Brooks Boyer and MJ: Do the Sox still Get Us?
Selling the White Sox by ignoring the White Sox
In 1997, the White Sox marketing team put up a billboard in Wrigleyville, reading “Major League Baseball: 8.1 Miles South.” This was a slight exaggeration of the discrepancy between the teams: The Sox might have finished second that year, but at 80-81 were only hanging around due to a rare off-year by Cleveland. The Cubs were coming off a bad stretch, but we were in the tail end of a Terry Bevington malaise.
And then 1998 was, in some ways, an exciting year on the northside. I guess. Some guy hit a lot of homers.
So while the billboard was in some ways self-defeating and was made quickly irrelevant, if not laughable, it was still fun for Sox fans. It was taking the pomposity of Cubdom, and the idea that Wrigley was nothing but a scene, and juxtaposing it with our joint, where, you know, you went to watch a baseball game. If both sides of this were stereotypes, there was then and is now some validity to it, and being on the scuffed side of the coin was part of the White Sox image.
That billboard wore it with pride. Enjoy your beer garden, we’re watching good baseball.
We’re used to being snubbed. While we can be boorish and parochial about it, there’s something to be said for being the cultural underdog. During the 90s and 2000s, when we were generally good, and the other guys had peaks and valleys, it was a source of pride. You can be in all the Chicago movies, we’ll just watch Frank Thomas.
(Or, as the labor historian Erik Loomis recently wrote at the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog: “Cubs fans managed to combine incredible levels of smugness with arrogance that they are richer than White Sox fans and a great joy in losing that they just embraced. Basically, you can tell the quality of someone from Chicago based on which team they like.”)
The Sox marketing teams, led by wünderkind Brooks Boyer, seemed to get that. They leaned into a kind of benign insularity, a celebration of our history — beloved players, the outfield shower, fireworks, a parking lot redolent of 1,000 tailgates soundtracked by the thump of beanbags.
But there were always signs this was on the surface. The distance between the Sox and Nancy Faust (now thankfully being partially rectified) was a thumb in our collective eye. As the years went on and lost seasons turned to wasted rebuilds and more lost seasons, as the organization drifted from respectable to irrelevance to laughingstock, a bitterness crept in.
The insularity wasn’t expanded to the South Side. The ordo amoris, as our late Pope (who, with his compassion for the downtrodden, would probably have been a Sox fan) would say, stopped at Jerry Reinsdorf’s office. The whole organization, including marketing, became an extension of his increasingly-curdled and defensive ways.
We saw this when the Sox parted ways with Jason Benetti, who alleged that someone (presumably, and intimated to be, Boyer) mistreated and disrespected him. This could be he said/he said, but Sox fans mostly trusted Jason. The kid grew up here, was a lifelong fan, loved the Sox. And he was unceremoniously shown the door.
This was very much a “my way or the highway” situation, which is understandable in a business, but not when that business is dependent on so many of us feeling that it is also our way. Baseball — all sports — need fans, obviously. And while they can count on fantasy players and gamblers to keep up interest, the lifeblood is still people feeling connected to the team. And it seems like the Sox want the connection to be not to our shared sense of the White Sox, but to the way the organization is run.
(You could say, fairly, that the White Sox are pulling out a lot of stops to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the team and the 20th of the World Series, but honestly, those are table stakes. I like what they are doing though, give them credit.)
This lack of understanding is what I felt when I saw Boyer’s statement about the City Connect jerseys, which I like parts of, but rubbed me the wrong way. His statement clarified what is wrong with them:
Let me translate:
“You know what makes this jersey great, fans of the White Sox? That the owner you now despise owns both teams! Both are middling-at-best-go-nowhere franchises. Isn’t that exciting?”
No? That doesn’t get your motors running, you ingrates? How about this:
“You know what I love about the White Sox? The thing that makes the White Sox the White Sox: Michael Jordan. He almost played more than one exhibition game for us! Hot dog!”
Even granting that these are Nike jerseys, it is still a terrible way to sell the City Connects. It is as if they aren’t even trying to make it relevant to Sox fans. They aren’t trying to make the Sox, a team with an actual identity and no small amount of historically cool caché, relevant to anyone else. Here’s a rich guy, here’s a famous guy, and that’s what we’re celebrating.
Look, I love Jordan. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, I worshipped him. And I will grant that Michael Jordan is maybe more popular locally, nationally, and internationally than the White Sox. Maybe. It’s not, overall, a terrible idea to turn attention away from a bad team (really, two bad teams) by saying “MICHAEL JORDAN, REMEMBER HIM? THAT SHIT RULED.”
And who knows, it might work? MJ is still a legend. Hell, this is a city where half the fans at Soldier Field dress like Mike Ditka, a middling meathead reactionary who only won one Super Bowl with that team and didn’t even let Walter Payton score, motherfucker!
To say the city holds onto its past is understatement. We still hold on to 2005, and that was a long time ago, in a world different enough to make you weep. (For context, The Apprentice went on the air just the year before. Fun!) So yeah, appealing to nostalgia can be a good play. Reminding Chicago of the better times can send a thrill up our legs. Who doesn’t want to think about Jordan hanging in the air, burying that last shot against Utah, sending us into delirium. It’s a great basketball memory!
But of course, it is only that. It’s cool MJ was in the Sox organization. It was cool to see him in a Sox uniform. Dare I say he looked very good in it. His one game in the spotlight, he helped beat the Cubs! But that’s a piece of fun, not a part of deep Sox lore.
So while it might work, it is still a distasteful if not wholly bitter pill to swallow. Want to sell the idea of the White Sox? Think about anything else.
Maybe it isn’t that our marketing team has stopped understanding us, but that they understand who they are all too well.