Bot This

One day last week, Michele passed along a tweet that purported to be from a national baseball group, though it sure read as political, maybe by way of a place where they don’t play much baseball.  We do live in strange times.

Anyway, the tweet, along with another one I found from the group, talked about a baseball crisis that isn’t being addressed.  And what could it be, you ask?  Why, criminal activity around Guaranteed Rate Field!  The tweet called it an emergency and wondered if the White Sox shouldn’t move to now-vacant Turner Field until conditions improve.  Give me a break.

Mental midgets have brandished the specter of crime in and around 35^th and Shields to slur the White Sox and nearby black residents for as long as I can remember.  “Oh, you don’t want to go to Comiskey Park, it’s not safe.”  So, my parents must’ve wanted to reduce the number of children in their family when they let me take the bus, alone, to the park once I reached high school.  And my dad must’ve had a plan all those times we parked in Bridgeport for a night game in the 1960s and ’70s.  Yeah, he was going to toss me to the wolves so he could make a run to the car.

Happily, I’ve lived long enough to see actual Chicagoans, including Cubs’ fans, stop mouthing this gibberish.  In Chicago, where race has mattered from day one, the White Sox have always been sensitive in that regard.  I’ve come across correspondence from as early as 1917 where someone a part of the Great Migration was amazed that he could attend a major-league ballgame in the presence of white people.  Comiskey Park was for a time home to the Negro Leagues’ Chicago American Giants in addition to the annual Negro Leagues’ All-Star Game.  None of this turned off white fans from packing the park during the Go-Go Sox era, or its replacement across the street during the 2005 World Series season. 

Go to a Sox game, and you’re likely to see the most mixed sports’ crowd in Chicago: white, black, brown.  All that matters is the play on the field, not the color(s) in the stands.  Somehow, I think the fact that ex-president Barack Obama is a Sox fan played into those tweets.  I’ll take a Sox fan, regardless of color, to a dweeb tweeter any day of the week.