Luck? For a Chicago ballclub?

CHICAGO - This is all starting to look as predestined as one of those rigged elections for which this city was once famous.
Are you kidding? Bobby Jenks, no folk hero on this night, blows a two-run lead in the ninth inning, and the White Sox barely so much as blink before winning in the bottom of the ninth.
Are you kidding? Scott Podsednik, a guy who didn't hit a single home run during the regular season, a guy who looked overmatched at the plate most of the night, steps up against Brad Lidge and hammers one into the seats like he's Albert Pujols.
Just like that, the White Sox win, 7-6, to take a 2-0 lead over the Astros in this World Series, a lead that seems as commanding as it was cold and wet here last night.
Well, after 88 years you can't say the White Sox aren't due for some good fortune. That's not to say they're not playing the best baseball of anyone in the postseason, but for the last three weeks there sure does seem to be something funny going on.
In the divison series, Tony Graffanino pulls a Bill Buckner on that slow ground ball, Curt Schilling never even takes the mound and the White Sox put the exhausted Red Sox out of their misery.
In the ALCS, Bartolo Colon takes a seat with a bad shoulder, and Doug Eddings makes the noncall on strike three in or near the dirt that perhaps prevents the White Sox from going down 0-2 and changes everything.
Now, here in the World Series, Roger Clemens limps off the mound after two innings in Game 1, and then last night another umpire perhaps changes the course of the series with a controversial call. Jeff Nelson ruled that Jermaine Dye was hit on the hand by a Dan Wheeler pitch in the seventh inning, and while it wasn't anything to rival the Eddings blunder, replays showed that the ball hit Dye's bat, not his hand.
For that matter, Dye himself confessed afterward that the umpires blew another one in a postseason that seems to be some sort of campaign for instant replay.
"It didn't hit me," Dye said. "I turned and he told me it hit me. You have to take advantage of mistakes. The umpire tells you to go to first, you go to first. I'm not going to tell him I fouled it off."
Had Nelson called it properly, who knows? Perhaps Dye makes the final out of the inning and Paul Konerko never gets the chance to hit the first pitch from Chad Qualls for a grand slam that gave the Sox a 6-4 lead and warmed the hearts of freezing Chicagoans everywhere.
Are you getting the picture here? Maybe Shoeless Joe Jackson finally apologized to the baseball gods for that Black Sox thing in 1919 and they're making up for nearly nine decades of punishing his team.
Certainly the Astros seem to be scratching their heads. They were convinced they should have had more runs to show for a night when they thought they hit the ball awfully hard against Sox starter Mark Buehrle.
"The little things are going their way right now," was the way Houston manager Phil Garner put it. "We thought we'd turned it around when we went ahead (4-2 in the fifth), but it didn't work out that way."
Then again, the Astros don't have much right to complain after the way their bullpen pitched in relief of Andy Pettitte last night. Wheeler was all over the place, and the way he was going, he might have walked Dye had it not been ruled that he hit him with the pitch.
Qualls couldn't have thrown a more hittable pitch with his first delivery to Konerko, right down the middle at the belt.
And Lidge? Wasn't it only a couple of minutes ago that he was the best closer this side of Mariano Rivera - with a seemingly unhittable slider to go with a 96mph fastball?
Now, suddenly, you have to wonder if he'll ever be the same after giving up that monster shot to Pujols last week in Houston. It's one thing for perhaps the best hitter in baseball to make you pay for hanging a slider, but when Podsednik, the White Sox's slap-hitting leadoff man, muscles up on your fastball in a situation like this, whoa, time to put in a call to the nearest sports psychologist.
So what is it? Biorhythms? Karma?
Who better to ask than Konerko? About to hit the free agent market, he's adding to a 40-home run season with a Ruthian postseason that now includes a grand slam. To top it off, his wife gave birth last Tuesday, which is why he was thanking whatever gods are looking out for him and his team these days.
"It's amazing to have a night like this," he said. "You lose a lead in the ninth and then come back and win that game ... it makes you feel like you got away with one."
Makes you feel like the Sox can't lose this World Series.

Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/