The Toronto Blue Jays were the defending World Series champions. The Chicago White Sox were in the postseason for the first time since the 1983 ALCS. In that regard, perhaps it’s not surprising that their matchup in the 1993 ALCS was defined by the Blue Jays being the team that avoided key mistakes and made […]

One of the big surprises with this team is that they never made it back to October with the current group, though they did lead the AL Central one year later when the strike that wiped out the rest of the season hit. The playoffs wouldn’t return to the South Side until 2000 and not until 2005 would they finally win the World Series, by which time Guillen was in the dugout rather than at short. But no one knew this in October of 1993 and the future looked brigh

The Chicago Bulls had rolled to championships in 1991 and 1992 that managed to shut up media types who pontificated that Michael Jordan wasn’t the type of player who could win a title (for younger readers, this really was a dominant media theme in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I trust those writers are hidden under a rock somewhere today). The 1993 Chicago Bulls faced a different challenge.

The 1993 Notre Dame football team was coming off a Top 5 finish in 1992, where the Irish finished 9-1-1 in the regular season and then blasted Texas A&M in the Cotton Bowl. Under the leadership of head coach Lou Holtz, Notre Dame had been to a major bowl game every year since 1987, won the national title in 1988 and finished #2 in 1989. Even though expectations weren’t high for 1993, that’s all relative and “low expectations” still meant a Top 10 preseason ranking.