In their 124 years of play, the Chicago White Sox have only made the playoffs 11 times. They had exactly one 100-win season back in 1917. Now, they have the worst season in modern baseball history under their belt.
It’s hardly an impressive resume for anyone looking for a baseball team to support. I am often asked why I’m a White Sox fan. That’s easy. My father is a White Sox fan. Why do I continue to be a White Sox fan? Now, that’s a tough one.
It’s a franchise that’s consistently followed by relocation rumors. Right now, Nashville is the destination. Thirty years ago, the team almost moved to St. Petersburg. Before that, they were surely Milwaukee-bound in the late 1960s.
A bizarre plan in the mid-1970s would have brought the Sox to Seattle and the Oakland A’s to Chicago. In the 1980s, it was New Orleans.
This franchise is long-haunted by curses. The 1919 Black Sox will forever live in infamy, and they kept the team away from a championship for nearly 90 years.
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Hall of Fame shortstop Luis Aparicio, after being traded in 1963, said that the Sox would go 40 years without a pennant. 4
The Sox ended their pennant drought 42 years later in 2005.
It’s a franchise that saw its only sustained period of success from 1951 to 1967, when they finished above .500 every year. This coincided with the era of the Yankees’ greatest dynasty in a league where only two teams made the playoffs.
It’s the franchise I support, and even after losing 121, I will continue to throw my support behind the Pale Hose. I have a lifetime of memories of this team, some good, some bad, but I can’t jump ship and leave that all behind. With that, I also suspect that many of the fans sticking around feel similarly.
I can’t even begin to think of abandoning this fandom before my memories of the 2021 season dance around my mind. I remember Carlos Rodón throwing his no-hitter, Leury García drilling a home run in the playoffs and Yermín Mercedes taking the baseball world by storm, if only for a month.
The 2021 season seems like it was decades ago, and when comparing that team to the current one, it might as well have been.
“At least it can’t get any worse” is a popular sentiment right now. It’s what Stephen King had to say in a recent tweet to Sox fans. It certainly can get worse. King might know a lot about horror stories, such as the 2024 White Sox, but he’s no baseball pundit.
There’s no reason to believe that next season will be any better, especially if general manager Chris Getz is true to his word and signs exclusively bottom-tier free agents this offseason. Additionally, the Sox can select no higher than 10th in next year’s draft.
It’s going to be a long road back to relevance for a team that has already spent years wandering through the baseball desert. Their reward for this decade-long slog was two first-round playoff exits.
That road starts now. On Tuesday night, the Sox AA affiliate, the Birmingham Barons, won the Southern League Championship. The future of the franchise gained championship experience that they may never need, but there is hope.
Even if it’s just a candle in a sea of darkness, there is hope. There’s always next year, or, in the Sox’s case, five years from now.
