What Happened to the White Sox?!

Check in on your friends and see how they’re really doing, before it’s too late.

Last month I had a squatter. At least I think she was a squatter. Can they be a squatter if you know the person?

At the end of 2024, I was dumped, injured, and generally unhappy. For a few weeks, I’d barely left the house, slept all day and tried to complete the achievement of ordering DoorDash from every restaurant in Phoenix. At some point, I decided to finally get off the couch. I texted someone that I had met many years ago on Tinder (her name in this story will be Mara) that I’d kept in touch with as friends, getting a drink once or twice a year since then. We met for a drink and went to a movie with her, just to charge my social battery, trying to clear my brain of the depression fog. It was a nice night out, even if the movie sucked. She is an engaging person to talk to with lots of interesting stories and it helped cheer me up.

Two weeks later, I wasn’t 100% cured, but I was enjoying a chilly Arizona (55 degrees) night with the NFL Divisional Playoffs on. She texted and asked what I was doing, my answer was I sitting in my sweat pants with the dog keeping my feet warm and a glass of Buffalo Trace. Mara then said her trivia team canceled and she was already out and about and asked if I wanted to hang out. I said I was pretty much in for the night, but she asked to come by for a drink…

Mara came over at halftime of the Saturday night game. It wasn’t an exciting game and I was ready for an early bedtime. She sat down on the recliner. Bauer immediately jumped into her lap like the traitor that he is. I offered a drink and opened a bottle of wine. I just had water, I was done for the night. The game ended, we mostly talked about her family and recent promotion, which was much more interesting than the last half of that Commanders-Lions blowout. I offered the remote to her and she went browsing through Netflix, clicking on every Ryan Gosling movie and getting 10 minutes in before switching to his next film, while sipping on wine.

Bauer the “lap dog”

It was a pretty uneventful night, and I kept dropping hints I was headed to bed. But at this point, she was through the bottle of wine and pulled out a pint of Smirnoff vodka that she splashed into a glass of ginger ale. I decided to go make the guest bed and offered to let her spend the night instead of driving home drunk. And since Bauer had a new friend, he kept her company while I went to my room.

The next morning, she was asleep on the living room couch, half of the Smirnoff emptied on the coffee table next to an emptied bottle of Pink Whitney vodka that had been half full in my bar since last summer. I let her sleep and went downstairs to work in my office. It was Sunday and I didn’t have anywhere urgent to be; I was supposed to head out to watch the Bills-Ravens game Sunday night with a date but that got canceled.

I have a decently-sized house, an old tri-level design with a den and my office in the basement, the living room on the first floor and bedrooms on the top floor. I was able to avoid making too much noise while going about my Sunday, even getting groceries done. She didn’t wake up until about 3pm. I told her I was headed out at 5 to watch the game and that she could take her time and use the garage code to leave whenever she was ready. She didn’t really seem in any rush to get home and ready for work Monday.

I didn’t really have plans to watch the Bills-Ravens, so I went to Wingstop and watched the game there. I just had to get out of the house from that awkward situation with a severely hungover guest on my couch. When I got home, she was gone. Phew. Everyone has a bad night here and there, no worries. I cleaned up a little, showered and hung out in the office with the TV on in the background.

And then the cops came

There was a pounding on the front door. I got up, seeing flashing red and blue lights through the window. The cops were here. What did I do? I opened the door. The guard dog welcomed them in, brought them his favorite Mr. Potato Head toy. They asked if I knew a brown-haired woman in a Camry. I said yes, she had stayed the night, but she left a few hours ago. Did something happen? Well, in the short time I was home, she’d driven back and parked on the street in front of the house, car turned off, crying in the front seat. Her purse was tossed into the passenger seat, that Smirnoff bottle poking out in plain view. The neighbors had seen her sitting there for over an hour and called the police.

Obviously she was in no condition to drive, so I told the cops I’d bring her inside. They got back in their patrol car and went back to deal with the Old Town Scottsdale crowd. Again, I offered my guest room and cooked some pasta for her, which was all I really had in the pantry. She started sobbing on the couch, opening up about family problems that had come to a head, on top of work stress. I didn’t judge, I just told her to take as long as she needed. Who am I to turn away someone in their time of need? I have a spare room, extra blankets and running water… and unfortunately a fully stocked home bar.

Sunday night, Mara settled back onto the couch and I went to bed. I woke up the next morning and she wasn’t there. Maybe she’d snuck off to work early in the morning. I went downstairs to the office, walking through the den and there she was, passed out on the downstairs couch in the game room. This time, my 2/3 full bottle of Buffalo Trace was now empty on the table in front of her, plus an empty 2nd bottle of Pink Whitney, a bottle of Jagermeister I didn’t even know I had, and a previously unopened bottle of Jameson was also cracked open. Once again, she slept the entire morning. I did a little defensive housekeeping and hid all the good liquor in a closet behind some towels. I don’t drink much; those bottles had been in the bar for more than a year.

