White Sox at Cubs — the Crosstown Come-Up — takes the stage Monday, a series this city deserves

Wrigley Field is way better than Rate Field.

Way better at attracting frat bros, you mean?

The Cubs are the best team in the city.

The White Sox are more fun.

Our record is better.

So? We’re in first place.

Blue.

Black.

Wiener’s Circle.

Ricobene’s.

North Side!

South Side!

Why am I arguing with myself?

I was about to ask you the same thing.

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Look, sorry if that was a strange way to start a column. It’s just that the Cubs and Sox are squaring off against each other again starting on Monday, and both teams are actually — what’s that word? — winning. That’s such a rarity, it’ll be only the second time in 18 years both teams bring winning records into Wrigley. And it’ll be the first time not counting the 2020 pandemic season, when the stands were so utterly empty, no one was around to beat the hell out of one another in hopes of going viral. Talk about sad.

Anyway, this — the Crosstown Come-Up, I’m calling it — feels like such a big deal for a change that it seemed appropriate to warm up with a little smack talk.

Speaking of smack talk …

“Kudos to the White Sox for consistently putting themselves in position to be where they are now — first place — which is very impressive,” Cubs shortstop Dansby Swanson said before taking the field Sunday against the Cardinals.

OK, so it wasn’t exactly in the spirit of a Michael Barrett punch to the face of A.J. Pierzynski. But maybe we’ll get back to that level of Cubs-Sox craziness eventually.

Swanson probably should have told me to buzz off when I asked him about the Sox, specifically about the teams’ series at Rate Field back in mid-May. The Cubs entered that series in first place, 2½ games up on the Brewers and Cardinals, but dropped the last two to the Sox to begin what turned into a hard-to-believe 10-game losing streak, by the end of which the Cubs were 4½ games behind the Brewers and in last place. Three months later, I wanted to know, are the Cubs too strong a team to take another disastrous turn?

“Anything can happen, but this group knows what it’s capable of and believes in itself,” Swanson said. “We have a lot of good momentum and energy.”

Then Swanson took the field and — disaster alert — had to leave the game right in the middle of his first at-bat. Swanson, who prides himself more than most on playing every day, swung through a Hunter Dobbins fastball in the third inning and was grimacing before the barrel finished traveling through the zone. He dropped the bat, threw down his helmet, walked straight to the dugout and, gosh, how bad might this be?

You want to blame me, go ahead.

“I didn’t even think this group would go through a stretch like that,” second baseman Nico Hoerner said about the losing streak.

No one did. That’s because it was preceded by a pair of Cubs 10-game winning streaks. Three months ago, the Cubs strutted down to the South Side at a time when baseball writers all over were putting them at or near the very top of major league power rankings.

That felt pretty off base by the time the Sox’ Edgar Quero — who’s in Triple-A now — belted an extra-inning walk-off homer to win the rubber game against the Cubs in one of the most exciting Crosstown games in memory. Then the Cubs kept losing, even getting swept by the Brewers in three games at Wrigley. For at least a minute there, the Sox were legitimately the city’s better club.

“It’s exciting. I think it’s great for baseball and great for the city,” Hoerner said. “We’ve always had great atmospheres playing the White Sox, regardless of if we’re having a good year, they’re having a good year or either of us is struggling. But this feels even more so. It’s later in the season and both teams have playoff hopes, and it just makes for a great series.”

Before the first series, the Cubs actually were cooling off, having dropped two of three in Texas and then in Atlanta heading in. This time, they go in having been torched by the Cardinals over the weekend in back-to-back 8-4 and 11-4 defeats.

The Sox, meanwhile, have both feet on the gas pedal after sweeping the Tigers in Detroit. The Sox homered nine times against the Cubs, with Munitaka Murikami, Miguel Vargas and Colson Montgomery each going yard multiple times. Murikami and Vargas come in red hot for the rematch, having bombed away a combined five times in three games while writing the Tigers’ season obituary.

Who would’ve believed coming into the season that one of Chicago’s teams would have a 5½-game division lead with six weeks to go, and that would be the gang from 13 Red Line stops south of Wrigley?

Swanson has never been on a Red Line train, but Hoerner has.

How about a Red Line World Series this year? Or, you know, ever?

“That would be absolutely all-time,” Hoerner said. “And I’d be all for it.”