Major League Baseball

Strong play from the Cubs and White Sox setting up a special summer in Chicago

Updated Jun. 16, 2021 1:38 p.m. ET

By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer

There are two baseball teams in Chicago, and usually, neither of them is good.

The White Sox and Cubs have been playing in some iteration of Major League Baseball together since 1901, and for the majority of that time, both have sucked hard-boiled eggs. During those 120 years of shared futility, the Chicago clubs have made the playoffs in the same year only three times: 1906, 2008 and last year’s bizarro, 16-team postseason.

It’s only June, but we might be in line for a rare, legitimate, Chicago baseball eclipse come autumn. The White Sox are 4.5 games up on Cleveland for first place in the American League Central, and the Cubs are tied with the Brewers atop the NL Central. Both teams have shortcomings and concerns — the Cubs don’t have anything resembling an ace and the White Sox have a manager who doesn’t always know the rules — but it’s shaping up to be an entertaining few months of baseball in Chi-town.

Russ Dorsey, a lifelong Chicagoan and the Cubs beat reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, was just a youngster in 2008, the last time the Sox and Cubs made the postseason together in a full season, but he remembers that summer well. "There’s something different about summer in Chicago when the baseball is good," he recalled. "It doesn’t happen a ton, so it makes the years when both teams are good really special around the city."

Neither the ‘08 Cubs nor White Sox ended up making the World Series, but the buzz generated that summer resulted in some high-level, compelling baseball.

Led by Aramis Ramírez, Alfonso Soriano and a dominant Ryan Dempster, the Cubbies won 97 games before being swept in the NLDS by the Mannywood Dodgers. The Sox, on the other hand, were three years removed from their first World Series title since 1919 and snuck into the postseason behind god-level Carlos Quentin and a dynamite bullpen. They won a one-game playoff against the Twins to take the AL Central in dramatic fashion before losing to the David Price Rays in the ALDS.

The Crosstown Series that year took place on back-to-back weekends in late July. For the first time since interleague play kicked off in 1997, both teams sat in first place in their respective divisions when they squared off. Fans still care about the Windy City Showdown when one or both of the teams is stinky, but with a pair of first-place teams that year, the stakes were even higher.

Things kicked off with a bang in the opener, with Cubs third baseman and Hall of Very Good member Ramírez crushing a walk-off homer to dead center at Wrigley Field.

The Cubs won the final two games of the series to complete a sweep at home, and a week later, the Sox took all three on the South Side. All of those games are up in full on YouTube, and if you have some free time, I highly recommend giving them a watch.

The 1906 World Series, on the other hand, doesn’t have any video footage online because, well, no one had cameras. To be clear, it didn’t really resemble baseball as we know it today; there wasn’t a single home run, Game 4 took 96 MINUTES, and not a single Black player was involved. But the third World Series between the American and National League champions was still a huge deal in Chicago. Schools were closed for Game 1, and the whole city was tuned in to the radio.

Heading into the seven-game set, the Cubs were billed as the overwhelming favorites, and for good reason: The North Siders had the greatest pitching staff of all time. No, actually. To this day, the 1906 Cubs' 151 ERA+ remains the best team ERA+ in MLB history. Led by future Hall of Famer Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown, the Cubs' pitching staff was expected to dominate the White Sox.

Speaking of the 1906 White Sox, they really couldn’t hit. Like, at all. This was still very much the Deadball Era, but the ‘06 Sox lineup hit .230 with only seven homers. That’s the whole damn team. The local newspaper dubbed them "The Hitless Wonders." So you can imagine how most Chicagoans at the time thought the Sox had absolutely no shot against the dominant Cubs hurlers.

But because baseball is weird, the Sox won in six games. Their future Hall of Famer, spitballing icon Ed Walsh, was dominant in his two starts, and the Hitless Wonders inexplicably exploded for a whopping 14 hits in the Game 6 clincher. The Cubs and the White Sox haven't played a crosstown Fall Classic since.

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There’s nothing quite like the buzz in a city when its baseball team is good, so when a dual-team town such as Chicago has two clubs clicking at the same time, the baseball vibes are impeccable. The rivalry permeates deeper into the overall consciousness of the place. Both North Siders and South Siders want to discuss their teams, debate their merits and just generally think about baseball. That can only mean good things for the overall state of the sport in Chicago.

Sure, the current iterations of the Cubs and White Sox have flaws, but they also both have elite, electric and historically star-studded position-player groups. Javier Báez, Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant and Wilson Contreras vs. Yoán Moncada, Jose Abreu, TA7 and the Yermínator. And who knows, maybe one or more of Luis Robert, Eloy Jimenez and Nick Madrigal could be back by early August for the year’s first Crosstown series.

Hopefully, both clubs can stay in the mix or even atop their divisions until then. If they do, expect some baseball-centric Chi-town fireworks come midsummer.

Jake Mintz is the louder half of @CespedesBBQ and a baseball analyst for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. You can follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.