We White Sox fans, a small but savvy crowd, believe our team is cutting down on awfulness. We might be short a $300 million player or two, but an award of colossal wealth and a long-term contract to a big star sometimes produces, sooner or later, comment along the lines of, “Hey, remember when that guy actually ran to first?”
There still could be improvement in 2019 (beyond saving $300 million), since 2018’s 100 losses and MLB’s single-season team strikeout record are sure improvable. And it could be worse. At least White Sox fans can cheer with less embarrassment than the remaining fans of the two big political parties.
Still, some of us are struggling with a certain rebuild-through-rottenness problem, one tougher to take than bullpen pitchers who throw not-so-fastballs or “can’t miss” prospects who miss.
This problem has no precise schedule but is as sure to arrive as property tax bills, inevitable as more Chicago aldermen posing for mug shots.
It impacts some of us White Sox faithful embarrassed by that repeated Adam-from-Washington disaster and our ballpark’s off-base name. It will eventually impact some who have been diehard Cubs faithful for about four years and weave their way through baseball-challenged partiers to reach the ivy-festooned theme park.
The 2005 White Sox season was a wonder — we’re hoping not a one-off — but my favorite players are still, in black-and-white imagery, Nellie Fox and Louie Aparicio. Something nags at people like me now. Your beloved team has its schedule for this teardown-and-rebuild. Your body has its own schedule.
You don’t like watching your team play dead. Then again, you’d prefer to be able to watch.
Just guessing here, but you might have heard that the Cubs won the 2016 World Series. Probably you’ve heard that even more often than you’ve heard cable news networks break major news that turns out to be not so major. Possibly you’ve heard that more often than you’ve heard music.
The post-2016 media parade of Cubbies Cuteness has been louder than Lollapalooza and longer than most presidential campaigns. Even if you had the good sense not to read the stories, their headlines hailed you with alerts along the lines of . . .
Tiger Beat names Kris Bryant hunkiest Cubs infielder
“Blue” couple happy they married on Wrigleyville bar
He bought that Cubbies hoodie and still hasn’t taken it off
Kyle loses weight again
Could any extension of Cubs hype be deemed excessive? If David Ross — former Cub!! — starts a vitamin regimen designed to improve his dancing skills, will that get ten column inches or ten minutes of sports talk somewhere?
When this period of all-Cubs-all-the-time began,my sports pain threshold began to decline. Then the White Sox decided to trade away their few talented ballplayers for young guys believed to be on their way to being good, and I started finding myself pained by calendars. By that I mean a current calendar next to one from July 1949.
Sure, a tactical change was called for. The post-2005 White Sox gradually sank into competitive infirmity while trying to win with pricey free agents better endowed in belt size than in remaining ability.
But the bad baseball persisted like a groin injury. A glut of batting averages around .220 and the mystifying trade of one strikeout king, Chris Sale, for another, Yoan Moncada, made recent baseball seasons seem about five months too long.
One of the set pieces churned out after long-deferred sports championships (107 years? impressively long) is the “If Only He’d Lived To See This Championship” piece. Of course, you feel sympathetic to a good-hearted person planting a World Series pennant at the grave of a beloved departed fan. But such memorials can unsettle veteran fans still breathing. Sometimes our breathing is labored, as we deal with despotic TV blackouts . . . or long-term rebuilds.
Just a note to all the people — two, tops — who might get a bit teary if I keel over a season or two before the next White Sox championship: Please don’t even think of taking an urn containing my remains to Guaranteed Rate Field, especially if it’s still named Guaranteed Rate Field. I’d rather you scatter them over Hawk Harrelson’s back yard as he drawls, “You can put ‘em on the yard, YES!”
Waiting patiently for a possible championship would seem especially challenging for White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, soon to turn 83. This classy gentleman accepted having his baseball andbasketball teams turned into short-term gong show acts for the possibility of future championships. A heartbroken young Brooklyn fan back when his Dodgers went for Los Angeles sunny money in 1958, Reinsdorf grew to realize that team loyalty was the soul of sports. Over half a century later he approved the planting of trees he hoped one day to see grow taller than himself.
Well, good luck to you, Mr. Reinsdorf (uh, me too). Maybe someday you and I can toast another White Sox title with glasses of Geritol — I mean champagne.