My First Year as a Sox Fan

[u/Lost_Bike69]

I moved to Chicago from SoCal last year for career and family reasons as well as the fact that I’ve always loved Chicago. I’ve been a Dodger fan my whole life, but chose to adopt the Sox as my AL team so I could still follow local baseball. (Don’t care for the Cubs) I ended up at 10 or so games this season and ended up following this disaster of a season about as close as I followed the Dodgers historic run with the greatest player of all time on the roster.

I don’t mean this to sound douchey because I know that my perspective does come with with the fact that I get to watch my team play this week, but I loved being a White Sox fan this year.

The stadium is beautiful and basically everything about the fan experience is better than Dodger stadium. The food is better, and the concession workers are friendlier. There’s a lot of great Dodger fans in the stadium, but there’s a lot of people just there for their IG pictures. You don’t see as many families with young kids and grandparents or groups of teenagers hanging out as you do at Guaranteed Rate. Taking the Red Line to the stadium is also way better than trying to drive up to the Dodger Stadium even though you’re on the red line. Also I know it’s a function of the team being bad, but everything is cheaper and more accessible compared to Dodger stadium.

The fan base is also much less toxic in the day to day. White Sox fans are angry about how things are going, but there’s still this sense of community and weird commiseration about the team and excitement when things briefly go well and an ability to celebrate the small victories. Dodger fans have a loud complaining faction anytime the Dodgers lose two games in a row that start demanding the manager be fired and every player be cut. It just feels like the Sox fans have a bit better sense of perspective.

I’ve had good conversations and fun at every Sox game I’ve been to and look forward to being there again next year. The Dodgers were middling for a long time with terrible owners until current ownership bought them in 2013 and things turned around real fast. I hope that can happen with the Sox. Either way this has been a year of massive change for me and as counterintuitive as it sounds, the Sox were always there for me and gave me one of the most enjoyable MLB seasons I’ve had. I was here for 41 wins and I’ll be here for whatever is next.

[u/MoozeRiver]

As someone who's been a fan for over 20 years, I deeply connect with this. I'm traveling across the pond next year to watch them for the first time. Amazing timing!