Well, Monday was MLK day. She didn’t have to go into work. So her bender continued. I also had nothing to do, so took the dog out for a long trip to the park, worked in the garage, and generally did everything I could to keep busy. I came home from the gym in the afternoon and now she was in my bed! Which would’ve been fine, if her perfume wasn’t so suffocating. Now both couches and my bed needed to be Febreezed. That night I turned on the PS5 and played Red Dead Redemption 2, hoping a few hours in Lemoyne would speed up bedtime and maybe Tuesday would bring better news. While I was downstairs, she came down and sat on the other chair, watching and asking why I was trying to kick alligators to death in the bayou, while casually unscrewing the cap to some more vodka and pouring it into the flat ginger ale. Like, more vodka in that pour than I could take in an entire college night out. Obviously she wasn’t headed anywhere Monday night.

No bottle was safe

Tuesday morning, I woke up and had a Zoom interview around 9am. Mara finally slept in the guest bed that I’d set up three nights earlier. That’s now four spots she’s slept in in three days. Even Goldilocks thinks that was excessive. I closed the door to the office while I had to look professional for the video call. On the other side of the hall from my office is the guest bathroom. Halfway through the interview, I heard footsteps and then her closing the bathroom door. I remember I was in the middle of answering the annoying interview question, “tell us about a time you worked to resolve a problem between coworkers and yourself”, when she started puking loudly in the bathroom.

I’m pretty sure the other side of the call didn’t hear it. I was trying to answer while for a good three or four minutes her retching is echoing into the office and now I’m trying to stifle a gag reflex. I think I held it together because I got an offer from them later the next day, but that was the final straw. It was day four of this whole mess. I went for a walk with the dog, cleared my head, called a friend. My friend and her husband were considering sending the cops in for me if I didn’t boot her soon. I still wanted to let her leave on her own terms; who knows what was waiting for her at home. But I did subtly hint that she needed to go.

I got back, she wanted to hear how my interview went. “I heard you in there interviewing…” with no mention of what I could hear her doing at the same time. I mentioned that I had friends coming over to play poker that night for our weekly Tuesday game (a complete lie), and said she could play, too, and I’d have to get to cleaning and that she’d probably have to leave.

Then she got pissed. “Fine!” she shouted. I went to my bedroom, grabbed the sheets to toss in the washer. I was upstairs for a couple minutes, cleaned the bathroom, etc., giving her time to get her stuff. I came back and the front door was wide open and her car was gone. She’d basically stormed out, leaving half her stuff behind (she’d had an overnight bag, so she must’ve planned beforehand). So I put all that in a bag, didn’t message her, made sure the dog didn’t escape.

She texted the next day about picking her stuff up. I left it next to the mailbox. I never heard from her again. A few weeks later, I plopped down on the first couch she had slept on and got poked by a random earring she’d left behind. I also went to clean a third bathroom that I never go into and found an open bottle of whiskey just sitting there for who-knows-how-long. And then there was another empty bottle of vodka under the bathroom sink. I think I got everything cleaned up from that week, but the total was, in less than 96 hours, 4.5 bottles of vodka, 2 1/3 bottles of whiskey, Jager, a flat 2-liter ginger ale and some unknown quantity of gin.

Like easter eggs left by the Bender Bunny

For the next few days, I had this icky feeling, like I’d been violated. I mean, I knew I was going through my own things, and that other people also have their own lives and own problems.

I knew she was a happy aunt with a good-paying job and a supportive social circle. Well, that’s what I thought. Turns out there were some awful things happening in her family (nothing abusive or illegal, though I don’t need to give details) and she was dealing with budget cuts at work, plus some friend drama. Everything looks good on the surface if you tell yourself not to look any closer.

Now Let’s Talk White Sox

Which brings me to the Chicago White Sox. Mara and White Sox fans are in the same troubled waters. From the outside, they don’t seem to be in distress. The White Sox made the playoffs in 2020 and 2021, Jose Abreu was the 2020 MVP, Tim Anderson won the 2019 batting title, and they won the inaugural Field of Dreams game over the Yankees in dramatic fashion in 2021. Frank Thomas (2014) and Harold Baines (2019) have gone into the Hall of Fame in the past decade. And they ended an 87-year World Series drought in 2005, 11 years before their rivals to the north did the same, when the Cubs snapped a 107-year streak in 2016.

If you’re a fan of any of the other 29 teams, you can point to any number of your own frustrations with your team over the past 20-25 years. Yes, even Dodgers fans can do that. Remember the McCourts?

What I do?

When I started this project where I interview fans all over the country, my plan wasn’t to get team-specific. I wanted to hear about people’s relationships with the game of baseball, not the roller coaster emotions that come with rooting for their teams, which we all go through. One of the first interviews was Pete Hand, a lifelong White Sox fan, and then he put me in touch with Josh Nelson of the website Sox Machine.

