So the Red Sox break their World Series drought last year, and the White Sox follow suit this year. So who's next?

The Obvious Choice - Chicago Cubs Be it billy goats, Bartman, or the indifference of the Tribune Company, the Cubs still reign supreme in the cavalcade of baseball's loveable losers. It's just that their kingdom is just so small now, what with the lack of Sox. There are other subjects, some of whom I'll mention later, but the A-list is now just the residents of the Friendly Confines.

As much as people worried that the Red Sox win would change their character (it hasn't; we're still fatalistic about our team, and seem willing to throw over one of its architects for putting together a team that only won 95 games and made the playoffs - you'd think the Sox were in the Big XII), the Cubs may have an even bigger stake in their reputation for being also-rans.

But if we're working backwards to get teams off historical slides, you could only do better by bringing back the Providence Grays.

The Semi-Obvious Choice - Cleveland Indians Never mind their 1990s successes - that led to exactly zero titles - and consider their previous history of futility. It's a little sullied by their actually winning Series in the past (even if it isn't exactly recent past) and not having to play in Municipal Stadium any more, but when you get to be so bad that a movie like Major League can play on it, you've reached a very interesting place.

The Bridesmaid's Choice - Atlanta Braves OK, they won the Series in 1995, but have lost four others during their lengthy streak of NL divison titles. Take out '95 and you have to go back to 1957 to find a Series win - when the team was in Milwaukee.

Rip Van Winkle's Choice - Philadelphia Phillies For a while, at least, Van Winkle could have gotten in two naps between Phils' appearances in the Series. You had 1915, then 1950, and then 1980. There's been less time to sleep since then, with appearances in 1983 and 1993, but you never know when they're going to slip back into a pattern that will send them back to the Series in 2042.

The New Futile Kings of the Rustbelt Choice - Detroit Tigers All the stuff that applied to Cleveland in the 1980s when the Tigers were good can apply here now. They do have a pretty good history, so they may be less wanting than others, but it's hard to get past the blunt force trauma that is the last 10-15 years of Tigers baseball.

Le choix de l'immigré - Washington Nationals Consider that the two previous teams named the Washington Nationals never finished higher than 7th - often in 8 team leagues. Then you have the two Washington Senators - the first was about as bad as the early Nationals teams, the other moved to Texas and still has never been to the World Series.

And, oh yes, this current Nats team used to be the Montreal Expos - no World Series appearances, a laughable stadium, and a lingering death of a final decade in Montreal, fittingly capped in their time as wards of the league.

So with this combined record of baseball futility, wouldn't a World Series be a welcome, if almost freakishly unprecedented, change? And it would twist the knife further into Peter Angelos, whose crankiness and inability to buy a competitive team makes him very hard to tolerate.

Of course, we'll probably get the Yankees in '06. Ugh.