CHICAGO -- One thing I remember about Oct. 26, 2005, was that it rained. It was pouring as I left a bar not long after the final out reached Paul Konerko's mitt.
It figures, I thought, on the night when the city should've stepped onto the streets and cheered, the skies opened up.
That was the night the White Sox, the perennial second team of Chicago, won the World Series for the first time since 1917. Theirs was a championship drought less famous than, but as humbling as, the Sox's northern neighbors.
And the Sox ended theirs first.
It was a shame the Sox didn't clinch anything at home -- not a playoff berth, a division title or any of their three postseason series. But in the end, none of the atmosphere details matter.
That was the best baseball team modern-day Chicago had ever seen. Ten years later, it still holds that crown.
The 2005 White Sox will celebrate the anniversary of their championship this weekend at U.S. Cellular Field. This season has been anchored by nostalgia -- and that's a good thing, given the present product on the field.
It's a little bittersweet considering the Sox, like the 1985 Chicago Bears, couldn't capitalize on the one title. But, like the Bears, the Sox had plenty of personalities and provided their fans with once-in-a-lifetime (perhaps literally) memories.
Covering the 2005 White Sox, even as a lowly freelance reporter, was a treat. You had manager Ozzie Guillen, a first-ballot lock in the Chicago Sportswriters Hall of Fame. You had Mark Buehrle, Konerko, Jermaine Dye, Big-Game Freddy Garcia, Jon Garland, Joe Crede, Jose Contreras, Scott Podsednik, Aaron Rowand, Tadahito Iguchi, A.J. Pierzynski, Crazy Carl Everett, a cameo by Frank Thomas, Big Bobby Jenks, Juan Uribe. Oh yes, you definitely had Juan Uribe. Uribe was the man and remains the man.
You had franchise greats mixed with reclamation projects combined with one-year wonders and mercenaries, and man, that was a team. You can't plan a team like that, you can't predict it. Kenny Williams and his staff did a great job adding guys such as Podsednik and Iguchi, but even Williams couldn't predict what would happen. Sometimes "it" just happens. Just not too often does "it" happen in Chicago baseball.
The 2008 Cubs were the kind of team you build to win a title, and they couldn't win one damn game in the playoffs.
The Sox couldn't lose two games in that '05 postseason.
When I think back to that season and all the things that went right, I think about the bullpen duo of lefty Neal Cotts and righty Cliff Politte.
In Cotts' first two seasons with the Sox (four games in 2003 and 56 in 2004), he threw 78⅔ innings and gave up 53 earned runs (6.06 ERA), 76 hits (14 homers) and 47 walks.
In 2005, he threw 60⅓ innings in 69 games and gave up 13 earned runs (1.94 ERA) on 38 hits (one home run) and 29 walks.
The next four seasons, Cotts never had an ERA under 4.00. In 2013, after a three-year, injury-filled absence from the majors, Cotts compiled a 1.11 ERA in 58 games for the Texas Rangers. He currently has a 3.50 ERA for the Milwaukee Brewers.
In 2005, Politte was known as the bullpen's "vulture" with a 7-1 record, but he had a sterling 2.00 ERA in 68 appearances. He pitched 67⅓ innings and gave up 15 runs, 10 of which came on seven home runs. He gave up 42 hits and walked 21 batters.
The next season, Politte compiled an 8.70 ERA in 30 games and was released July 20. He pitched in 15 games over the next two years in the minors for other teams, but never appeared in another big league game. He had hip problems that eventually resulted in a replacement.
But in 2005, he and Cotts were nearly perfect.
The same goes for Guillen, who pushed all the right buttons.
At the city series last week, I talked with Hawk Harrelson for a while in the Wrigley Field dining room, and we got to yapping about Guillen.
"He wasn't a good manager, he was an outstanding manager," Harrelson said, as he pined for Guillen to get a chance to manage somewhere else.
Harrelson then went into a well-worn story about how he told Guillen to make some noise after a bad loss during the Sox's late-summer struggles. Guillen filled the reporters' notebooks after Hawk left his office, and all was well, of course.
Hawk wasn't taking credit. No other manager could do what Guillen did that season.
As everyone remembers, the hard-charging Cleveland Indians were ready to take the Central after chipping away at the Sox's season-long lead, but then Grady Sizemore lost that ball in the sun in late September, and the Sox coasted into the playoffs, where they lost one game.
While no series was ever in jeopardy, the Sox won some memorable close games.
There was Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez getting out of that bases-loaded jam in Boston (reporters remember walking into the visitors' clubhouse and seeing Duque smoking a fat cigar), Pierzynski's "Only A.J." hustle play against the Angels, the four complete games from the rotation in the American League Championship Series -- something which will never be repeated -- Paulie's grand slam and Podsednik's walk-off homer against the Houston Astros, Geoff Blum's 14th-inning blast in Houston, the 1-0 win to clinch it.
Sometimes "it" just comes together for a team. In Chicago, that seems more like a fantasy, or an occurrence that only happens in places like St. Louis.
But one year in Chicago, the impossible happened. They had a parade and everything. Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf got the ball. Just ask him to see it.
The Sox are still chasing that memory with free-agent signings and roll-the-dice contracts. It didn't work in 2006 or 2008, and since that season, most of the gains the Sox made in the city have mostly been washed away. This 10-year anniversary season, in particular, has been an epic disappointment, but Sox fans will always have 2005 now and forever.
You don't want to call it once-in-a-lifetime, but you never know.
