The arrival of the once- and perhaps still-hated New York Yankees for a long weekend series here in Chicago against a once but no longer formidable White Sox team takes me back to the late 1950s and early ’60’s, when I was a rabid young Sox fan and the games actually meant something to both teams in the heat of a pennant race.
I still vividly recall the many hot, humid, late-summer Friday nights, well before my teen years, driving with my dad from our home in Evanston to the Bridgeport neighborhood just south of old Comiskey Park and leaving the car on a block of wood-frame houses where grownups gathered on porches and kids played in the street.
We acknowledged the locals with smiles and nods, then walked on purposefully to the ballpark — the pungent odor of the nearby Union Stockyards hanging in the muggy summer air — to watch our beloved home team play the reviled visitors in a high-stakes weekend series between two heated rivals and annual pennant contenders.
My lifelong love affair with the Sox started, as I vaguely recall and with family members filling in the blanks later, at the tender age of 3 or 4. My dad’s mom owned a small deli on the ground floor of the Hyde Park hotel, where we visited regularly, and many of the Sox players lived during the baseball season.
They treated me like a little mascot, gifting me autographed balls and bats, and I was hooked.
Sealing the deal, fortuitously, my uncle’s business had season tickets — box seats right behind the Sox dugout — and that enabled me to attend several games a year with my dad, including those memorable opening nights of a late-season Yankee series with the Sox trailing the New Yorkers by a few games in the standings and needing a sweep to catch up.
A large crowd turned out at Comiskey Park to watch the White Sox beat the Yankees, 5-2, on June 24, 1963. (Jim Mescall/Chicago Tribune)
On many of those Friday nights, their ace pitcher, Whitey Ford, faced our ace, Billy Pierce, but an evening that began with high hopes usually ended in painful reality, like it was preordained by the baseball gods.
A Yankee star — Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris or Yogi Berra or Elston Howard — invariably hit a late-inning home run or a base-clearing double to ensure a “bad guys” 4-2 or 5-3 or 6-4 win, sending us trudging silently back to our car for the long, mournful ride home. We swallowed the bitter pill of a pennant once again out of reach.
There was, of course, the one magic year, 1959, when the Sox did win a pennant, and I went to the opening World Series game at Comiskey.
Patrons at The Pump tavern yell and scream as the White Sox win their first pennant in 40 years on Sept. 22, 1959. (Al Phillips/Chicago Tribune)
Adults were using the coveted family box seats, so they got me a single ticket in the first row of the right field upper deck, next to the foul pole, where I almost caught one of Ted Kluszewski’s two home runs.
Fans will remember the Sox won the opener 11-0 but lost the series to the Dodgers in six games.
Fast-forward 46 years to 2005, the only pennant year since then, when I also attended Game 1 of the team’s glorious four-game sweep of the Houston Astros, a National League team back then.
I wonder how many others attended the opening game of both series so many years apart?
Between those two pennant years, and most of the time after ’05, I remained a loyal fan who occasionally caught games in person and watched and listened to many others on TV and radio.
The Chicago White Sox and the Houston Astros during Game 4 of the World Series at Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas, on Oct. 26, 2005. (Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune)
My wife, a nonfan, graciously joined me, reading material in hand, at games in cities such as Boston, Houston, New York and Los Angeles when our summer vacation travels coincided with Sox visits.
So here we are now in the final weeks of the 2025 season, with our unlovable losers only slightly better than last year, when they broke the ignominious record for most losses in a single season. They have some promising young players acquired in dubious trades for stars with contract issues, but not enough to be consistently competitive.
I’ve watched and listened to very few games the past two seasons, probably because I’ve become, in my senior iteration, a “fair weather fan” who pays close attention only when the team is contending — there are more enjoyable ways to spend summer evenings now — but I still care enough to study the post-game box scores to see how individual players performed.
This weekend, however, is an exception. I’m actually watching these Sox-Yankee games for the same reasons I attend class reunions and celebrate milestone birthdays and anniversaries: The past may be long gone, chronologically, but sweet memories linger, and the important ones warmly resonate emotionally, psychologically, intellectually and maybe even spiritually.
The Sox may be losers on the field these days, but they’ll always be winners — champions in fact — in my Book of Life.
Andy Shaw is not only a lifelong Sox fan but also a semi-retired Chicago journalist and good government watchdog.
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