I woke up Sunday after a hot, sticky, stormy day Saturday and found myself transported into November.

That's what it felt like on the South Side of Chicago last night -- cold, windy, with nasty little rainshowers that kept poking at us, reminding us how dreary this series was. If that wasn't bad enough, the Cubs played like the weather, cold and dank, in losing 5-1 to the White Sox, completing the sweep of revenge for the Sox' sweep at the hands of the Cubs last weekend.

The Cubs' play matched the gloom and mist and fog that enveloped the Cell for most of last evening. There seemed as many, if not more, Cubs fans there than last year (when the Cubs swept), but there was little for any of us to cheer about; the Cubs weren't really in last night's game despite going into the bottom of the eighth trailing only 3-1, a lead that went from "maybe we can come back" to "forget it" when Jose Ascanio gave up a two-run homer to Jim Thome after retiring the first two Sox hitters in that inning on easy ground balls.

Lou Piniella -- perhaps wisely -- didn't stick around for most of it, getting himself tossed by substitute umpire Rob Drake for arguing a check-swing call on Joe Crede that went the Sox' way in the second inning. Replays showed that call could have gone either way, and Sean Marshall struck out Crede anyway. But by then the Cubs had already blown their best opportunity to get back in the game. Henry Blanco had a terrific at-bat, fouling off three Mark Buehrle pitches after running the count full, and then drawing a walk -- Buehrle was a bit wild early, and Blanco's walk loaded the bases. Ronny Cedeno, with a chance to be a hero and give the Cubs the lead, swung at Buehrle's first pitch and hit a lazy fly ball to center.

Meanwhile, Marshall was nearly matching Buehrle, except for two mistakes: the balls that Carlos Quentin and Brian Anderson hit out of the yard that gave the Sox all the runs they needed. Marshall threw 93 pitches in 7 innings and probably could have come out to throw the 8th; I didn't necessarily disagree with Alan Trammell's decision to put Ascanio in the game, but Marshall might have kept the score to a manageable 3-1, which would have made the two baserunners the Cubs got on base to lead off the 9th much more meaningful. Even at that, if Jim Edmonds' line drive goes two feet higher or to the left or right, it's a two-run double and the tying run would have come to the plate.

But it didn't, and so the Cubs head to the West Coast with their first four-game losing streak of the year. Let me play glass-half-full guy for a moment: the Cubs still have the second-best record in baseball (at this moment, the best record is held by... the Tampa Bay Rays, who moved into first place in the AL East with their win over Pittsburgh and Boston's loss to Houston). They still have a 2.5 game lead over the Cardinals. It's not just the Cubs who had trouble in interleague play -- only the Mets, Braves and Reds had winning records from the NL over AL teams in the just-concluded interleague stretch. The Cubs are heading to play the team with the worst home record in the majors (the Giants are 14-24 at home). And the injured players will begin to return soon, starting with Carlos Zambrano, who is ready to go for his scheduled start in St. Louis on Friday.

It would have helped if Derrek Lee hadn't had such a strange series (two GIDP on Friday, then 5-for-5 on Saturday, then three K's last night), or if Aramis Ramirez hadn't clearly had family troubles on his mind all weekend, probably contributing to his 0-for-13 weekend, and also causing him to miss the first three games in San Francisco.

Creativity points to the woman in my section holding up a sign which read: "CUBS: Enjoying your sentence at the Cell?" (Answer from me: no) And after two relatively peaceful days, fights broke out both in the left field corner and also on the third-base side in the upper deck, perhaps both fueled by too much drinking on a Sunday when fans could party all day before a night game. And to Sox management: there aren't enough restrooms; they can't handle a capacity crowd. Lines snaked far outside the women's rooms most of the night and I missed a couple of batters in the 5th when I got stuck myself in long lines for the men's room (sorry! couldn't wait till the 7th!). While it seemed there were about 35-40% Cub fans in the house all weekend (including Pink Hat Guy, who is normally seen on TV behind the plate at Wrigley Field -- how did I know this? He was wearing a pink hat reading "THE PINK HAT GUY"), we had little to cheer about, and by game's end last night, many Cub fans had left. To the Sox fans in attendance, credit to you too, believe it or not: there wasn't a huge amount of "Cubs suck!" chants in evidence, and the Sox fans actually seemed happier that THEY won that that WE lost -- as it should be, focused on their own team's success. Just as the Cubs have been superb at home this year, so have the Sox (27-11 at home), including a four-game sweep of the suddenly-hot Twins, so I don't think this series is necessarily any indication that the Cubs are in trouble.

Statistical oddity: how evenly matched are these teams? After 12 seasons of interleague play, each team has won 33 games. Each team has won 19 at home and 14 on the road... and the White Sox have outscored the Cubs by one run in the 66 games, 323-322.

Mike summed it up best when we talked before the game. "The circus is over," he said. "Let's get back to baseball." Amen. Till tonight.

