Thanks, SSS readers!

With things a little bit cool on the transaction front (STAY TUNED FOR NEWS MONDAY OR SATURDAY OR ARGGHH WE CAN’T WAIT!), it seems like a good time to express some thanks to you, South Side Sox readers, for the community you’ve provided here this year.

It hasn’t been the smoothest season, both on the field and off. Our White Sox did manage to provide a number of thrills (thanks Tim, Lucas, José, James, Eloy, Luis ... ) in taking an 11-win jump in the standings. And with the Yasmani Grandal signing and recent DFAs of Yolmer Sánchez and Daniel Palka, it certainly appears that this is going to be one serious offseason on the South Side.

On site, it’s been a stressful season. When some administrative adjustments made it hard to reward the staff that we’d built up here over the course of 2018-19 properly for their work, we scrambled for a solution. Our midseason staff migration over to Sox on 35th failed, so the spur-of-the-moment South Side Hit Pen popped up and now hosts the work of many of your old SSS friends.

With most of our standard SSS fare (Minor League Updates, Deep Dive, analysis of the majors and minors) outsourced there, many of you have followed and bridged our two sites. We can’t thank you enough for making that effort. Neither South Side Sox nor South Side Hit Pen would exist without you.

Looking ahead, we do have some fun stuff in store.

At South Side Sox, we’ll have the standard offseason fare, including some 2019 wrap-up pieces, as well as our Top Prospect Voting for 2020.

At South Side Hit Pen in December, we’ll begin our Top 100 Prospects countdown. You’ll also find our Hall of Fame voting — expanded to three separate ballots (Veterans’ Committee, Class of 2020, and White Sox Class of 2020). We’ll continue churning out interesting features, from White Sox writers both old and new.

And in a bit of a bridge between the two sites, we’ll debut the South Side Hit Pen podcast at the end of the month, promoting it here as well. Clinton Cole will handle hosting duties for the main podcast, while Brett will provide some quick-hit casts with fellow SSHP writers, likely released as Patreon subscriber exclusives.

We’ll also continue to try to find creative and rewarding ways for you to help support our White Sox writers, including cool merch ideas (wazzup Yaz) and, well, anything we can think of to help make this a fun and rewarding experience for all.

Over the past two years, every SSS and SSHP writer/photographer/artist has been paid for their work. That’s a tradition that’s rare in the online writing world, and we believe unprecedented in the White Sox writing universe. And there’s no other way we’re going to do it, going forward.

But most remarkably, at a time when SSS was left with more of a skeleton crew and SSHP was trying to get its feet under it, the community here remained strong. Gamethreads were surprisingly robust, with very rare exception extremely well-mannered and insightful. That is an absolute and direct tribute to you, our readers.

We hope that there are some positive changes in store for 2020, not just for our beloved White Sox on the field, but with SSS as a site. Fingers crossed.

But if the worst we can expect is the same engaged, vibrant, intelligent community that will fuel this site into a 15th anniversary season (!), bully for us.

Once more, thanks SSS. You guys and gals are absolutely fabulous.