Okay, so technically they’re still in it, but I think we all know just how much “being in it” really counts for. But as the Good Guys vainly clutch at straws for ways to stay alive, perhaps we fans can return the favor and find the good in what little is left. To wit:

Spitefulness.
No, not spite for ourselves - spite for the Cubs! Remember the Cubs? They’re terrible! And not just regular terrible - terrible to the point of quite possibly finishing the season with no more wins than the Sox at nearly twice the payroll. Geovany Soto’s munchies got the best of him, Alfonso Soriano is exactly the useless player all those non-eight-year-contract-giving clubs thought he would be, their bullpen is comically bad, and Lou Piniella’s only course of action is to turn his rage inwards. Now as the local sports press sets its crosshairs on the Best Entertainment $30 Million Can Buy, “It’s Gonna Happen” has happened again, and in ways we all knew it would. Oh, the sweet smell of schadenfreude.

Football.
As a good friend put it to me, the Bears are shaping up to be the Pale Hose of the NFC: “We have promising young kids, broken down veterans, and a completely mediocre division, which we will probably lose anyway. If nothing else you should feel eerily comfortable watching the Bears. We’ll beat teams we shouldn’t, lose to teams we should beat, and fall well short of our potential.” Baseball season may be running out of time, but White Sox season never has to end. Go Bears!

It’s become increasingly fashionable to proclaim the Cubs-Sox rivalry as a thing of the past, something no longer relevant in the brave, post-2005 world of Chicago baseball, as though the Sox doing what the Cubs couldn’t somehow negates years upon decades upon centuries of baseball-fueled civil unrest.

This, of course, is a stupid idea, as even the most casual observer will tell you that, championship parades aside, Sox fans are still poor white trash and Cubs fans are still whiny trust fund brats. And that’s okay: horribly misguided, misinformed stereotypes are the very thing Chicago was built on - some might say thrives upon - and in the end, it’s just a baseball game. No, the real problem with this year’s edition of the Crosstown goes much deeper, yet has a surprisingly strong grounding in reality.

The 2009 Sox and 2009 Cubs, all told, are both colossal disappointments.

Remember when the Cubs were supposed to run away with the division, the league and the World Series with it? How’s that going?

Remember when the Sox were supposed to kick the Tigers out of the basement? They can’t even get that much right.

So what are we really looking at this week? Our fair city declaring either an underachieving bunch of losers or an overachieving bunch of nobodies to be its resident band of collective heroes.

Monday afternoon at the corner of Michigan and Wacker, a man stood amidst the flood of foot traffic announcing “I got skybox seats for Cubs and Sox! All you can eat, all you can drink, $125!” And do you know something? No one stopped to take him up on that. Nobody. And why would they? One-hundred twenty-five bucks to watch Fonzie lead off the bottom of the first with a three-pitch, swinging strikeout? To later watch Brian Anderson do the same thing? A nail-biting parade of dropped fly balls and booted grounders?

What we’re looking at, instead, is two lame teams squaring off, neither having won anything of substance for a few years and a pair of fanbases looking for something, anything to cling to in lieu of glory and in the name of civic pride. It’s not dead, it’s just back to business as usual. Time has not dulled the rivalry; time has merely returned us to those halcyon days of 2004.

Also - death to the Cubs!