Could he LOOK any more puncheable here?
It’s bad enough when the only people who are sucking the enjoyment out of the Cubs for me are other idiotic Cub fans, but now I can’t help but get sucked in to the cesspool of unexamined mental unhealthiness that is Sox Nation?

First there was Mark Buerhle’s perfect game, which deserves acclaim, naturally. But then the Manolantern poses an innocuous but fair question about how Buerhle’s game compared to Kerry Wood’s 20 strikeout game from 11 years earlier.

Let’s forget the fact that by any objective measure, it’s hard to argue against Wood’s game being more impressive. Not only did he do something that is rarer than a Perfect Game, statistically speaking, but the twenty strikeouts themselves would indicate that Wood was less reliant on his defense for his success than Buehrle. Buehrle relied on his defense to make 21 outs–Wood 6 (and only 7 balls were actually put in play all day against Wood). One need only look at DeWayne Wise’s circus catch in the ninth to appreciate that Buehrle was inches from not even hurling a shutout, while inches–and Kevin Orie’s terminal mediocrity (or the scorekeeper’s capriciousness–take your pick) also is what what kept Wood from throwing a no-hitter on top of his individual dominance–in fact, I’m pretty sure nobody came within 150 feet of a home run against Wood that day, much unlike Gabe Kapler’s would-be home run vs. Buehrle.

Still, I’d be willing to listen to an earnest and honest argument, if one was going to be made, in favor of Buehrle’s being the more impressively-pitched game.

If. Only.

The first comment in Buehrle’s defense had to be framed in that all-too-familiar ad hominem rhetorical device of attacking the Cubs, proving, as always, that the northsiders are never far from a Sox fan’s mind:

It’s this city’s undying love for the Chicago Cubs that will keep the score skewed in Wood’s favor. Which is unfortunate.

Who is up for clarifying – as if ESPN didn’t do so enough last night – whether the game Wood pitched in ’98 wound up being a perfect game? Twenty-seven up, 27 down… no?

No.

If you do a little research, there have been a number of “near-perfect games” pitched by mound-takers for the North Side ball club. Wonder if Cub fans will blame it on a goat, or maybe a fan’s interference.

I don’t hate the Cubs. But as long as the White Sox are around, I don’t have room to even *like* the North Side.

Wow. In answering a question about which game was more impressive, there was some brief talk about the impressiveness of perfect games in general (though no acknowledgment of the rarity of a 20K game) sandwiched around your boilerplate bitching-about-media-bias-for-the-Cubs, references to the billy goat and Steve Bartman, and a confession about him defiantly resisting the idea of rooting for the Cubs, as if anyone asked him, and as if it had anything to to do with the question in the first place.

How telling. And how typical of this odd breed of fans. I think he hit all his talking points on that one.

Most of the other comments from Sox fans in this discussion followed this same path–an inferiority complex pockmarked with an obsession with the Cubs.

But of course we’ve grown used to this by now. Sure, I had naively thought that the when the Sox supposedly won the World Series in 2005, that this would mark the end of this weirdness, but it’s actually managed to get worse.

And now it appears that Meth Nation has found their mascot, and it’s none other than this guy:

For all you youngsters, when suggestively laying across a vinyl couch shaped like a baseball glove, be sure to put a towel underneath you so your ass doesn't get stuck

As Kermit first pointed out, and Wrigleyville23 nicely detailed, Steve Stone has suddenly become the composite of all of your standard stereotypes of White Sox fans. All he needs is to have his rug shaped like a mullet and a meth addiction, and it’d be perfect.

As I’m not privileged enough to receive Stoney’s Twitter, I do not know this to be true (and if I’m wrong, I’ll excise this), but I happened to hear that, in using Twitter to announce to the world how much of a petty, Cub-obsessed douchebag he’s become, Stone has not only tweeted about Milton Bradley on a nearly daily basis, but he hasn’t even offered up any tweets on Buehrle’s perfecto.

It gets better. As Dolan detailed last night, Stone’s now pathological obsession with the Cubs led him to completely fabricate a rumor about Bradley heading to Detroit, and managed to dupe some of our favorite patsies–one of whom is a member of the legitimate, mainstream, accredited media (albeit with pom poms and knee pads) who should know better.

Kermit mentioned how proud he was that he never liked Stone. While I won’t go so far as to say I never liked him, I did spend the years between 1983 and 1993 feeling he was a pretty milquetoast foil for Harry, who rocked my face off during most of those years. Stone taught me a few things about the game, but he mostly struck me as a non-controversial, nasally-sounding weenie. Toward the end of Harry’s life, Stoney seemed to start putting his big boy pants on and became a bit more outspoken, and his innocent weenieness slowly became arrogant smarminess.

Well in the past few weeks, Steve Stone has now become full blown total douchebag, and whatever credit I may have given him for his baseball acumen I take back on account of the fact that he is clearly an agenda-driven cock, who harbors resentment and envy at the Cubs like a jilted prom date. I’d suggest he get over it but, wrapped in the creepy cocoon of paranoid delusions that is Sox Nation, I don’t see it happening any time soon.

Meanwhile, the Cubs have gone 8-2 since the All-Star Break. Can the Sox and their ilk go back to their world and leave me to being angry at idiots like Carol Slezak instead?