White Sox enuui ’23

Watching this White Sox team turn the possibility of a big, gift win against a playoff-contending opponent into another loss, I realized something.

My anger was gone.

Couldn’t find it.

No rage. No blame.

Nothing.

Something in me has changed while watching the current iteration of my favorite team. Something in me has broken, or fundamentally changed.

I don’t hate them at all. I am still following the games. Still rooting for them to succeed. Still rooting to feel that warm thing in the pit of your stomach when your favorite team wins the game.

They just haven’t been doing very much of that over the last year or so.

What I find, is I just don’t find a lot of joy in watching them right now. It’s not fun to watch them not succeeding, failing, and failing to succeed, continuously.

Maybe that’s on me, though.

Maybe I took Rick Hahn’s kickoff of this current rebuild at face value; believed too deeply in his ability, against all odds, to create a culture of baseball success in the city of Chicago.

Maybe I am an idiot, but I believed him.

That small-idiot portion of my brain that makes me live or die at times with a set of laundry on an everchanging cast of bright-eyed kids trying to make their dreams into your reality, that’s the part of me that couldn’t be convinced that the rest of my baseball life was going to be spent cheering on the ’27 Yankees of the new millennium.

We’re not, though.

Most nights we aren’t even guaranteed an even marginal level of competent baseball.

I’m just not enjoying it much right now. That’s all.

It’s a bummer, you know?

I don’t even really need a reason why it’s turned into whatever this is.

I chose to embrace the lofty expectations of the rebuild and contention window — and have come out fundamentally changed.

I’m left now to only muse at what could have been: Is this what fans of winning organizations feel like all the time? With all the stakes that come with expected amounts of a credible chance at a championship?

Is the fan part of my brain so corroded by decades of half-hearted attempts at building 80-win ball clubs that I find more happiness in having a roughly 50% chance of seeing my favorite baseball team win on a given night?

That idea bums me out more than the 2023 White Sox.

I’m just not enjoying the game much right now.

I don’t know, but I hope things become enjoyable again soon.

I’m rooting for them. All of them. I’m rooting for those warm feelings to come back.

I really am.

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