Life After Baseball for a Wayward Sox Fan

A chronicle of personal awakening when you break up with a baseballl team

The Sox finally sucked the joy out of baseball for me. It was a slow and steady decline that ended with back to back train wrecks that you normalize because you simply don’t have any context for how horrific it is, even as a Sox fan.

Don’t get me wrong, I saw it coming, but I wasn’t going to abandon my cultural identity, the thing that kept me rooted to my home town, things that were imprinted on my DNA generations back simply because we were historically bad.

And then — the next season when we became truly truly historically bad I started to feel a tickle of doubt. But I was loyal.

However.

After the Sox blew 28 leads in the seventh inning or later to go on to cluth defeat out of the claws of victory, that doubt took hold in my heart and poisoned my love.

Let us remember, good teams continue to find news ways to win, and bad teams keep inventing new ways to lose. And my Sox became very inventive. Wholy original losers. Given this collective and continuous non stop trauma, you eventually you start to dig in and ask tough questions of yourself. Like whenever any relationship ends. In my case, the moment of awakening came when I asked myself, “who am I if I’m not a Sox fan?”

Sports hurt goes deep. You think of the good times you had and want to make it that way again. You wish you could bring back The Buehrle complete game, “the catch,” the Konerko grand slam, Posednick hitting homers in the World Series run of 2005, Magglio Ordonez, Ray Durham, Hawk and Whimpy, The Rock Tim Rains, Bo Jackson, Black Jack McDowell, Thome, Harold, AJ and The Big Hurt. You think of all the hours you spent listening to DJ and Ed Farmer, before he passed, and wonder when did it all go so wrong.

Yeah, I broke up with the White Sox this year. It starts gradually. In the beginning, I wouldn’t miss too many games, till I only watched the ones I knew they had won, till eventually I was unable to watch at all. And then I moved on. Faced the unknown of starting over.

But what do you do when you’ve been with a team all these years. I can’t become a Cubs fan. My God. That’s blasphemy. I could cheer for a winner, but I don’t want to be that guy. I felt unmoored.