Really, it shouldn't have even gotten as far as the top of the ninth.

The Cubs had numerous chances to put today's 6-5 loss to the White Sox away and failed almost every time. Ten men left on base; RISP left on base in the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 9th innings and the worst part about the above is that the Cubs had runners in scoring position with less than two out in every single one of them, and a runner on third with less than two out in four of the five innings (the only exception, the first, where the RISP was left stranded on second).

Do this and that's a recipe for losing, and that's exactly what happened. This game could have and should have been put away in the first inning, when the first four Cubs reached base and two runs scored before the first out was recorded. Javier Vazquez looked shaky and another hit or two might have had him out of the game. Instead, he struck out Jim Edmonds and Geovany (the scoreboard at the Cell had it wrong, "GEOVANNY", in the lineup introductions) Soto, and the Cubs had to settle for a 2-0 lead, which they promptly coughed up in the bottom of the inning, with a two-run HR from Jermaine Dye and then -- what else -- a two-out run-scoring double from Joe Crede.

After letting the Sox extend the lead to 4-2, the Cubs took it back in the fourth at 5-4, with three hits sandwiched around a walk to Kosuke (the Sox PA announcer, Gene Honda, has gotten this wrong -- I wonder if deliberately -- for two days, saying "Ko-SUE-kay") Fukudome, who was, thankfully, back in right field today and looked fine. But then, they allowed the Sox right back into the game in the last of the fourth; Alexei Ramirez homered to make it 5-5.

Sean Gallagher managed, somehow, to complete six innings, though I wonder what the 121-pitch outing, the longest of his major league career, will do to his next start, and wonder what the scouts who must have been here looking at him must think of Lou letting him go that long. Granted, the bullpen has gotten toward overwork of late, but still. Both starting pitchers labored -- Vazquez reached 105 pitches before completing the fifth inning, and the game dragged toward two hours in that inning as angry storm clouds started to build over the South Side, an announcement was made that severe weather was in the area and we should be prepared to "take cover", and torrential rains and some hail hit parts of the North Side.

Wanting to not get soaked, I left my seat and stood under the upper-deck overhang for a couple of innings, until blue sky appeared to the west. Literally at the second I returned to my seat it started drizzling, did so for about five minutes, then stopped and the sun returned. The seat I had -- in the third-to-last row of the LF bleachers -- is a story in itself. The ticket I bought was for section 108, row 9. Finding that seat, I discovered it was directly behind the RF foul pole -- but not marked "limited view" on the ticket. Give the Sox customer relations people credit -- they managed to find a single unused seat in the LF bleachers, which I happily exchanged. Before the game I stopped by the first row near the Cub dugout, where my friend and BCB reader dfrancon was sitting, and there may be photos coming my way later tonight. Meanwhile, most of the Sox fans were in a jovial, not nasty, mood today -- right in front of me, a marriage proposal from a Cubs fan was made to a female Sox fan, who gave a teary-eyed acceptance (I dunno -- I wonder about those mixed marriages), and her name -- unless the scoreboard operator was making it up -- was Helen Keller.

I've digressed, and maybe you'd rather read about that than the leadoff HR that Carlos Quentin hit off Carlos Marmol, which was the game-winner. Marmol looked shaken after that, going back to his wild ways of the last couple of weeks, walking Dye, but then got out of it with no further damage, but the Cubs could do nothing against the suddenly-solid Sox bullpen. Biggest credit, really, goes to Matt Thornton, who came in with D-Lee on first and one out and struck out four of the five batters he faced.

And when Lee -- who went 5-for-5 today and got stranded all five times -- led off the 9th with a double that didn't miss being a game-tying HR by too much, hope sprung up in the Cubs fans I was standing near (I left my seat again, to stand near one of the exits, because if you don't do that, getting out of the Cell when there's a sellout is like the Dan Ryan at rush hour), but Bobby Jenks got three straight ground balls, and even though the first one, a comebacker, advanced Lee to third where a simple fly ball would have scored him, it didn't happen.

Frankly -- and this may be a controversial viewpoint -- this team really misses Alfonso Soriano, infuriating as he is at times. Including the game in which he got HPB and got the broken hand bone, the Cubs are 8-8 since his injury. You know as well as I do that Soriano can carry a team for weeks at a time when he's on -- he did it in September 2007 and again just last month. We need him. We need tomorrow night's game, and the pitching matchup isn't favorable. But isn't that sometimes when "the book" comes through the least? At least we know it'll be a faster game than the first two; Mark Buehrle is probably the fastest-working pitcher in baseball. With the lefty Buerhle going, we'll likely see Matt Murton in LF tomorrow night.

Finally, this is the last time I keep score with a neon-green pencil with smiley faces on it (I tried it to change the Cubs' luck. NO such luck.)

Go get 'em tomorrow. I don't want to trade sweeps with the Sox.