CHICAGO — On Tuesday night, the Chicago White Sox had a shot at history, if not the kind any team sets out to make. At 36-120, they were just one loss away from breaking the record for futility since the MLB started scheduling this many games. Late September baseball contests, for two-thirds of the league, tend to be either dubious searches for meaning or the barest excuse for drinking beer outside, but this one was played on the precipice of a loserdom that hasn’t been seen since the 19th century, when Cleveland had a 20-134 squad called the Spiders. In the 162-game universe, the White Sox were about to surpass the 1962 New York Mets, who finished their first season of existence at 42-120.
It wasn’t going to happen that night. The White Sox had their first late-inning comeback of the entire season, eking out a 3-2 victory over the visiting Los Angeles Angels. In normal terms, the Angels—at 63-94—are very bad as well. They were also the recipient of most of the home crowd’s scant goodwill on that night. When Angels second baseman Jack López hit a home run in the seventh to put L.A. up 2-0, Sox fans cheered him—a little too much. “The bleachers were getting real rowdy and people kept getting escorted out,” a friend who was at the game told me. “It felt like folks were ready to rage.” Earlier, fans had been chanting “Sell the team” vigorously enough that the Sox-employed television broadcasters couldn’t really ignore it. When the Sox finished their improbable victory, improving their record when playing from behind after the seventh inning to a hilarious 1-94, the home fans booed them for it.
The baseball stakes were again unprecedented on Wednesday, and I knew I had to attend. I’d traveled, many times before, into the heart of the fanbase’s darkness. My mom’s side of the family is from the South Side, and my grandfather grew up in the twin shadows of The Great Depression and the 1919 “Black Sox,” who also made the bad kind of history. That team had a loaded roster and a cheap owner; eight players decided to throw the World Series in exchange for a payout from gamblers. Growing up, family picnics featured a lot of grousing about the MLB strike in 1994, which cut short the season of a Sox team that was winning at a 100-game pace and featured back-to-back MVP Frank Thomas. One of the main people preventing that season from finishing was White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf.
Much more recently than seems possible, I went to the last playoff game the Sox played, and probably the last one they’ll play for a long time. In October of 2021, the team’s only exciting season in the past decade ended unceremoniously on a dreary Tuesday afternoon, against the infinitely more serious Houston Astros. The stadium was full of only the most committed of followers—people with more hardness than hope, ready to turn on hometown players even during better times. For most of that gray afternoon, a racist man behind me screamed sarcastically at star shortstop Tim Anderson. “Black Lives Matter, Tim!” he yelled. “You matter, Tim!” He also called the team’s best hitter Jackie Robinson, repeatedly, in a not-so-sincere way.
Wednesday night’s bleacher energy was not so bigoted, but it was in its own way a showcase for the deepest vitriol in Sox land. Even during the normal-feeling first few innings, there were early signs that something was off, mostly in the yells of men rooting loudly for their team to lose, their calls shot through with the kind of over-compensating goofiness you’d see at a midnight screening of The Room. We get it, fellas, you understand rudimentary irony. This turned into a fully clownish parade of haters by the sixth inning, a stage for those perversely obsessed with seeing their team achieve the ultimate indignity. Things started to turn, in my vicinity, when a drunk man trying to get a wave started around the stadium was rudely shut down by a group of young men a few rows behind us. “We’re trying to focus on losing,” they said. It sounded like a joke at first, but when I turned to see their faces, I was struck by their sour, humorless expressions. Pious about taking in their team’s epic failure, they were mad at the possibility of such lightness. “This isn’t Wrigley Field,” they said, tediously.
Later, those same men did something that revealed their anxiety about a nearby fan’s attempt at joy as something more like a neurotic event planner’s concern that things were going all wrong: Following the seventh-inning stretch, they put paper bags over their heads, with big Sharpie frowns drawn on them and captions like “Sell the team” and “Chokehold of mediocrity.” It was their time to shine. People kept coming to our section to take selfies with them, and another self-appointed saint of the worst season ever flocked over. This one sported a big “L” flag, which he wore like a cape and kept swirling around him in various superhero poses. He had a much less obnoxious, more approachable attitude about his theatricality. He kept screaming at nearby center fielder Luis Robert to tell him he still loved him, that this season wasn’t his fault, that he hoped Luis would end up somewhere much better than here, soon enough.
