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It’s not a secret to anyone around me where my support goes during the baseball season. I’ve been a Chicago White Sox fan for my entire life and my fandom has only increased in fervor and fanaticism over the last nine years. I say nine years because nine years ago is when I started college and for the first time had ESPN. With ESPN I was able to simply watch more sports and my appreciation and obsession with sports really took on a whole new life.
Sadly, the White Sox do not get much screen time on ESPN or any of the major national sports networks. ESPN has a rather poor track record of leaving out the White Sox when talking about Chicago sports, but then again, so does Chicago’s own sports writers. When the north-side baseball team won the World Series in 2016 there were an absurd amount of articles with variations on the headline “Chicago wins first World Series in over 100 years” despite the White Sox World Series victory just 11 years earlier.
I will probably write more about the Sox in the future. I expect to have an entire separate post where I wax poetically while I compare the different baseball teams in Chicago and their adoring fans. For now though, I want to say a quick word about one of the big reasons I am such a big White Sox fan.
I referenced earlier that starting college and finally having ESPN increased my general sports interest. However, even without a sports interest overall, I believe I would always be a big Sox fan because of family. Although we grew up on the north-side of Chicago, all of our family was from the south-side and most of them continued to live on the south-side. We would travel to the south-side all the time for family gatherings and there were always Sox hats, shirts, and other memorabilia aplenty. My parents would have the soothing voices of DJ and Farmer on the radio whenever we drove in the car during the summers. We didn’t have cable, as mentioned earlier, so their voices would more often than not follow us into the house if the game had no yet ended.
Going to Sox games was a personal affair. It was a chance to be with family, either extended or nuclear. As time went on my older brothers cared much less about the Sox and going to games became an even more intimate time for me because it was just myself and my parents. (It must be said that during the 2005 World Series run for the White Sox my brother Keith did get really into the playoffs, to the point of watching non-Sox games to see who our next opponent would be. Even he could not escape the familial grasp of the team from 35th and Shields.)
Keeping up to date with the team gives me the opportunity to converse with cousins, aunts, and uncles at get togethers. Without my fandom, I would receive fewer emails from my Uncle Dennis. I would talk to my cousins Rocky and Kevin less. My Aunt Kathy (not to be confused with my other Aunt Kathy, my Aunt Kathleen, or my mother Kathleen…the Irish, man…) works for the Sox and every summer she continues to light that fire under me with constant email blasts like the kind the media receives when the Sox make a move.
This won't be my only post on the White Sox, not by a long shot. In fact, some of my future posts will most likely get pretty technical with statistics and player performance. For now though, the point here is clear. The White Sox, to me, is synonymous with family. So when people say to me that I should root for the Cubs when they’re in the playoffs because “at least they’re still Chicago” it’s hard to articulate to them “yeah, but they’re not family.” Chicago is one thing, family is another.