Why I Hate This White Sox Team (And Maybe the Entire Organization)

White Sox Ace Dylan Cease. He should be the only one in the clubhouse allowed to wear a shirt with the word ‘grit’ on it.

At about this time yesterday, the Washington Nationals traded a 23-year old generational talent whose just compensation for his extraordinary baseball skills will net him a contract near $500 million in the very near future. Juan Soto, and his then Nationals teammate, Josh Bell, were shipped to the San Diego Padres for a figurative boatload of elite prospects, ranging from uber-talented pitchers like Mackensie Gore and Jardin Susana to position player wunderkinds C.J. Abrams and Robert Hassell III. Mind you, I am not embittered as a White Sox fan just because the White Sox could never pull off a move such as this–a franchise-altering, audacious act–but I am sick and tired of the appeals this organization makes to its fans that we ought to join the Sox hierarchy in this la-la-land, perpetual illusion in which they feign interest in such deals. As generational Chicago sports analyst Mike North put it on Twitter this past week:

If only it were the front office’s ineptitude and timidity with which White Sox fans had to deal. We’re, in truth used to it, conditioned for it. But, the endless multiplicity of self-inflicted dagger wounds leaves Sox fans stuck attempting to rally support for a middling, .500 collection of underachievers with whom it is impossible to identify. This squad is the antithesis of the past iterations we loved–at least in my lifetime: 1983 (yes, I brought it up), 2000, and of course, 2005. Those teams were young. They were hungry. This team is anything but.

Ironically, it is led by the same guy as that ’83 team, but is this really the same guy? Sleepy Tony LaRussa appears to be the absolute wrong man for the job. It is hard to imagine a worse choice for a manager.

Grant Sleepy Tony this: He is an organization man. While the beginning of a professional baseball game does not seem to arouse any sort of excitement within him, he does perk up like fellow lawyer, general manager Rick Hahn, when he faces any questions or critiques of his decisions. Intentionally walk a guy with a 1-2 count, to the incredulous laughter of opponents? How dare you doubt my hall-of-fame credentials and genius? That was just the smart move that then allowed Max Muncy to hit a three-run homer the next at-bat. Unfazed, Sleepy Tony would do it again, almost a month to the day of his first non-sensical decision, when he intentionally walked Jose Ramirez after he had fouled off the first pitch of an at-bat.

White Sox Baseball. Unconventionally middling.

As for Rick Hahn, he holds press conferences employing the slick double-speak to which we are more accustomed to hearing from Jimmy McGill than baseball honchos. Did you ever notice that, like Sal Goodman, Hahn sounds as though he’s a lawyer tasked with arguing on behalf of a client who he knows is guilty? The crime here is baseball malfeasance, and it ought to carry a minimum sentence of ostracization to assisting Kim Ng in Miami. Rick Hahn, after all, knows how to survive in the employ of a hapless, mediocre sports franchise; his key skill= sounding relatively professional while ingratiating himself with the owner of the team to such an extent that he’s willing to compromise his work by jumping on the owner’s deranged idea-petards, such as, thinking at random here… hiring the owner’s inept friend to manage the team. Someone with integrity and a healthy level of earned self-confidence would have quit right then and there. But, not Rick Hahn–he seems incapable of recusing himself from this dumpster fire of a case.

And if that were not enough, the team itself consists of some talented players like Cease, Jose Abreu, and Andrew Vaughn who, while performing and “grinding”, are nonetheless the quiet types who pitch, hit, and field like surgeons plying their trade in stoic near-silence. Useful and admirable, but not exactly what this team needs.

Conversely, the loud ones are full of vim and vigor leading to nowhere.

Take closer Liam Hendricks. Certainly, it is not his fault that he is overpaid: the aforementioned GM/advocate has long had an obsession with over-compensating relievers to the point at which, for example, this relief corps has the highest salary allocation in Major League Baseball–of course for middling performance. No, I don’t blame Hendricks for taking the money. What I do detest about the guy is his incessant faux-raging on the mound. He yells expletives into the air upon nearly every strike out and acts the role of Leonidas in “300” after every save. This is baseball not Thermopylae, and your opponents feature such fear-inspiring names as the Guardians and the Twins, two armies far less intimidating, relatively, than the 10,000 Persian Immortals. An outside observer less familiar with these antics might complain that Hendrick’s convulsions resemble unnecessary aggressions and evoke toxic masculinity, but, never fear–he’s Australian, and he wants everyone to know that he loves gay people.

Liam Hendricks raises the gay pride flag at Guaranteed Rate Field.

