If you told me back when Sox Machine launched on Feb. 1, 2006, that I'd still be covering the feats and foibles of the Chicago White Sox on these same pages 20 years later, I don't know if I would've been shocked. I wouldn't have dared assume any level of success, but people practice instruments for decades even if they never play on stage, and it didn't take long for writing about the White Sox to similarly feel like a natural extension of myself.
For those who don't know the origin story: I'd just moved to Albany, New York, for my first real job in the middle of the 2005 season, and when the White Sox won the World Series that October, there weren't many avenues for sharing the excitement. On the professional front, I'd been a reporter in college, but took an online producer job that didn't involve writing, and I realized I missed the exercise. Then my first upstate winter arrived, and since it'd be years until I happened upon the life-changing joy of curling, I needed something to do.
Blogs were just starting to become a valid creative outlet, if not yet a respected form of media. New ones popped up every day; many were abandoned soon after. I thought I might have some talent to start a site, and I'd been sitting on a domain name that was somehow not taken by a Boston writer. I also knew that my threshold for shame is low, and I didn't want to publicly ditch a project like a poorly considered New Year's resolution.
While Sox Machine's official birthday is Feb. 1, I started writing in early December 2005 for nobody, figuring that if the daily obligation got old in a hurry, then I'd delete the site with only a handful of people knowing it ever existed. But I also considered that if I found satisfaction in writing without an audience, then I probably wouldn't be deterred by launching the site to negative or, worse, nonexistent feedback.
As evidenced by the headline of the post you're reading, baseball turned out to be the ideal vehicle for daily writing practice. Putting my own experiences into words for others to read is brutal and unnatural. Ask me to document the struggles of strangers under harsh and unrelenting objective measurements, and paragraphs pour out. Twenty years later, they still do; muscle memory checked and balanced by scar tissue from the many, many times I discovered what I didn't know.
Because momentum immediately took hold, I apparently never took the time for a “Welcome to Sox Machine” announcement. The very first post from that December was a reaction to Paul Konerko's five-year, $60 million signing, and on the day it launched for others to read, I covered Felix Diaz – he of a 6.75 ERA during the peak of Fifth Starter Hell in 2004 – leaving the White Sox organization to sign a one-year deal with the Nippon Ham Fighters. The lack of a formal introduction turned out to be its own mission statement, in the sense that the site has always been a conversation, even during the first two months when I was talking to myself.
That rolling conversation has continued for 20 years despite numerous changes. The Sox Machine project moved to South Side Sox in 2011, and a few years later, Josh started the South Side Sox Hangouts that became what is now the Sox Machine Podcast when I eventually hopped on his bandwagon. We then moved back to Sox Machine in 2018 as a reader- and listener-supported venture when SB Nation's model started showing cracks.
Thanks to your support, I was able to make this my full-time focus when my wife and I moved to Nashville in 2020, and when we had the opportunity to add James as a full-time beat reporter to make this an even wilder, grander experiment, you backed us even more.
While the site has grown in terms of dedicated staff, platform size, formats and access, the focus of the site has remained narrow, or at least specific. Josh and James weren't here on Day Zero, but they may as well have been. Because whether it was Josh creating the audio component from nothing in 2014 or James joining 10 years later after parlaying his own blogging origins into a full-fledged award-winning BBWAA membership, we all started covering the White Sox out of an internal compulsion to put our own fascinations and curiosities into words for public consumption, regardless of the quality of the on-field product.
Along the way, we've been fortunate enough to develop an audience that backs us not just financially, but with emotional and intellectual investments. I worked at a newspaper for 15 years, but the real daily miracle is a comment section that comes together to advance the best interests of the site under every post. Sox Machine was started with the idea that audience engagement couldn't be assumed, so it's in the site's DNA to never take it for granted.
So, what's next?
“More of the same” is the easy answer, and it's mostly correct. It's what you pay us for, sure, but the approach underneath it all is what's allowed us to avoid burnout. We try to make the site and podcast about the things that interest us, and hope that we can convince you they're equally important. We won't bat 1.000 on that front, but at the end of the day, we're people creating things for other people. That can feel like an uphill battle when you're competing for online real estate with AI abominations that a sizable subset of people are equally content to click “like” on …
… but as long as baseball is played and watched by live humans, the hope is that everybody involved will want organic eyes, ears and brains working to document the shared experience.
Evolution is necessary, however, because we still need to grow in order to foot the bill for our ambitions, and the White Sox aren't yet doing the heavy lifting to stoke enthusiasm. We're working to bolster our ad revenue and create sponsorship opportunities, and above the surface, Josh is building out our YouTube presence. It's not a Pivot to Video, where outlets subtracted from their strengths to chase ad dollars that were based on inflated or outright fraudulent metrics, and then had to cut further when the money didn't show up. We're going to keep doing what we're doing, but we also need more people to know we're doing it.
What can you do? If you haven't yet subscribed, the first day of our 21st year is a perfect time to start. If you already subscribe, you can put an active payment method on file for easy renewal and share our work whenever you're so moved. In either case, you can join us for our 20th anniversary celebration in August, the details of which are in the RSVP form below. Don't worry about gifts, because your presence is your present. Our appreciation for your support can't be overstated, and we hope we'll continue to make it worth your while.
