The Chicago White Sox have baseball's 13th highest payroll. Before the season started, Sports Illustrated picked the club to finish with the 17th best record in the majors. So after leading his team to 99 wins and a championship, manager Ozzie Guillen wants a pay raise.

In the euphoria of Chicago's first World Series title since 1917, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti says the Sox should pay their man at least as much coin as Cubs manager Dusty Baker gets for extending his franchise's futility. "Make no mistake, this is Ozzie's triumph, his trophy, his masterpiece," Mr. Mariotti writes. "Of all the characters vital to the championship we never saw coming -- and numerous names apply -- Guillen clearly is the centerpiece and biggest reason it happened. He demanded the Sox change their culture and play in his vision. He's the one who pulled off the daily balancing act, remaining a fun, peppery peer of the players while sternly reminding them of his authority when necessary."

But the Arizona Republic's Joseph A. Reaves says Mr. Guillen should have made good on his suggestion that he might retire if the Sox won the championship. "Sox fans love you now," Mr. Reaves writes. "But wait till the Indians win the division a couple years in a row. Or you take your boys back to the playoffs and get whipped in the first round by Oakland. It won't be pretty. I know you don't want to hear this. But you and I are a lot alike. We both say what's on our minds and take the heat. It's fun. So take it from me. I'm talking to you as a friend. Quit."

Proving that newspapers still will spend money to cover the big stories, the Sun-Times and rival Tribune both send correspondents to Mr. Guillen's native Venezuela to get the local reaction. Because the Trib's Hugh Dellios went to Mr. Guillen's hometown of Guarenas rather than staying in Caracas, the Fix will go with his account: "Even more than in the rest of Venezuela, people are celebrating in this working-class bedroom city 50 minutes east of Caracas, the capital, where they remember Guillen as a hyperactive, sure-handed youth they knew by the nickname 'Paillo' (pronounced pie-EE-oh), which was the sound when he tried to say 'Papa' as a toddler. Even so, many people here didn't make it through Tuesday's 14-inning Game 3, which ended at about 2:20 a.m. local time, because they had to make predawn commutes into Caracas to beat the rush-hour traffic the next day."

It's an inevitable postchampionship impulse: Other teams wonder how they can apply the winning formula and mint their own trophy. Among the would-be White Sox copycat: Detroit News columnist Rob Parker, for the Tigers; and the Washington Post's Thomas Boswell, for the Nats.

Here's essential reading for this stratagem: "If the Chicago White Sox are going to be perceived as the fresh blueprint for universal baseball achievement, then imitation will follow, which means the search is on for dowdy ownership, ill-conceived ballparks, take-no-guff general managers, garrulous field leaders and rosters of players with generally ordinary skills and uncommon faith in one another," Tim Brown writes in the Los Angeles Times.

There's also the uncomfortable truth that World Series teams tend to have benefited from some luck, and luck isn't predictable. The NL champion Houston Astros can't count on a repeat appearance. "They stuck together through tough times and accomplished things numbers say they shouldn't have," Richard Justice writes in the Houston Chronicle. "The problem with teams that overachieve is they don't usually do it two years in a row. Those three-run doubles that land an inch inside the right-field foul line suddenly bounce the other way. Those hard grounders go from being double plays to singles. And yet, the Astros have almost no choice. Their improvement will have to come internally."

It's an old refrain but one worth repeating: World Series games start too late for the nation's youth -- and many of its adults -- to stay up 'til the bitter end. "Why can't they start at 7 p.m. on weekdays and why can't they play day games on the weekend? Because television says no, that's why. It's their time or no time," Hal McCoy writes in the Dayton Daily News. "The network doesn't want to compete with college football on Saturday and the NFL on Sunday. Why? Because baseball would lose the ratings, even though it is the World Series, the game's chocolate cake with white frosting."

The Fix will give the last words on the World Series to White Sox blogger Black Betsy: "You inherit the White Sox. They aren't a bandwagon you jump on early in your life while times are riding high. You go to games when you are 9 years old and find your identity with a team. You cry when they lose; you dance when they win. You learn the history of the team. You are amazed at Eddie Collins' career, Ted Lyons' wins, Luke Appling's hits, and Luis Aparicio's defense. You learn about the pennant races lost, the players traded, and how the Sox always came up short. You play out the 1959 World Series again and again in your mind, trying to change the result. Now that history is washed away by four games in October."

This week, ESPN The Magazine published an article in which WNBA star Sheryl Swoopes told LZ Granderson she is gay. "This is big. Real big," Cyd Zeigler writes on Outsports.com. "Sheryl Swoopes is the most decorated, biggest-name athlete in American team sports history to come out of the closet."

And yet, no male athlete in a major sport has been openly gay before retirement. Dallas Morning News columnist Kevin B. Blackistone is one of several observers who would like to see a male star come forward: "Such a confession would force the homophobes not just in locker rooms, but elsewhere, to confront the fallacy of their fears and realize that one's sexuality doesn't have an impact on one's bench press, 40-yard dash speed, vertical leap, fastball or, for that matter, the ability to be a CEO, CFO, DDS or short-order cook. That, after all, is one of the great gifts of sport. It can be a great destroyer of stereotypes."

But Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Stephen A. Smith is, quite frankly, surprised that Swoopes coverage hasn't condemned her partner Alisa Scott's professional ethics. Ms. Scott was an assistant coach on the Houston Comets when Ms. Swoopes played for the team, and a coach-player relationship -- though it's unclear when that relationship became romantic -- isn't acceptable, says Mr. Smith.

Golfer Jean Van de Velde also struck a blow for tolerance and equality in sports this week. Angered that the British Open will allow women to attempt to qualify, Mr. Van de Velde said he would wear a kilt and shave his legs, if that's what's necessary to enter the women's British Open next year. On ESPN.com, Mark Kreidler says it's a goof, and Mr. Van de Velde is "just a sourpuss trying to make a feeble point."

British soccer hero George Best, now 59 years old, is unconscious and in intensive care. The Independent's Ken Jones laments a too-short career laced with alcohol and scandal. "For a while everything about Best was heroic: a working-class upbringing in the raw, red-bricked streets of Belfast; the inventive application of immaculate skill, dark good looks," Mr. Jones writes. "If only he had lasted longer."

In the Times of London, Simon Barnes argues that sports' anti-drug efforts mistakenly target marijuana and other narcotics. "The most dangerous drug in sport is the one that is killing Best," Mr. Barnes writes (though it should be noted that Mr. Best's alcoholism, while it cost him his original liver, isn't necessarily causing the current medical crisis). "All this pouncing on drug-users is a way of legitimising alcohol, sport's drug of choice."

The Washington City Paper's Dave McKenna flashes back to a time in 1982 when six Washington Redskins cheerleaders were enlisted by the U.S. government for a mission of critical diplomatic importance. It's an untold story at the intersection of sports and the Cold War.

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