While the Cubs’ championship drought drew most of the national attention over the years, it was the Chicago White Sox who broke through first, ending their own 88-year title wait in 2005 with a dominant run through the postseason. Managed by the fiery Ozzie Guillen and built around a pitching staff that thrived on complete games and a lineup nicknamed for its aggressive, small-ball style, the White Sox won 99 games in the regular season and rolled through October, losing just one game across three playoff rounds before facing the Houston Astros in the World Series.
The Series opened at U.S. Cellular Field on October 22, 2005, with Chicago winning Game 1 by a score of 5-3. Game 2 the following night produced one of the signature moments of the series: with the score tied in the ninth inning, Scott Podsednik, who had not hit a single home run all regular season, launched a walk-off shot off Astros closer Brad Lidge to give the White Sox a 7-6 win and a 2-0 series lead. The series shifted to Houston’s Minute Maid Park for Game 3, which turned into a marathon. The teams battled through 14 innings, the longest game in World Series history at the time, before Geoff Blum’s go-ahead home run in the top of the 14th helped Chicago escape with a 7-5 victory.
On October 26, 2005, the White Sox closed out the sweep with a tense 1-0 win in Game 4, as Jermaine Dye’s RBI single in the eighth inning provided the game’s only run. Dye was named World Series MVP for his performance across the series. The sweep made the White Sox the first team since the 1999 Yankees to win the World Series without losing a game, and it delivered the franchise’s first championship since 1917, a drought that had spanned nearly nine decades and included the shadow of the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal.
Pitching carried the White Sox throughout the postseason, with the starting rotation of Jon Garland, Mark Buehrle, Freddy Garcia, and Jose Contreras throwing complete games in all four American League Championship Series wins over the Los Angeles Angels, an almost unheard-of feat in the modern bullpen era. That dominance carried into the World Series, where Houston’s potent lineup, featuring stars like Roger Clemens, Craig Biggio, and Lance Berkman, never found a rhythm against Chicago’s arms.
The championship set off a wave of celebration on the South Side, culminating in a parade through downtown Chicago that drew hundreds of thousands of fans. Two decades later, the 2005 White Sox remain the standard for South Side baseball, a scrappy, defense-and-pitching-first team that proved patience, sometimes nearly a century of it, can still be rewarded.
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