As the paper bag men began a “Fuck you Jerry” chant, which quickly got loud, a security guard came over and told them to stop. And he told the man with the “L” flag that he needed to stop waving that thing around, too, because it obstructed people's views. That logic was not believable, and the guard didn’t express it with a lot of conviction. A group of pre-teen boys, upset about the bag-headed men, started a “Let’s go White Sox” counter-chant. They said that everyone still here were the true White Sox fans, that they were “the G.O.A.T.” This led one of the plentiful cynics in the area to ask them where their parents were; another asked them if their dad was hated Sox left fielder Andrew Benintendi.
In the midst of this rooting war, the stadium’s digital scoreboards went blank. This added to the strangeness of the stadium’s nighttime composition: Packed in its lower half, the stadium was totally empty in the upper deck, which had apparently been closed off for the night. Everyone joked that Reinsdorf cheaped out on gameday staff and also on his electric bills, a bit that brought the children and the misanthropes briefly together. Their divide was quickly re-established, though, when the grumps got too pumped up about López making a routine infield play. The haters were happy for the opposing defender’s competence, but still pissed at him for missing a catch the night before, which had helped the Sox win. They made this much clear—that their approval, surely important to López, was conditional.
Most attendees I observed, to be clear, were neither true believers nor stone-cold critics, deranged by recent developments and driven to display their 95 theses of Sox criticism for the world to see. The crowd was largely a peaceful enough mix of the ambivalent, rubberneckers, and people simply enjoying a great night of weather. Some of them looked increasingly forlorn, concern growing in their eyes as their evening at the ballpark became more and more zoo-like around them, all of us gradually forced to become the audience for a battle between micro-cults that bore unfortunate similarity to the malignant fandom wars you see in the most curdled of internet sports communities. The serene insignificance of my previous visits to the stadium this summer was now punctuated by this malcontent din.
At the end of nine innings, the game was knotted at 3-3. Things ended mercifully in the bottom of the 10th, in maybe the least satisfying possible way for those here to see the team embarrass itself: Benintendi, the man they dislike the most and the winner of the largest free-agent contract in the team’s history, delivered a walk-off single. The team swarmed the field as if they’d clinched a playoff spot, grabbing each other and leaping with glee, pouring the Gatorade cooler all over each other as fireworks of victory boomed overhead. History would have to wait another day.
That day will likely come this weekend. The Sox blew out the Angels Thursday afternoon, 7-0, completing their second series sweep of the year, and their first since April. Hardly anyone was there for the workday matinee, but throughout the win, they looked ... good? Clinical and somehow confident, more or less like a big-league baseball team. This is probably a testament to just how much the Angels have fallen apart; they’ve won only three of their last 15 games. But it should be noted that interim manager Grady Sizemore, who took over in early August, has had markedly more success motivating this crew than predecessor Pedro Grifol. Out of steam seemingly before the season started, Grifol had nothing to give but bland paternal scolding. Sizemore has been much better at locating his players’ pride; there isn’t much to get out of this roster, but he’s getting it.
Sizemore made a point of underlining Friday’s contest against the Tigers in Detroit, the first in a weekend series that will end the season. For the Sox, avoiding loss number 121 is on the line; for the Tigers, three games up on the Minnesota Twins for the final AL Wild Card playoff position, the consequences are also considerable. Chicago will send its top starting pitcher, Garrett Crochet, to the mound, although he’ll be on his usual strict pitch count. “We wanna throw our best guy up against this team that’s fighting for a playoff spot,” Sizemore said. “These are our rivals.” Crochet, in turn, advocated for Sizemore to become manager on a full-time basis.
It has been a long, depressing, thoroughly suboptimal road to the first sign of meaningful baseball for the Sox, whose sad story only really began in earnest two years ago. Sox heads deserve to remember what competently, passionately played games look like, even if some of them would prefer to see what lies a few inches deeper into the mud. Maybe the series against the superior Tigers, in which the Sox top out as a spectacularly funny spoiler team, will extend the unexpected sweetness of this team’s sudden, late flicker of purpose. Or maybe they will revert to roadkill form when faced again with a team that knows how to play. In any event, this week has been the first time in a long time that any Sox game has offered its viewers a chance to wonder. What we do with it is up to us.
