A matter of changing your Sox

CHICAGO -- White Sox in five games. It's got to happen. It's a pattern.

Red Sox in four in '04. White Sox in five in '05. Cubs in six in '06. Apocalypse in seven in '07.

If you love the Red Sox, you've simply got to love the White Sox. In this town, they're telling us that White is the new Red.

We all know Stephen King isn't writing a book about the White Sox. The Farrelly brothers aren't making a motion picture about Ozzie Guillen and friends. They are not Idiots, none of their pitchers has yet bled on the mound, and Babe Ruth hasn't been mentioned during their magical run to the World Series.

They don't have their own Nation. They are not even the most popular baseball team in their town.

But these 2005 Chicago White Sox, the Second Team of the Second City, are the Boston Red Sox of 2004, and if you love the Red Sox, the White Sox are your team in this low-profile but wildly appealing World Series.

Headline writers agree:

Oct. 11 Chicago Tribune : ''The Goat Lives. The Bambino rests. Will 2005 end the Black Sox hex? REVERSE THE CURSE."

Oct. 9 New York Times: ''For Baseball Romantics, It's Time to Change Sox."

Oct. 21 New York Times: ''Fox Hopes White Sox Are the New Red Sox."

The White Sox face a much tougher opponent than the Red Sox did last October. No, I'm not talking about the redoubtable Houston Astros and their stable of aces. I'm talking about the larger forces, the gallery of the baseball gods where superstition rules over science. The White Sox are up against the granddaddy of all bad karma.

Curse of the Bambino? That was nothing. It amused some, offended others (the estimable Gammons said it was more moronic than the wave), and made life easy for headline writers, but it absolutely pales when compared with the plague that has infected the Pale Hose.

The 1919 White Sox did something to earn a lifetime of hardball purgatory. They threw the World Series. And they have not won another one since. It is the big, dirty secret that no one wants to talk about as Chicago prepares to play host to the World Series for the first time since the ChiSox were beaten by the Dodgers in '59. Counting the Black Sox scandal, the Second City has lost the last seven (five by the Cubs) World Series played here. The last time Chicago had a baseball champion was in 1917, which was the year before Boston beat the Cubs, which was a year before the White Sox took money to lose.

It's all there in John Sayles's excellent movie, ''Eight Men Out" (John Cusack does a great Buck Weaver), or the book (same title by Eliot Asinof). Angry at cheapskate owner Charles Comiskey, eight of the White Sox, including all-world Shoeless Joe Jackson, took cash to intentionally lose the World Series to the Reds. They were beaten, five games to three, in a best-of-nine event. Two years later, after they were acquitted in a bag-job trial, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned them for life. And the White Sox never won again.

Understandably, ballplayers, coaches, and managers want no part of this. They don't care about history. It's not their place. In the days before the miracle of 2004, the Red Sox routinely spit on the ground any time the old stuff was mentioned. Curt Schilling and Mike Timlin had nothing to do with Denny Galehouse and Mike Torrez. They didn't want to be asked about it and there was nothing relevant they could say about it.

White Sox slugger Paul Konerko yesterday said, ''This team has done a good job of not worrying about the history of this organization . . . I think that's what the Red Sox did last year, they had to block all that out, they had the baggage of all that stuff."

Red Sox first baseman/outfielder Todd Benzinger once said, ''I don't know why people keep bringing up 1978. We're different players. It's not like we're related to those guys, like we have the same genes or something."

He's correct, of course. But the situation is completely different for a city and its fans. A professional sports team in your city is a continuing story. Joe Thornton is related to Ray Bourque and Bourque is related to Bobby Orr and Orr is related to Milt Schmidt. Fans think of each year's team as a continuation of a long-running story. The past matters.

Konerko played with Frank Thomas, who played with Harold Baines, who played with Minnie Minoso, who played with Ken Holcombe, who played with Luke Appling, who played with Tommy Thomas, who played with Eddie Collins, who played with Shoeless Joe Jackson. And there are a few people in Chicago who saw them all.

Which is why it's important for the White Sox to do what the Red Sox did and put the Black Sox to bed, just as the '04 Red Sox buried the great Bambino.

Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is dshaughnessy@globe.com.