CHICAGO _ Baseball was much different in 2008, the last time the Chicago Cubs and White Sox were in first place this late in the season.
Every opinion was not automatically shared on Twitter or Instagram back then. No one talked about launch angles or exit velocity. The average game time was under three hours.
In Chicago, the Cubs were celebrating the 100th anniversary of their last championship season as consensus favorites in the National League Central, while the Sox were three years removed from their own championship parade and hoping to rediscover their 2005 mojo.
Dreams of a Crosstown World Series _ the first since the one and only affair in 1906 _ were in the air all summer. But it all ended in disappointment the same week in October as both teams crashed and burned in their first-round playoff series.
As the Cubs and Sox battle for postseason positioning in this pandemic-shortened 2020 season, reporters Mark Gonzales and Paul Sullivan provide a brief glimpse of 2008, when Gonzales was the Tribune's Sox beat writer and Sullivan was the Cubs beat writer.
