White Sox vs. Astros

On Wednesday night, the Houston Astros rebounded from a shocking defeat by the St. Louis Cardinals to win the National League Championship Series and advance to the first World Series in team history. The Astros will play the long-suffering Chicago White Sox, a franchise that hasn’t won a title since 1917. While neither team has tasted much success in the past century, the White Sox and Astros haven’t received nearly as much attention for their losing ways as the Cubs or Red Sox have. In 2004, Josh Levin explained why no one talks about an Astros curse and suggested a few possible scapegoats for Houston’s troubles: George Steinbrenner, the Republican Party, and a blind Little Leaguer. In August, Mike Debonis wrote that White Sox fans don’t whine about the team’s 88-year dry spell. If they “do win it all, there won’t be hundreds of books and special-edition DVDs that exhaustively document the final moments of anguish and misery on Chicago’s South Side,” DeBonis writes. “When the sports world’s most mundane epic losing streak ends, it will go quietly.”