I am a White Sox fan, but I should probably get this out of the way, I am a baseball apostate. I was born and raised just outside of Cleveland. Chances are, especially if you live in Chicago, you know of at least one person who was born and raised in Cleveland. Chances are really good that they are fiercely loyal to the Cleveland sports franchises, especially in the holy order of Browns, Indians and Cavaliers. There may be some who put the Indians in front of the Browns, but that is a decided minority and those that do so are often look at as unfortunate and misguided. Football is king of Cleveland even if the team is woefully bad each year.
Growing up I shaded more toward the Indians but most years it was relatively easy to enjoy each team without much interference from the other. The Browns rarely made the playoffs and when they did it ended in bitter disappointment, making the promise of spring training all the sweeter. Conversely, the Indians were always out of contention by training camp and were easy to ignore through the end of summer. As a fan of baseball it was great to go to those late summer games and be one of 5,000 fans in a 70,000 seat stadium. For some reason it reminded me of Pinocchio inside of the whale.
As I grew up, moved out and went my way, I maintained a pretty strong link to my Cleveland roots. College and grad school both had sizable Clevelander populations and we could easily commiserate about the woeful state of our sport teams. It’s hard to pin down what to call the emotional state of Cleveland sports fans, but I know I shared in it for years and while other fandoms have similarities the…hardness or edge isn’t quite the same. It’s almost a resignation like the doctor from Camus’ The Plague; the whole exercise is pointless, yet one must continue. Two events led to my fall from grace, or to be more hopeful, conversion to a new faith: The end of the Cleveland Browns and moving to Chicago.
The demise of the Browns may seem like an odd thing to convert me to a White Sox fan, but hear me out. Like I said, I probably favored the Indians more than the Browns, especially as I got older, but I still followed the Browns. I still cared. When the news broke that the team would be leaving for Baltimore the following year it felt like a relative had died. I know rationally that is a sad statement on my psyche but well there you have it. Just thinking of Cleveland without the Browns was beyond depressing. Even though there was the promise of the new team in five years, it didn’t take away from the shock of the team pulling up stakes and moving on. I thought I might follow the Bears but something immediately struck me: I don’t get 1985. I’m sure it was great and if I experienced it I would feel different, but I don’t know. There is something about players from that team still being attractions in the Chicagoland area that just mystifies me. I don’t see the appeal of meeting Steve McMichael twenty plus years after the fact. There is also a subgroup of Bears’ fans that are pretty much the “Superfans” of Saturday Night Live fame. Unfortunately they are not being ironic, but truly believe that Mike Ditka is a sage in all things and not an extremely enterprising businessman who has been cashing in on his local fame for decades. Basically with the local option out of consideration and the fact that I don’t like to gamble on football, the NFL lost its appeal surprisingly fast. And unlike many folks in and from Cleveland when the team came back, I wasn’t interested. In those lost seasons, I found new things to do with my time. I also learned an important lesson: teams have no loyalty. They may talk a good game, support local causes and businesses, say how important the fans are, but the truth is, given the right set of circumstances and dollars, pretty much any team would leave its current location for a sweeter deal. It’s business, nothing personal.
I don’t want to reduce fandom to a strict consumer-provider relationship. I do believe it is more than that. However the strict regional loyalty that I once felt was shattered by the Browns leaving. If they could move on to another city, another fan base for God’s sake! Then why couldn’t I? In the end it was like Seinfeld once said, we root for laundry. When I thought of that, it was a lot easier to change.
That change wasn’t overnight. I moved to Chicago in 1995 and I wouldn’t consider myself a White Sox fan until 2000. I started out like many transplants rooting for the Cubs, the national brand of Chicago baseball. I even worked security at Wrigley for a spell, which definitely pushed me toward the White Sox, but more on that another time. The laundry argument worked in favor of the White Sox as well. Only a year after I arrived, Albert Belle signed with the White Sox for the 1997 season. A bit of a conundrum: I had defended/supported/even secretly liked Albert as an Indian, should I immediately start booing him just because he changed his shirt? The other thing about Albert was, quite simply, he was an absolute joy to watch hit a baseball, the batting equivalent of Mike Tyson. He just went up to hit that ball with bad intentions. He was responsible for one of the greatest performances I ever saw, his three home run game against the White Sox. Now two years later I was supposed to just forget that? Well I didn’t. I went to more White Sox games than I previously had, mostly to see Albert, but along the way I was introduced to Frank Thomas, a better all-around hitter than Albert and another simple joy to watch hit a baseball.
As I said I didn’t really consider myself a White Sox fan until 2000. That had a lot to do with the manager they hired in 1998, Jerry Manuel. If you haven’t been ridiculing my conversion up unto this point, I’m sure you’re chuckling now. What can I say? Manuel was a different kind of manager. I read a profile of him before the season started and I really wanted him to succeed. On the surface anyway, we shared a lot of the same values, admired the same people and shared an outlook on motivation. Basically, Jerry wasn’t a PASSION guy; he was calm; he wasn’t a screamer. Even in that first year of his tenure I was following the team pretty closely, going to even more games and caring less and less about the Indians. When the White Sox made the 2000 playoffs, I was genuinely excited and tried to get tickets. Much to my surprise, I was also disappointed when they got swept. I was downright angry. This was familiar emotional territory. This was full blown fandom.
Even though I liked Jerry Manuel, I wasn’t sorry to see him go. What made me amiable to the move was the apparent fact that Jerry was reacting to fan/media/outside pressure. He tried to be demonstrative. He tried to be the PASSION guy. One of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever witnessed was watching Jerry Manuel try and act upset with an umpire. It was a pure pantomime. It was like watching a show like the Office that thrives on uncomfortability. I just felt sorry him more than anything and it seemed like he wasn’t being true to himself, I lost faith in his ability to manage and control the clubhouse.
The next few years were a whirlwind to say the least. Ozzie Guillen could not be more different than Jerry Manuel, and oddly enough I liked him too. Especially in Ozzie’s first three years it was a great time to be a White Sox fan. They were in the hunt in 2004, won it all in 2005 and were a fun team to watch most of 2006. After that it became more drama off the field than on, unfortunately. It became apparent that Kenny and Ozzie just couldn’t get along. Even so I still get all warm and fuzzy when I think of 2005 and I do feel like it was my team that one. I didn’t feel like an interloper. I felt like an insider. As the last few years have rolled along, with mounting disappointments and underperformances, I certainly feel the same way, with a little more cynicism, but aren’t the most committed fans the most cynical?
I wrote about this topic a few years ago, with some different twists and turns here.
