 be far behind?

* Winning the World Series would surely bring White Sox fans the attention they've been whining about for years now. Maybe they'd shut up.

CONS
* White Sox fans are already, by and large, totally obnoxious about the Cubs, letting their obvious inferiority complex about the amount of attention the Cubs get turn them into complete assholes even though the rivalry between the two teams has thus far been confined to a handful of games in the middle of the summer and the mere fact that they exist in the same city. Now take that and add the smugness of a championship - we wouldn't hear the end of it until the Cubs won a World Series, and possibly not even then.

* Ozzie Guillen: unmitigated douchebag. Seriously, someone needs to tell this guy to just shut up already.

Because I grew up away from Chicago, I always considered the Sox my low-grade second team - I could be happy with positive results for them because they were also a Chicago team. Of course, they only made the playoffs once in my conscious life before I came to college (1993; 1983 was too early to count), and once I got here I realized three things: 1) there is in fact quite a sizable rivalry; 2) it means way more to Sox fans than it does to Cubs fans; 3) Sox fans are total jackasses about the rivalry. Listening to them brag about taking two out of three in an only-so-meaningful June series is just embarrassing; you'd think they'd just won 110 games or six straight pennants. Then again, it is the Sox, with a history that, somewhat amazingly, manages to be even more futile than the Cubs' - I guess you take what you can get.

The point is this: how can I, in good conscience, root for the Sox to win it all, when if they do so I will never, as a Cubs fan, be allowed to live it down until the Cubs go all the way? (And we all know that may well never happen, though I shudder to think that.) Does a team whose fanbase would do that deserve my support? I think not. (And for the record, let's assume that the Sox do not win this year and the Cubs win before they do - do you really think Cubs fans would immediately turn around and stick it in the face of Sox fans? No - we're just going to be happy that it's finally over with and to have won. I'm sure that Sox fans would be as well, but I'm equally sure that large numbers of them are thinking about how best to rub it in the face of their Cubs fan coworkers, and I guess my point is this - most Sox fans are jerkoffs.)

Hence why Sox-Yanks, the other version, was the Doomsday Scenario. As I said to Tyler, only slightly hyperbolically, I would root for a team of SS officers with Hitler pitching before I would root for the Yankees - but could I really root for the Sox when doing so was like asking myself to be punished? I still think I'd rather see the Sox win it all than the Yankees, if only for the novelty factor, but Yankees fans would have the decency not to rub it directly into my face if they won, mostly because they don't care about Cubs fans (and why should they?). They would have gone after Red Sox fans, and so whatever.

So what's the course of action now? Eh. I'm not sure I can really root for anything - not even "a well-played game," because what good is a memorable series if it matches up two teams I don't especially like? (Last year's NLCS being a great example - could I have cared any less who came out of that one?) But I guess I root ever so slightly for the Angels - sure, they won it before, but Angels fans aren't going to rub it in my face, mostly because Angels fans don't actually exist. (The crowd shots at Angels games are created through the help of Jim Henson Studios and a complex system of mirrors.) All of the other three teams? Are totally going to rub it in my face (by me I mean all Cubs fans, of course). So that's just no good.

Bleh. Hopefully one of these years the Cubs can get good again and give me a real reason to care about the baseball playoffs - there's only so much anti-Yankee rooting one can do, really, until it just turns into apathy. (Between 1998 and 2000 in particular, October sports might as well not have existed.) And in a year like this, with three teams I can't like and one I can't care about, it's just another bad day at the office.