White Sox Blog Primer

A guide to White Sox Blogs

• South Side Sox -- When I first started writing a White Sox blog nearly 2 years ago, I was writing mostly for myself. I was just looking to document my opinions on managerial and player personnel decisions. I wanted my opinion to hold slightly more merit than just some guy posting on a message board. The posts were often very stat-heavy, and I was often self conscious about my lack of writing skills. But before long, I had gained a small but loyal audience that was steadily growing.

  With the move to South Side Sox, I fell into a nice posting pattern. (Gamethread - Recap - Gamethread - Recap - News post) After the Sox won the series and the baseball news came to a trickle, I shifted to a more light-hearted blogging approach.

  On that point, it's interesting (to me anyway) how my own philosophy has changed over the past 2 years blogging. When I started, I was almost a straight-stats type of guy, but I've slowly changed such that even though I still read all of the saber stuff, I hardly post about it. Writing the recaps every night has made me more observed, to the point where I didn't pump out 2000 words about why Juan Uribe shouldn't be considered for the #2 spot.

• Sox Machine -- Probably the blog that currently most resembles this one. Jim often focuses on the same things that I do here, but he generally has a slightly off-beat take on things. He's also the radio critic of the White Sox blogoshere, giving frequent updates on the progress of the new White Sox radio team.
  • State of the Sox -- Jim has also started another blog, State of the Sox, that will contain his daily and weekly recaps. He hopes it will serve as reference in the future, but will understandably need some help to maintain it. He's asking for first hand game accounts for some of the April day games that he'll be unable to watch.
• Exile in Wrigleyville -- If Jim is the radio critic of the White Sox blogosphere, Vince is the newspaper critic. Both of them come from a newspaper background, so it's no surprise that's often their focus. Vince's posts are most often written in response to something he's read.
• Black Betsy -- Betsy and Exile were the first White Sox blogs that I discovered.  -- Incedently that didn't happen until I decided to start my own, and was searching for others to link to. -- SuperNoVa has just resumed posting after being silent for quite a while, but he also writes for Nats blog, (he's from the D.C. area) so let's hope he's back to posting more regularly. He created a WPA-like scoring system called ERV, and it appears that he may be posting daily ERV updates for the Sox this season.
• Daily Southtown's White Sox blog -- Debuting after the first game of the season, it's clear that the Southtown's new beat writer, Nathaniel Whalen, who also writes the blog, will become a must-read for me. It seems that he's already discovered the beauty of baseball blogs; the immediacy of the posts. If you're posting about a game that happened 12 hours ago on the net, it's already old news. Just a couple hours after Wednesday's game with the Indians, he's asking many of the same questions that we are, and even one was just percolating in the back of my brain.

  He only uses batting average when he cited some situational stats in his latest post, and he's yet to use the power of linking, but the blog still remains promising.

• Inside the White Sox -- White Sox VP of marketing, Scott Reifert's blog. He gives some nice insight into the behind the scenes of the White Sox. But I could do without the need to sell MLB products.
• ChiSox Daily -- ChiSox Daily is the granddaddy White Sox blogs. It's been running continuously from the same address since Carl Everett was manning center field. The "daily" may be a little misleading, however, but it is updated regularly.
• Jack Keefe's Blog -- Jack Keefe is a fictional minor leaguer created by Ring Lardner. He became a fixture in the White Sox related posts at BTF, and started the blog during the White Sox postseason run. He's back Al.
• Palehose Six -- Debuting just before spring training, Palehose is easily the fastest growing Sox blog on the net. I suppose it's not really a blog, but Carl uses blogger to publish his comic strip, so I'm callin' it a blog. Palehose Six was recently picked up by the Daily Southtown, who will run the strip on Sundays in the sports section.
• Southside Adventures -- White Sox, half-naked women, sex, music, and drinkin'. EasyW does more minor league updates than I have done in the past here, so it's a good way to keep up on the farm during the season.
• Black Sox Blog -- In addition to your standard news oriented posts, Jay's blog features Season Lookbacks and Player Retrospectives.
• South Side Baseball -- I stumbled across this site during the offseason. It updates almost daily with short, "newsy" posts.
• Winning Ugly -- Updates about twice weekly. Standard blog, news, opinion, analysis.
• The White Sox Guy -- Stock MLBlogs design and more ads than posts on the main page make this one a feed only blog. He updates almost daily though, and the content is good, so get yourself a feed reader and subscribe.
• Chisox Rants -- Not many rants lately. Posts from November still make the main page.
• Non Compete -- More of a general Chicago sports blog than just a White Sox blog, but it's worth mentioning if for only the reason that they routinely link here.
• Daily Grinder -- A relatively new blog. General baseball with a emphasis on the White Sox.
• Baseball Zealot -- White Sox, Cubs, Illini, and general baseball. Worth reading if only for the first-hand accounts of Big Ten baseball games.
• SoxCast -- White Sox Podcast. I don't really listen to podcasts, but maybe some of you do.
• WGN: Hawk and DJ's Baseball blog -- We'll see how this one turns out. It's keeping some WGN intern occupied at least.
• ChiSox blog -- Just found this one. Multiple authors, updating multiple times a day. Looks promising.

Update [2006-4-7 2:7:28 by The Cheat]: I missed a couple.