White Sox playing for 2008 but hearing about 2005

The White Sox need newcomer Nick Swisher (right) to join Javier Vazquez as a consistent contributor this season. AP

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TUCSON, Ariz. -- The spoils of a successful season are alarmingly limited sometimes. The White Sox won the World Series in 2005, tore off 90 wins the next season, tripped into an injury-forced heap of losses in 2007 and are now considered -- when they're considered at all -- as an old team just hanging around in the powerful American League Central.

Champs one minute. Chum for the division waters the next.

Really, whatever happened to the 2005 White Sox?

"The other day," says manager Ozzie Guillen, sitting in his office at the Sox's Tucson Electric Park complex, "I was signing a picture of me with the [2005] trophy in my hands, and a lady says 'Man, I can't believe you still have this picture.' And I said, 'Why, because it was so long ago?'"

That's the kind of mindset that Guillen and the rest of the Sox face as they enter the 2008 season. The team that won nearly 200 games in the two years prior to '07 is now judged on the 90 games it lost last season. The lightning-rod manager, king of the town in '05, now fields questions about his job security every week. Ken Williams, the steady general manager who built the Sox from a Windy City afterthought into a force, now has his every move picked apart.

Still, after giving the city its first World Series title since 1917, you'd think that the Sox would get a little bit of a break. You'd think wrong.

"We clinch on what, the 26th of October?" Guillen says. "On the 27th, people forgot about us."

After that disastrous '07 -- and, maybe, because of the success in the two previous years -- the heat on the White Sox is approaching pre-championship levels. Williams spent a typically frenetic winter reshaping, though not completely rebuilding, his ball club. He traded starting pitcher Jon Garland to the Angels for shortstop Orlando Cabrera. He brought in an expensive reliever in Scott Linebrink. He made two bold trades for a pair of talented young outfielders, Nick Swisher and Carlos Quentin.

Is it enough? Can the White Sox rebuild and contend for a playoff spot? Can they get past the defending division champion Indians and the improved Tigers?

Or should the question rather be: Hey, didn't they just do this a couple of years ago?

"There is a history," says Williams, quietly, "about our being correct in our evaluation of who we put on the field."

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