I became a season ticket holder for vanity. Has to be, right? There is simply no other explanation. No person can make it to 81 home games. Most people, myself included, barely make it to half. Season tickets should be held by Chase, United, Midwest Savings Banks, used as an ever rotating ‘atta boy. Yet here I am dear reader, the rightful inhabitant of Section 546, Row 4, Seats 15 and 16, all summer long, three summers strong. My season tickets are at Rate Field. 35th and Shields. Home of the Chicago White Sox. My team for better and mostly worse.

My mild obsession with getting out to the ballpark began humbly enough. After watching the Sox “good years” 400 miles away in Lexington, KY while earning a degree from the University of Kentucky, then treading water making music and managing liquor stores, I’d finally returned to the city I love in late 2011 (for those curious my moving back has been immortalized in the feature film “Happy Christmas”). 2012 would prove the last winning summer on the South Side for nearly a decade and by 2013 both the franchise and myself were in blow up mode. Unemployed outside of splitting a few hundred dollars playing The Empty Bottle or Coles or The Whistler a few times a month, I began to find purpose and cheap thrills riding my bike down from Logan Square to Bridgeport to catch a game. Tickets for the upper corners were $7 at the gate, but once inside you could sit wherever you pleased. In those brutal years they really began leaning into gate giveaways. T-Shirt Mondays and then T-Shirt Thursdays, I began to think it was foolish not to catch every game I could get to.

My Sox and I both began to rebuild in late 2016. They’d deal their only ace, Chris Sale, to Boston for prospects and I began my journey inside of Teamsters Local 727. The next few summers got by both of us. I became too busy working films all summer to make it down to the ballpark much and what felt like a few blinks later we were on the backside of a global pandemic. 2021 found the White Sox winning the AL Central for the first time since 2008 and found me captaining transportation crews for television shows. With newfound gusto I started to make my way back down, but the team, hampered by injuries in 2022, never could figure it back out. By the time a right hook from José Ramíerz caught Tim Anderson’s jaw in August of 2023 the window was shut. That off season as I, a satellite of Hollywood, experienced month after month of a writers strike, talk began about moving the White Sox to Nashville. I couldn’t and wouldn’t believe it but I kept asking myself, “What right do I really have to complain?” I decided that it was simply time to buy that right. If they were to leave they would leave with me in a seat.

Work resumed for me on “The Bear” season 3 in January of 2024 and after a few paychecks had cleared, it was time to call up a sales rep and lock in for the summer. I knew the seats I wanted. The first row of the best section of the cheapest season tickets you could buy. I was in. I was ready. The Sox were not. My first summer I had front row tickets to the worst season in the history of professional baseball. A history almost as old as America itself. 41-121. It started bad and got worse and worse and worse. By the end of the summer they were boo-ing wins. White Sox faithful rallied around the idea of being crowned with the most losses ever. A badge of honor and my first badge as a season ticket holder. That fall they sent me a box of every tchotchke they’d given out that summer. I stored it neatly away waiting for the time Cooperstown calls to ask for it to be displayed in their hallowed halls. 

I came back for more in 2025. Same seats and same results more or less. We’d ballooned the win total to 60 but our losses at 102 relegated us again to a laughing stock. My vanity project had gone awry. If you buy season tickets for the status, what status does owning said tickets to the worst team in the show give you? I didn’t have an answer to that but I decided to keep digging.

Here we are in year three. As I wrote these very words the White Sox moved into first place in the division. The team is fun and the team is having fun. Young guys that want to play for each other and a Japanese superstar who picked us on seemingly a whim. We’ve also got the Pope on our side. Old Leo XIV is a dyed-in-the-wool Sox fan and proud of it. Things are looking up and anything can happen and I’ll be there for it. I can’t give up the seats now. I can’t give up the seats ever. If these rumors ever come true, if the White Sox ever leave Chicago, they will be ripping me out of my seats. And maybe that is vanity. To think ownership cares what two seats out of 40,000 thinks. But that’s what I bought the tickets for. That’s what I keep buying the tickets for. To show off and show up.

This piece is in Recommend If You Like The Baseball Issue Summer 2026. You can find physical copies in bars, cafes and stores in Chicago and Washington, D.C. The newspaper is available for purchase here.

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