The White Sox are terrible

 And now, time for another Cruds Break, but not the Cruds Break you think it is, even if my Cruds (the Pittsburgh Pirates), after a brief flirtation with competence, are inexorably making their way back to their ancestral home at the bottom of the NL Central.

"Wow, that's some impressive run-on sentencin', mister!' you're saying now.

And also: "But you ruined it because it was mostly about your bleep-bleeping Pirates. Honus Wagner is dead, dude. Get over it."

Fine, then. I won't write another word about the Pirates. At least in this post.

That's on account of the fact this post is about baseball's real Cruds, currently defiling the game in myriad disgusting ways on the south side of Chicago.

They're the Chicago White Sox, of course, and, man, do they stink. As of this morning, April 21, they're 3-17 and already 11 1/2 games out of first in the AL Central. Think about that for a second: They've only played 20 games, and they're already 11 1/2 games out of first.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be a White Sox fan right now. Or a White Sox player. Or my friend and former colleague LaMond Pope, who's the Chicago Tribune's White Sox beat writer and one of the best people you'll ever meet.

Five more months of this poop show lies ahead of him. I can think of some people who might deserve such a fate, but LaMond not only isn't one of them, he's the least deserving of such a fate. The baseball gods are cruel.

Anyway, again, I can't imagine. Although I got an inkling last night at dinner, when my wife Julie and I sat next to an acquaintance who grew up in Chicago and started going to Comiskey when he was a kid, and has been a White Sox fan all his life.

I can easily imagine what he'd like to do to White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf right now.  But he's far too jovial a guy to say anything  about that, other than Reinsdorf is the worst, the absolute worst.

So we talked about Bill Melton and Wilbur Wood and the Go-Go Sox of the early 1970s instead. And Bill Veeck and Harry Caray. And the Sox of '59, who had Nellie Fox and Jungle Jim Rivera and the ageless Minnie Minoso, and who lost the World Series to the Dodgers because (as my acquaintance recalled) an L.A. reliever named Norm Sherry kept trotting in from the bullpen to shut them down.

We didn't say much of anything about this Sox team, other than the fact they're the worst team in baseball and how could Reinsdorf put a team on the field that isn't even a major-league team? And still charge major-league prices?

And play not in old Comiskey, but in something called Guaranteed Rate Field?

The baseball gods are cruel. I know I said that already, but it bears repeating.