the club, would go on to win the next three American League pennants, starting a dynasty that would be a difficult hurdle for the other AL clubs, including the White Sox, for many decades thereafter. With the players' suspensions becoming permanent, the Sox fell to seventh place in 1921. It would be the mid-1930s before the team returned to the upper half of the league, and the early 1950s before they became regular contenders again. The curse: 1959–2005 When the White Sox finally won their next pennant, in 1959, Jack Brickhouse called the final out of the pennant-clinching game: "A forty year wait has now ended!" At that time, four decades was the longest stretch any major league team had gone without a World Series appearance (the crosstown Cubs had only gone 14 years after winning their last pennant). In that sense, the Black Sox "curse", or the apparent pall cast over the franchise for some decades in the wake of the scandal, had also finally ended. Despite the team's pennant victory, however, they lost the 1959 World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers in six games. The White Sox remained competitive for the next several years, but were not quite good enough to win. After a slump, they became contenders again starting in the late 1970s, and qualified for post-season play by winning the American League West division title in 1983 and 1993 and the American League Central division title in 2000. The "curse" discussion was revived by the national media during the 2005 post-season, when the Sox won their first league championship since 1959 (an even longer wait than before, 46 years). During the ensuing 2005 World Series, the White Sox swept the Houston Astros for their first World Series championship in 88 years (87 if the cancelled 1994 World Series is excluded). Some of this discussion found its way to the official World Series film DVD. For example, White Sox center fielder Aaron Rowand, in an interview for the DVD, compared the 2004 Red Sox with the 2005 White Sox: "If they could break their 'curse', so could we." In one of those ways that patterns appear to emerge in sporting events, the White Sox World Series win in 2005, along with the Boston Red Sox win in 2004, symmetrically bookended the two teams' previous World Series winners and the long gaps between, with the Red Sox