They all said the concessions would be better, and they’re not wrong
Well, well, well, look what we have here. A few weeks ago I summarized baseball for you, and one thing I stated is that the Chicago White Sox, shockingly a professional team on the south side, are very bad, bad in the “does not win games” sense. I stated that there was a real risk they would go on to break the single-season record for losing, which stood at 120 as of this season. There are 162 games in a baseball season. 120 losses is colossal, Wagnerian. You’re at least supposed to flip the coin and do a little good, right?
Not here, fam. The White Sox lost their 120th game on Sunday, September 22. This tied the all-time record. But what we really want is for records to be broken. They had the 23rd off, then returned home for a series against the Angels on Tuesday & Wednesday.
On the 23rd, I, being a shitpost of a human who loves transforming into the angel of death for my rivals, looked up White Sox ticket prices to see how many others wanted to experience history. The 24th sold pretty well, and ticket prices were high. But the 25th’s ticket prices were, by all estimates, reflective of a normal 2024-era White Sox game. This is fortunate, because I already had a prior commitment on the 24th.
So I made a bet. I made a bet against all logic that the White Sox would win on the 24th, and if so I would get to witness them lose the first-ever 121st Major League loss on the 25th. I bought one single nosebleed seat for the 25th.
The first thing you need to know is that I paid $6 for this ticket. Six. Six dollars. The last time I paid $6 to go to a major league baseball game, I was barely over three feet tall, ponying up my allowance money. Six dollars is the CTA fare there & back. Six dollars is half of a hot dog at any MLB stadium. Six dollars is one-third of a bad sandwich in Wicker Park. Six dollars is what someone who never lived through the past four years of inflation might think a minor league game costs to attend. Six. Six dollars.
I tell my friends this and they become concerned – not for me, or for society, but for the White Sox themselves. “Oh, that’s not right,” they say, gravely. “They must be really suffering.” And they are, friends, and I find their suffering to be funny. I find their suffering to be funny because the Cubs have dropped so many 100-loss seasons on my face over the years that to witness something absolutely titanic happening across town gives me life. I find their suffering to be funny because it is demonstrably worse, of course, to endure the past two seasons of loss that the Cubs have gone through, where we crashed out of the postseason by a single game, bought our rival’s manager, invested in one of the best pitchers in the game, renewed an expensive guy who became even more expensive after doing well, and still failed to make it to October this year. In short, it is worse to try and fail, and it is funny to know you’re going to fail and so fail harder and more hilariously.
The White Sox possess no such illusions about who they are, and I deeply respect them for that. They recognize that they are the smallest market in MLB, that for many teams it is just not their year for a while, and they are rolling with it. They are saying the quiet part loud: that a 1 in 30 chance of hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy in November balloons to impossible proportion when other teams are literally investing the GDP of a small island nation into one guy who beastmodes the totality of the sport while injured. Who among us, confronted with the horrible truth, would not shrug and do the same?
Anyway, I had the score open on my phone when I was out on Tuesday, and at one point I looked down. A loss meant I wouldn’t have to show up on Wednesday with my $6 ticket; a win meant I would. Top of the 8th, Angels 2, White Sox 0. The White Sox had not come back late from a multi-run deficit all season. I sighed, thanked myself for placing the bet, and was excited to watch history unfold on my phone, instead. Then I put my phone away, the White Sox scored three runs, and they won the game. They won the game, people. They not only won the game, they won a game that they profoundly should not have won, in a season where losing has been the norm by a factor of three.
While calling a ride to get home, I checked the score again, just to be sure, and squeaked. My friend rode past on his bike, fully aware of what I was up to. I shouted “THEY WON!”
“NO!”
“THEY SCORED THREE!”
“AHAHAHAHAHAAH” and he rode off into the night. One could not script a more perfect moment.
And so it is knowing this, this tapestry of human experience, that we now find ourselves at Comiskey on a suspiciously October-cool Wednesday evening after a lifetime of consistent, faithful, lockstep Cubs attendance, at the rivals’ stadium, marveling at this desiccated, parking lot-swaddled husk of an entertainment edifice, all of us existing in defiance of god. Of course we’re not here to root for the Angels. We are rooting against the White Sox. We are rooting specifically for one team to lose. In order for a team to lose, another team must win, but we are not here for the Angels to win. The Angels are a prop tonight, a stand-in, existing solely as the White Sox Defeaters for three hours. Who plays the Harlem Globetrotters? That, but for losing.
Who even plays for the White Sox anymore? Dylan Cease? No, he got traded and then threw a no-hitter for his new team. You rack your brain for a bit and only come up with the name of a noted anti-vaxer, and you realize that his attempting to murder people makes it even funnier that you are now rooting against him. Thank heavens he’s hundreds of feet away from you, outside, well-ventilated, breathing, losing.
As I walked my dog that afternoon, I thought about the final out of that game, a game so famous that it has a Wikipedia page, a game so famous that a fielding play caused the words “The Catch” to be permanently written on the outfield wall. The announcer just yelled YES! YES! YES! HISTORY!. Baseball people use the word “history” to elevate events, sometimes artificially, but it certainly counted here. “History” is usually slapped onto achievements. This is history, but for losing. It’s sort of appropriate in 2024, a year when nothing feels right, but all of the disaster is less immediate, and we’re all just plugging our ears and yelling through it. Of course the single-season loss record would be broken in 2024. HISTORY!
You run into your pal Ryan at the stadium before first pitch even happens, and you spend the entire time together. Ryan is a bartender at the bar that your BFF owns, and he is a White Sox fan, and he desperately wants them to lose. He wants them to lose by 20. He wants position players to throw eephus in the 6th. He is already two beers deep by the time you encounter him, and it is $5 beer night for the whole last week of the season. Ryan is the perfect companion for all of this, becuase he knows more than two White Sox players and is furious, furious in the wholly justifiable way that you would expect any sufficiently ardent fan to be, furious in the way that you expect dozens of couples & families with matching “SELL” shirts to be as they wander the concourse, smiling, having a great time, knowing they’re dancing on a corpse.
There is near-zero applause for the home team lineup, near-zero applause for every base hit, near-zero applause for anything, really, except for the two home runs that defined most of the game’s scoring. Home runs aside, you witness just a lot of bad baseball. The Angels scored on a bunt that ended up not being a sacrifice because of a White Sox fielding error. A fly ball was dropped at one point. Pitchers walk the bases loaded thrice. In a lifetime first, you experience a team’s pitching coach get ejected. Ryan starts multiple “SELL THE TEAM” chants. They really get going in the eighth. Eventually you’re filming them.
A kid walks past holding a sign: “IT’S MY 10TH BIRTHDAY!” Imagine breaking the all-time loss record on a kid’s birthday. This is a reminder that, despite the moment at stake, it really is just another baseball game, and baseball games are going to possess baseball things like families having a nice time, despite everything.
You wonder what all went wrong for the White Sox over the past 15 years. They won the World Series in 2005 after fans extensively boycotted the team for its poor performance. Hurt the owner, hoist the trophy. Would it work this time? Probably not, but it certainly isn’t stopping people, even with $6 tickets. And you remember, of course, that this was the case, roughly, for you, where in 2012 we dropped over 100 games and four years later, you know what happened. Teams can bounce back fast, y’all – if they want to. History has a poor memory of ignominy, only the championship matters, except for maybe this time.
Anyway, the game went to extra innings and the White Sox’s noted antivaxer walked off the Angels in the 10th. I paid six dollars and got entertained, and I’ve never been more mad in my life.