[cknox0723]

"He's into his wind-up. Here's the pitch. Strike on the inside corner! Hooo-weee, a motherf*cking slider! What a pitch!"

...

"It's two outs, bases loaded as Buehrle steps up to the mound. Checks the runners...goes into his wind-up...here comes the three-two pitch...and it's a fly ball into deep right-center. Ordonez is going back. He's going back! Back! His back is up against the wall...and...he catches it! He catches it! Holy ####! The White Sox win it! They win it!"

Like Randall McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I fancy myself as a sane man in an insane world, with but one dream at this moment's time. That dream is to see the World Series.

The cast of characters isn't quite the same as the Oscar-winning movie, but it'll do. Instead of Billy Bibbit, we have <b>Jorge DePaula</b>, singly personifying every disorder in the <b>DSM-IV</b>. Our Charlie Cheswick is undoubtedly <b>Hackin' Miggy Olivo</b>, who never met a baseball that he wouldn't take a cut at. And even the great Chief Bromden can't hold a candle to <b>The Art of Suck</b>, <b>Esteban Loaiza</b>. But y'all know that's all really irrelevant anyway, since OOTP only knows ratings.

That means there's really only one thing separating me from R.P. McMurphy, and it's not the padded walls. Jack Nicholson's character had visions of Koufax and Mantle dancing in his mind as he sat so near, yet so far from seeing the highest level of competition in the greatest game there is.

And my dream, so close yet so far away, runs through the south side of Chicago.