It was a good day yesterday. Three generations of Dolans in the stands at Soldier Field, the sun in our faces, morans standing in the aisles blocking our view of several plays during a rare Bears laugher (well, “win” laugher, they have plenty of the other kind). In fact, the Bears at times looked like a real NFL team. It probably wasn’t when the offense couldn’t spend more than sixty seconds at a time on the field in the first half, or when the best defense was to let Paul Edinger try a field goal, but there were times when you were reminded why these men are paid handsomely for our football watching enjoyment.

Meanwhile, baseball is still stubbornly playing games and handing out trophies and such. The Cubs start their third week of the offseason with the players being reminded how boring it is to only have the wife to have sex with, and in the front office they’re still sorting through huge piles of cash, trying to get it all counted.

In Houston, two of the three teams who finished the season with better records than the Cubs (in their own division of course, there were like a dozen altogether) are still playing. The Cardinals, who we hate, are busy adding to Tony LaRussa’s legacy of leading his teams to underachieiving playoff appearances in any postseason not interrupted by an earthquake.

In Anaheim, the White Sox were putting the finishing touches on an American League pennant. Chicago is enamored with this scrappy bunch of Sox. There hasn’t been this kind of excitement in Chicago since Karl-Heinz Granitza and the boys were winning the 1981 NASL Soccer Bowl.

OK, that’s not fair. There was pretty much the same kind of fervor when the Wolves won the Turner Cup a few years ago.

The truth is that most Cubs’ fans should be happy that the Sox won a pennant. Now the Cubs can claim full and total control of the banner of being the biggest losers in baseball, all by themselves. Gee, that’s just great. I’m sure John McDonough is thinking up a t-shirt design right now.

The White Sox proved last night something that the Cubs could have two years ago. It’s not that hard to win a series when you have a 3-1 lead. See, you just win that night and they give you a trophy. The Cubs never quite figured that out.

The Sox have played very well in the playoffs. They dominated the Red Sox and pitched the Angels into submission. We can be pithy and try to come up with ways to mock or discount their acheivement. But you can’t. They won the American League and deserve all the credit that goes with it.

The Cubs had good enough teams to win the pennant themselves in 2003 and 2004 and they didn’t do it. The Sox found out in the mid ’90s that the window to actually win something closes pretty quickly. When they fell short in 1993 they looked at how young their team was and figured there would be plenty of chances. Their owner helped conspire to cancel the 1994 playoffs, so that chance was missed and when baseball resumed, the Indians had gotten better than the Sox ever were.

Even the die-hardest of Sox fans knows that the stars aligned this year and that they had to make like the 2003 Marlins and win something now. To their credit, it’s just what they did.

So it may suck that when a team finally wins something it’s the Sox and not the Cubs, but the Cubs had their chances and they frittered them away. The Sox finally cashed one in.

But really, how bad a mood can you be in today? As much as it may annoy you that the 300 pound woman who gets on the elevator with you day and tempts the tensile strength of whatever cables are holding you aloft will be wearing a black “2005 AL Champs” t-shirt for the next eight years, there was a tremendously satisfying baseball game held yesterday that had nothing to do with the Sox.

Any game that includes the following things has to be considered a classic, even if the victorious team was the Astros.

1) The Genius gets tossed from a game for arguing balls and strikes from the dugout, even though he was warned in mid rant that he was going to get tossed unless he shut up.

2) Lassie Edmonds gets tossed DURING AN AT-BAT in which he is the go-ahead run in the game.

3) Albert Pujols makes like Moises Alou and gets thrown out at the plate on a horrible baserunning play with NOBODY OUT in the ninth inning.

These are the kinds of games that writable DVDs were invented for.

Cardinals fans are up in arms over the “antics” of home plate umpire Phil Cuzzi. They claim his strike zone was biased against them (which is ludicrous, Phil’s strike zone was all over the place for both teams), and they are now putting him up there in Don Denkinger’s category in the “Mean umpires who stole playoff series from the beloved Cardinals.”

I know I’m preaching to the choir here on this point, but I’ll do it anyway. Has there ever been a team more likely to bitch and moan their way into a spot like this than the Cardinals? Nobody complains like Tony LaRussa. He thinks he can turn a game with some well timed barbs thrown at the umpires or opposing players. He turned out to be right yesterday. He turned it, alright.

And then Edmonds… Could THAT have ever happened to a better guy? As Cubs fans we know who the serial umpire baiters are. Moises Alou has been doing it for a decade, but he pales in comparison to the tantrums that Edmonds can throw at home plate. Jim threw another one yesterday and got tossed. With the tying run on base and a full count, and with the Astros’ dominant closer, Brad Lidge, inexplicably standing in the bullpen, watching.

Since we’ve all seen Bull Durham a dozen times, we know what the “magic words” are that will get you tossed. For those who can’t remember they are two words, melded into one that rhyme with stocktucker. Edmonds probably didn’t say them. But since he, himself, is one of the most famous stocktuckers in the game, Cuzzi could have tossed him just for looking at him wrong.

The Cardinals are now down 3-1 and though they won’t admit it, they know they’re done. Remember that feeling you had when the Marlins put the eight spot up in game six two years ago? You knew there was another game and you knew it wasn’t over, but you also knew that it was over. Does that make any sense?

When Larry Walker snuck into third base with only one out and John Mabry hit an impossibly slow rolling grounder to second, and the Cardinals still couldn’t score Walker from third they knew it was over. They’ll talk big and they’ll wrap themselves in indignance and carry on, but it won’t be enough. The NLCS is just as over as the ALCS is, they just haven’t handed out the trophy yet.