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After putting those articles out, I ended up seeing more White Sox fans and accounts popping up on my social media feeds (thanks, algorithm). So I’d heard Pete and Josh’s stories, interviewed fans of both teams about the White Sox-Cubs dynamic in Chicago, and got a sense of the ownership angst with Jerry Reinsdorf from social media. I didn’t think too much of it. I mean, the A’s were in the midst of their final season in Oakland. The Padres owner passed away and now the trustees who own the team are suing each other. The Rays stadium blew apart in a hurricane. The White Sox can’t be that much worse, can they?

And then 2024 happened. The White Sox set a modern baseball record with 121 losses, featuring three double-digit losing streaks capped off by an AL record-tying 21 losses in a row in July and August. The team wasn’t just bad, they were historically awful. And then the national spotlight zeroed in on them. It’s one thing to be a last place team. You flirt with 100 losses and people forget about you in August. A standard Rockies or Marlins season, basically. But to have everyone watching your September record “chase” play out, hoping you keep losing and digging into depths of the standings previously uncharted? That’s a new level of pain.

And it’s not getting better:

The team has been mismanaged for a long time

The White Sox and Bulls, both part of Jerry Reinsdorf’s portfolio, have both had major struggles in the past 20 years as Reinsdorf ages exponentially (turning 89 this year, he still has a lot of sway over team personnel and management decisions). That led to longtime friend Tony La Russa being pulled out of the retirement home and into the dugout to manage for the first time in 10 years when he took over in 2021. They made the playoffs and then things went off the rails in 2022, as he finished the season in the hospital after a season of making questionable bullpen decisions, falling asleep during games and general Grampa Simpson levels coherence.

“So we intentionally walked batters with 2 strikes on them, which was the style at the time.”

The upper level management and scouting departments have been a mess, constantly failing in player development, trading stars away and being frugal in the free agent market. In today’s era of lavish spending, the White Sox highest ever guarantee on a contract is still $75million for five years of outfielder Andrew Benintendi in 2022. They are one of only two teams in MLB who have never signed a player for more than $100million (if you guessed the other one as the A’s, you would be right). Okay, so they don’t spend and the team is in a bad cycle. That happens to lots of teams. The Pirates, Orioles and A’s all seem to go through eras of excellence and then stretches of futility. The White Sox don’t get extra pity just for losing a bunch.

GM Chris Getz 2023 Intro Press Conference

Well what about…

Their stadium situation is iffy, even putting aside that someone got shot

The White Sox have one of the oldest stadiums in baseball now, with Comiskey Park II U.S. Cellular Field Guaranteed Rate Field Rate Field having opened in 1991. They had the unique timing in that they didn’t get stuck with a cookie cutter stadium from the 1970s, but were also too early for the ballpark renaissance of the late 90’s and early 00’s. So their stadium is adequate, but not great. It was one of the few I’ve been to that I have barely any recollection of. We went, and then we left. And that was in 2006, the year they were celebrating their World Series win! I literally cannot remember being inside that park. We went to like 37 stadiums that summer and that, and RFK Stadium in DC, are the only ones I can say that about.

Now they want a new stadium, but they want to move to a richer zip code at the taxpayer’s expense. We all know how that ends. As fan angst grows, ownership is actively looking to pick up and relocate to an expensive new park with an entertainment district developed around it with all kinds of suites and first class amenities to “compete” with the Cubs and Wrigleyville, trying to copy what other teams have done with their new parks, like Atlanta and D.C. and San Diego. And it’s come at the expense of keeping their current park enjoyable.

Aside from placing a corporate name on their stadium with a literal red down arrow in the logo, they rank in the top 5 most expensive beer prices and, oh yeah, someone got shot in the stadium and there still hasn’t been much clarity as to what exactly happened. Three spectators were injured by a stray bullet. The suspect "reportedly snuck the gun in past metal detectors hiding it in the folds of her belly fat." At least one good thing came out of that story… they canceled the postgame Vanilla Ice concert that night.

Okay, but someone sneaking a gun in and expensive beer prices, we can look past that. Maybe they can start working on better PR for 2025 and rebuilding some trust…

They just signed alleged child abuser Mike Clevinger to a contract

And are looking to have him close games in 2025. Oops…

So that’s the gossip on how the White Sox went from a team most fans either respected or at worst spent very little time thinking about, to overnight becoming the laughingstock of the league. Much like Mara, whose publicly facing persona of success and strength quickly exploded into the mother of all benders, the White Sox rubble today was the result of years of little earthquakes to the foundation of the franchise before it all collapsed seemingly overnight. Check in on your friends (and other teams), see how they’re really doing before it’s too late.

Now Rob Manfred and the other baseball owners are asking Jerry to explain what exactly happened: