So about a month ago I went to a White Sox game—exactly my third since I moved to Chicago in 1992. I came here because I loved the Cubs.
I didn’t hate the Sox like native Cub fans do. Just was as indifferent toward them as you are, toward the Tampa Bay Rays. I took a Sox-addled nephew to see Frank Thomas play, around 1993; young lad missed a Big Hurt home run on account of, I was having a smoke break on the concourse at the time. I accepted an invite from a fancy editor to a game in 2005. And I followed my curiosity about this year’s historically terrible team, riding my motorcycle into the South Side one August night.
It was something that night, sitting in a Major League Baseball stadium this empty, and it’s haunted me since—sadly, and happily, too. After attending dozens of relatively rave-like Cubs games over the last few years, I liked the quiet out south.
I liked it enough that I wanted to share the experience with my wife. So I picked a night on the calendar—a day when her teacher’s schedule was on the light side, and the California Angels were in town—and I told her we were going on a date.
Well, that turned out to be last night. So it wasn’t so quiet. Thing is, the Sox had won the night before, avoiding losing their 121st game of the year, and thus avoiding setting an all-time record for baseball futility. So last night was the night to witness history, and the ballpark was relatively full of people, everyone in kind of a light and whimsical mood, or so it sounded to me.
And why not?
The White Sox went up 2-0 early, on a home run.
The Angels tied it at two. The White Sox went up 3-2. And the Angels tied it at three. My wife was intrigued.
(Especially after I told her how few historical nights there have been, in White Sox history. There was the night they won the pennant, in 1959, and Mayor Richard J. Daley got so excited he blasted Chicago’s air-raid sirens in celebration—driving some Sox-oblivious citizens into their Cold War air-raid shelters. There was 1978’s Disco Demolition Night, well-documented here on Writing Boots. And least colorfully, there was the team’s World Series win in 2005. That’s about it.)
Last night, there was an incredible amount of inexcusable base-running between these two last-place clubs. “It’s hard to lose to the Anaheim Angels,” a guy grinned to me in line for Beggar’s Pizza in the crowded concourse.
The White Sox wound up winning in the bottom of the 10th, and staving off historical ignominy for one more night.
These fucking guys can’t even lose when they’re supposed to. I’m starting to fall in love. And not just with the chow down here.
Driving home, I sez to my wife, I sez: “What if we do our empty-nester thing by getting season tickets to the White Sox?”
“I never saw that coming,” she sez, laughing. “But I will come down here again,” she adds, without irony.
And I believe her, also without irony.
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