ALDS: Sweet Home Chicago

It's playoff time and the Red Sox, and Uncle Buck, hit the road to Chicago to take on the AL Central Champion Chicago White Sox. The ALDS starts Tuesday at 4pm as Matt Clement takes on Jose Contreras, who has quite the history with the Red Sox. For more information on that log on to ESPN.com...but UB asks what's so great about Chicago anyway? Chicago has given us some great things:

SCTV

Playboy Magazine

Chris Farley

...and of course Uncle Buck's favorite The Blues Brothers.

The White Sox, however, are not one of them. The White Sox are perhaps the most pathetic franchise in Baseball and maybe top five in all of sports. They, as everyone knows, were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series and have only appeared in 1 since, 1959. (They have two Series wins, 1906 over the Cubs and 1917 over the New York Giants.) If that isn't pathetic enough, they don't get any home town love. They don't even have a home town writer to come up with a pretend curse like the Red Sox did, and UB would have to say throwing a World Series is a much better reason for a curse than selling a player. In Chicago the fans favor the Cubs by about a 2-1 margin and in the age of new "fan friendly-old style" ballparks, the ChiSox play at US Cellular Field, which had the miss fortune of being built right before the ball park renaissance.

White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen shows Cleveland Indians fans the international sign of choking during the three game sweep last weekend. It was almost Ozzie's hands around his own throat though as the White Sox 15 game lead fell to 1.5 games, before the ChiSox won 8 of the last 10.

For the Red Sox to see the light and get through this series UB says they need to keep Scott Podsednik off the bases. Podsednik is the trigger for that whole offense with his speed. Also they need to get their starters to go deep into games, as their bullpen is the big weakness.

Wrong glass, sir...