Off the hook there, then. Not only does Hendricks intimidate visiting teams with his totally courageous, rugged advocacy for homosexuality, but he predictably cannot resist weighing in on weightier matters. When a deranged incel confused about everything from his (?) own gender to what constitutes basic human decency gunned down scores of people during a July 4th parade in Highland Park, Hendricks himself transitioned from hurler to fascistic sociologist:

Dude, you are from Perth, Australia. Ponder for a moment the ridiculous assertions made by this guy. Boil them down for a moment: America has a maniacal gun/violence obsessed culture. Guns are not purchased and used in the United States for protection. The solution to violent murderous shootings is to trust the government, turn in your weapons, and only allow the state to determine who can use a rifle for “hunting, or shooting clubs”.  “Something has to be done.” Like what, Liam? Seizure of all guns? Who exactly would carry that out? Doubtlessly the police, in his mind, the same members of the same institution that, in these fair United States, are under no obligation to protect you from harm. Quite the laughable claim then when you see the standard propaganda of “To Protect and Serve” on your town’s police cars. The members of the same institution who, in Australia, happen to have a lot of guns and enforced Canberra and provincial capital despotism with such criminal obeisance that concentration camps were erected for the unvaccinated (read now “utterly vindicated”) and Liam’s homeland returned to a penal colony during the Covid hysteria. But, Liam, in support of the jailers, please feel free to lecture us about our perceived problem with violence.

If only it stopped with our Australian mate. The anointed “face of the franchise” is none other than Tim Anderson. Now, there are many things to like about Tim Anderson. Through hard work and determination, though being a novice at baseball in his teens, Anderson directed and shaped his natural athleticism into becoming a first-round pick in the MLB draft. Anderson, however, is not a fundamentally sound shortstop. He is not a fundamentally sound hitter, which sounds strange for me to assert since he has already won a batting title and frequently sports high batting averages. He’s a poor situational hitter and rarely registers a walk. Outside of his play, Anderson loses his cool in the most inopportune times, both in-game and in-season. He’s notorious for complaining about calls and even bumping into umpires. The latter infraction has resulted in Anderson’s suspension for several games already in his career. Worst of all, Anderson is desirous of playing the race card when it is to his advantage and then hypersensitive when other players call him out for asserting himself to be the next Jackie Robinson. Anderson notoriously flaunts his achievements at the expense of opponents and readily embraced the whole idea of “changing the game” to loosen it up. He ought not to act like a petulant 5th grader on the playground when someone teases back.

The rest of the crew: I have never seen a player look so pained and aggrieved to play baseball than Yoan Moncada. “Softer than baby-shit,” as my astute brother has noted. Lucas Giolito warred with the team over a $50,000 arbitration dispute in the off-season. He thought it a ridiculous amount for the team to withhold from him. That works the other way too, pal–it was absurd also for Giolito, who comes from a California family of, let’s say, some means, to make his contract dispute such a distraction for the team. Josh Harrison is not very good at professional baseball.

One more source of righteous ire: James Fegan of The Atlantic reported just this June on how the White Sox are nickel-and-diming minor league players in their farm system. Nothing builds loyalty like skimping on player accommodations and even requiring players to tip clubhouse managers out of their own pockets. Wait, I forgot: Jerry Reinsdorf only senses misplaced fealty to failed executives, not players. Players come and go after all. The Kenny Williams’s, Rick Hahn’s, and Tony LaRussa’s of White Sox World last forever.

I could continue but the most appropriate coda to this admittedly (somewhat justifiably) cacophonous screed must focus on Jerry Reinsdorf himself. The very reason the White Sox still call Chicago home is because Crooked Jerry blackmailed his way into having the Illinois taxpayer footing the bill for his awful, on-the-cheap stadium that was so out of touch with what fans throughout baseball and Chicago wanted in a ballpark that he’s gone back, hat-in-hand, time and time again, to get the state to pay for more improvements. He is the rent-seeker, crony-socialist par excellence. What a failed joke of a sports franchise owner.

Jerry and Sleepy Tony and Intolerant of Intolerance Liam, and the rest of the sorry crew might simply retort (when awakened from slumber, whether in a drunken stupor behind the wheel or not, or while out protesting with BLM or something) that I should just renounce my fandom, my support for the team if I dislike their performance and dispositions so much. No contract binds me too them; so what if I loved the White Sox teams of the past and did indeed identify with chain-smoking Dick Allen, the good-natured Robin Ventura, the humble-cheater, Joe Jackson, or “Old Aches and Pains”, Luke Appling?

Those teams are gone; all of those guys are dead but one. Why are you hanging on?

And in that, they have proffered an argument in the form of a question to which I do not have an immediate, satisfying answer. Best I can say is nostalgia for what it all once was.

But it just is not anymore. So it’s time to let go.