I’m not a fair-weather fan

I am not a fair weather White Sox fan, but I think I’m out.

There’s been a fair amount of apathy attached to my White Sox fandom the past two years and in many years before that, but they’ve always been my team. My first ever Sox game really set the tone for what I was in for in my life as a baseball fan. Long story short, it involved a 10-run first inning by the Seattle Mariners where Mike Cameron and Brett Boone hit back to back homers twice in the same inning for the first (and to my knowledge, still the only) time in history. Obviously then, I wasn’t too concerned about how good the team was, I just enjoyed baseball.

My general baseball fandom waxed and waned multiple times growing up, but has held steady since 2014 and I’ve always been there with the White Sox. I watched probably 100+ games per season during the rebuild years and sure, they didn’t win a lot, but they’re my team and there was so much to look forward to…or so I thought.

Through things that were both in the White Sox control and not at all in the White Sox control, this team isn’t good anymore and will likely not be good for the foreseeable future. I don’t think I can watch the Sox be bad again and it’s not because I can’t watch bad baseball. It’s because I can’t give anything to an organization that doesn’t care at all about their fans.

The LaRussa hire was definitely the first strike against the Sox for me. The next was hiring a first time manager when you said for the second time in three years that you wanted someone with recent success and experience to be the manager and then hired Grifol. Strike three was the Getz hire. And then the hits just kept on coming.

Jerry showed me exactly who he was in the interview in his office before the first Getz press conference. If ‘Make America Great Again’ could be said in baseball terms, Jerry said it in his office that day. The owner of the White Sox is trapped in a nostalgic longing of a game that no longer exists. Baseball has passed him by, but he’ll be damned if he won’t run his organization the good old-fashioned way when baseball was ‘great’.

And now we come to Jason Benetti. I love Benetti and I think he’s probably the best play-by-play man in all sports, end of story. There’s my bias. The fact that the Sox let him get away has cemented my thinking that this organization will never be good and really isn’t worth rooting for while Jerry still owns the team. It’s not the bad baseball that bothers me, but the process that leads to the bad baseball

So I’m not a fair weather fan, but I think I’m out. The White Sox are now on a prove-it deal with me. After all, baseball is a business, and at this point they need to convince why they should give me their business. I don’t think the White Sox will be good again until they have a new owner, new front office people, and a new way of doing things that can actually let them compete in today’s game, not Branch Rickey’s.

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