CHICAGO — Two seasons after the Chicago White Sox lost 121 games, a modern major league record, fans of the team said Thursday that they do not know what to do with their hands, their weekends, or the general feeling in their chests ahead of Game 4 of the American League Division Series against the Cleveland Guardians.
The White Sox, who finished the regular season 84-78 after three consecutive 100-loss seasons, swept the Houston Astros in the wild-card round for the franchise’s first postseason series win since 2005 and lead Cleveland two games to one. The team is the first in major league history to reach the playoffs after two or more consecutive 100-loss seasons, a distinction several fans described as “not something we trained for.”
“I have a whole system for losing. I don’t have anything for this,” said Ray Kolodziej, 54, a Southwest Side bus mechanic who has attended an average of 31 games a season since 1989. “In 2024 I knew where my hands went. One on the forehead, one on the back of the neck. Now we score a run and my hands just sort of go up, and I don’t know who they’re for.”
Fans reported a range of symptoms. A season-ticket holder in Bridgeport said that she had cried twice in the wild-card round and was unable to determine the cause either time. A man in Beverly said that he had purchased a new cap and could not bring himself to wear it, out of concern that the cap would “find out.” A survey of 412 fans by the Center for Measured Outcomes found that 64.3 percent had been bracing for disappointment so continuously since 2023 that they were no longer able to stop, and that 11 had braced so hard during Wednesday’s Game 3 loss that they were, as of Thursday morning, still braced, and had to be carried to work in that position by co-workers who were also braced.
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, said the condition is well documented. “There is a long tradition of fan bases that suffer for so long that hope becomes a foreign object,” Achterberg said. “The literature describes a town in 18th-century Bohemia whose bowling team won a single match after 40 years, and the entire town went inside and did not come out until the following spring. I wrote that literature last night, but it holds up.”
The Center’s survey found that hope among White Sox fans had risen 318 percent since August, though Dr. Marjorie Teller, the Center’s director, cautioned that the baseline was “essentially a rounding error, and the rounding error had moved to Arizona.”
Asked how he planned to watch Game 4, Kolodziej said he would follow the same routine he has followed for every playoff game this year, sitting in the same chair, in the same shirt, with both hands placed flat on the kitchen table where he could keep an eye on them.
“If we win, I don’t know what I’ll do,” he said. “If we lose, I know exactly what I’ll do. That’s the scary part. I’ve gotten good at the wrong thing.”