The History of the Chicago White Sox - Part 0

 I can’t believe what I am seeing.

It’s August 5th, 2023, and the Chicago White Sox have hit rock bottom. 

What’s happening isn’t especially out of the ordinary. The Sox are getting made fun of on Twitter, which is nothing new. What makes this rock bottom for a team, what broke me as a fan, was the specifics of what happened. 

José Ramírez, the third baseman for the rival Cleveland Guardians, just hit a ball down the right field line that should be extra bases, but the Sox did a good job fielding it and actually have a chance to catch Ramírez at second. Tim Anderson, the White Sox’s shortstop, is covering the bag when Ramírez comes sliding in. It’s possible that Ramírez didn’t expect the ball to come to second so soon, or maybe he just slid badly, but either way, he barrels into second base, nearly taking Anderson out along the way. Tim takes exception to this, which is pretty common. In the big list of things that start fights in baseball, hard slides into second are probably the second most common thing on that list behind batters getting hit by pitches. The usual baseball fight activities start with some yelling and shoving between the players, but everything changes when Tim raises his fists and José does the same. The two exchange punches for a while, mostly looking like two people who are definitely not professional boxers until José connects on a hit directly to Tim’s jaw. 

He hit the ground so fast. 

    Tim Anderson was my favorite player growing up. He made his debut for the Sox in 2016, when I was 14 years old. He played a lot of basketball as a kid before switching to baseball, which may explain his complete disregard for the “unwritten rules” that so many old heads value so highly. From the day that he arrived on the south side of Chicago, he was unapologetically himself. He gave wild quotes to the media, fired up his teammates, and generally brought an attitude of fun and excitement to baseball that the game was desperately needing. Best of all, he didn’t care what anyone said about him. That’s what I admired about him the most. As a high school freshman growing up in the age of social media, a role model like Tim was exactly what I needed. 

        By 2023, though, things were different. The White Sox had risen and fallen in record time, going from a contender to a bottom feeder in only two years. All the trash that Tim talked about how good the Sox would be and about how getting made fun of was okay because eventually the Sox will get them back was all coming back to him, and that was before the baby. Tim Anderson, who had been married for several years, had a child with someone who was not his wife. Being caught red-handed cheating on your spouse is a great way to destroy your reputation. Another way is to be terrible at your job. On the field, Tim was going through a career-worst stretch at the plate. OPS+ is a stat that we will see a lot of in this series. It is, to my knowledge, the best statistic that currently exists to quantify everything that a MLB player does as a batter. It uses a complicated formula to grade batters on a scale where 100 is average. A player with an OPS+ of 110 is 10 percent more productive on offense than a league average player. In 2023, Tim Anderson’s OPS+ fell from a pretty good 109 to a nightmarish 60. By OPS+, Tim Anderson was one of the worst players in all of baseball. 

It wasn’t just Tim, either. A few days before the fight, on August 1st, was the trade deadline. The White Sox, being terrible, were sellers, and dealt relief pitcher Keynan Middleton to the Yankees. On August 7th, Middleton would give an interview about what it was like to play for the White Sox. He tore the organization to shreds. He told stories of a culture with “no rules”, where players fell asleep during games, missed meetings, and refused to participate in drills. He even claimed that Tim Anderson and catcher Yasmani Grandal had gotten into a physical fight in the locker room in July. 

By the end of the 2023 season, the White Sox were largely seen as a circus, and Tim Anderson was the ringleader. After he knocked Tim out, José Ramírez was largely hailed as a hero online. People were glad that someone finally shut Tim up. My favorite player growing up, a person I looked up to as a child, whose poster I had on my wall, was now seen as a loudmouth idiot. Someone who talked a ton of smack and never backed it up, someone who never showed an ounce of respect to anyone, including both his wife and the game that he plays. 

By extension, Tim made the franchise look bad. When the White Sox ended the 2023 season with a record of 61-101, there was no shortage of people dancing on the team’s grave. The White Sox are a bunch of clowns and assorted losers, and baseball’s better off when they’re at the bottom of the standings, out of sight and out of mind. 

It didn’t always used to be this way. 

Throughout just my lifetime, the White Sox have been shamed, hated, forgotten, feared, ignored, and admired. 

The White Sox are baseball’s nomads, moving around from place to place, never being just one thing. Ask people from each of the 121 seasons that the Sox have played who the White Sox are and you will get 121 different answers. 

I think that they are the most interesting team in professional baseball. 

By the time I’m done here, I think you might, too.