For high-flying Cubs and struggling White Sox, 'hope' has different meanings

So an ex-Cub (Kyle Schwarber) won the All-Star Game, and three ex-White Sox pitchers (Chris Sale, Garrett Crochet and Carlos Rodon) were in uniformed attendance. Pete Crow-Armstrong got a double off Rodon, while Miguel Vargas, Andrew Benintendi and Luis Robert Jr. sat somewhere (not in the American League dugout) probably watching the game on TV.

Such is life in Chicago baseball.

Now we step into the back end. One team backing in, the other trying to stay in front in one of the tightest divisional races in the majors. One wishing they were the other, the other wishing for ceaselessness, continuousness and lastingness. Somehow, in a weird North Side/South Side “Summer of Chi” way, there’s hope in both while only hope for one.

Going into the final 40% of the season, the Cubs are at No. 2 and the Sox are at No. 29 in MLB.com’s post-All-Star-break power rankings. Act 2 of a (strongly possible) three-act play for the Cubs. The final act of a two-act comedy for the Sox. No encore.

But the hope that characterizes both shares a life of difference and indifference. With the Sox, there has been this undercurrent of joy not in just watching them “do all and everything” to make sure that this season wasn’t a repeat of last season, but in watching the Rockies stay on pace to erase the record the Sox set last season and the add-on of watching the Nationals, the Athletics and those Rockies have worse run differentials.

Yes, celebrating someone else’s futility and misery is not a good human quality. Not even at the highest level of baseball. But if those stats-in-comparison alone hold true, the screams of “hallelujah” south of Roosevelt are going to — hopefully — be louder by the game for the next 11 weeks. Karma be damned.

North of Roosevelt, there will be a different story, a whole different vibe, a completely different outcome. Flirting with being 20 games above .500 with a .598 win percentage provides an assured feeling that could be the Cubs’ most indelible resource. One that will worship them into October baseball or be the pressure that eventually forces hope to surrender. It’s a belief no one in this city has right now when it comes to the regular season’s finish line for the Cubs. Because, well, they ain’t the Mets.

Then there are the specifics, the particulars, the I’s in team we need to obsess on for the rest of the season because they will fill the myopic space all of us will use to instill team hope from the inside out. For the Sox, two names: Shane Smith and Kyle Teel.

A pitcher/catcher dynamic that can put our desperate Sox delusion into early-onset thinking Andy Pettitte/Jorge Posada. (OK, Mark Buehrle/A.J. Pierzynski is a more realistic battery but still a reach. I’m trippin’.) Smith’s 2.37 ERA, 64 strikeouts and four home runs allowed in 68„ innings mean something even as they amount to nothing. Teel, while he’s no Cam Smith or Nick Kurtz (not yet), but of the rookie stock, he has shown a promise (so far) that might be worthy — albeit again reaching — of the over-hope.

Teel was the Sox’ minor-league player of the month in May. Called up, holding down a roster spot. If he could only by year’s end be in the Cade Horton rookie conversation, we Sox fans will take that all day, every day and all three church services on Sunday. Hell, we have no choice.

(Sorry, Colson Montgomery. We’re still holding out and holding back our hope with you.)

Speaking of Horton, the job he has done for the Cubs, basically stop-gapping the dam leak that was the season loss of Justin Steele and the 15-day injured-list loss of Shota Imanaga, was almost as unexpected and exquisitely timed as Michael Busch’s team-leading batting average, slugging percentage and on-base percentage.

And while Horton and Busch are essential to the outcomes of the Cubs’ next 65 games, neither happen to be where hope rests if the Cubs are going to meet the still-unexpected expectations they put on themselves. Even with that, it will be the play of Kyle Tucker, PCA, Seiya Suzuki and Nico Hoerner or Ian Happ (and decisions made by Craig Counsell and whatever move they make by the trade deadline) that are going to determine the October-or-nothing mission for the Cubs from this day till the dream season finds its end.

On the black side, there’s only hope in “harmful faith.” On the blue side, there’s hope in, for and surrounding every move a team makes, “necessary belief.” Making the whole Alexander Pope BS of people always hoping for the best even in the face of adversity only applicable to where one is standing.

And for the Cubs and Sox, where they happen to be in the standings. Eternal being only one team’s understatement.