The gates opened before noon Thursday for the lots around Rate Field and suddenly a moment long anticipated, here as much as anywhere, had arrived.
No more wait ‘til next year. No more suffering through a long winter of cold, baseball-less discontent. Now there was something like a rebirth, even for supporters of a team that a year ago was as lifeless as any in baseball history.
This was not merely opening day, an annual rite in Chicago and more of a holiday in this city than in a lot of places, but it was opening day on the South Side. Opening day for the White Sox, losers of a modern major league record 121 games a season ago; standard-bearers, now, of a new and unrivaled sort of sports misery.
And yet more than three hours before the first pitch against the Los Angeles Angels, the spaces in Lot B, just across from the stadium on 35th Street, were starting to fill. Already, it smelled like charcoal and sausage and beer and the “Southside” flags, rising from various groups of tailgaters and revelers, were rippling in the wind.
Already, it was a party; the long mourning of a season ago a thing of the past.
“This is our favorite holiday,” said Rosa Haraf, a lifelong Chicagoan and South Side native who has been a Sox fan for 25 years. Now she lives “uncomfortably close to Wrigley Field,” she said, but as soon as the Major League schedule came out she and her husband bought tickets to the Sox opener and made their plans. They arrived at 9 a.m. Thursday to wait for the lots to open.
Baseball’s opening day is for the believers, the diehards and dreamers. It’s an early spring sacrament for the faithful, everywhere, but few scenes better personified the spirit of it than outside Sox park. For more than six long months in 2024, the place had been home to an abundance of pain; futility that defied belief or description.
White Sox loyalists suffered through it all, a lost season going from dreadful to something almost comedic, and then they found themselves on Thursday coming back for more, as if they hadn’t had enough. More of what, they couldn’t exactly be certain.
Well at least they had this: a fresh start and a new day and the confidence that things had to be better.
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That they couldn’t possibly be worse. Right? Right!?
When fans last gathered here, late in September, there were jeers and boos while the Sox improbably swept the Angels in a three-game series. Alexis Lopez, a lifelong fan, attended one of those games and “I was laughing,” she said Thursday, “because I’m like, ‘You shouldn’t be cheering your team to lose.’ Like, I understand you want to see history.”
The Sox made that dubious history, anyway, last year and finished with one more loss than the hapless 1962 New York Mets. Yet Lopez and thousands of others returned as if all that losing hadn’t happened. It’s the magic of opening day, the promise of new beginnings.
That and the allegiance of South Siders. “We’re loyal as all hell,” Lopez said.
She had taken off the rest of the week from work and all around her were people who wouldn’t have missed this. John Trznadel, attending his 55th consecutive White Sox home opener, was among them. He missed the one during the pandemic, actually, “but his cardboard cutout was here,” said Christine, one of his four daughters, three of whom joined him Thursday.
They’d prepared Sox-themed cookies for the occasion and all of them, daughters and Dad, wore custom-made Sox T-shirts in celebration of opening day. It is a day, Trznadel said, that “makes you alive,” even if the home team’s prospects seem dim. He has felt that way since his older brother convinced him to skip school in 1971 and head to Comiskey to see the home opener.
He has been hooked ever since, a regular during the good and not-so good years; a regular even last year during the journey into the abyss. His only prediction was that his team would be “better than last year.”
That it had to be.
“That’s all I can hope for,” he said.
Hope defines opening day, and on Thursday it manifested on the South Side as much as it did in and around any major league park. Maybe more.
A group of guys in old-timey White Sox garb — 1919 jerseys, in fact — strolled the grounds for photo ops and raised spirits. They were invited guests, a troupe from Dyersville, Iowa, that comes out of the corn there to reenact Field of Dreams for tourists. Now they were tourists themselves, and struck by the support for a franchise that perhaps deserves less of it.
“A little bit different than walking out of the corn,” said Jim Offerman, one of the Field of Dreamers, as he and his teammates posed for pictures. They arrived in a van after a 4 ½-hour ride and ran into clogged streets around the stadium. Offerman looked around.
“We don’t have any traffic jams in Dyersville,” he said.
Across the lot, vehicles were still streaming in. The first-arrivers had been here for hours. By now, though, the lines to get in the stadium were growing and soon enough the concourse was packed too. Inside one of the merchandise shops about a half-hour before first pitch a fan offered a meager prayer: “I just don’t want the first pitch to leave the ballpark,” he said.
To the contrary, the Sox escaped early trouble, scored three times in the second and then homered twice — off the bats of Andrew Benintendi and Lenyn Sosa — in a five-run eighth. Their first four pitchers, meanwhile, combined to throw eight scoreless innings. The nervous dread subsided, for once, and the roars returned as the Sox triumphed.
It was opening day and they were undefeated after an 8-1 victory. It was opening day and a season after finishing 51.5 games out of first place, they were tied atop the standings. Upon the final out, most in a crowd of more than 31,000 who’d gathered stood. The noise grew with each strike, reaching a crescendo on the third. The fireworks followed.
It was opening day, and the White Sox ended it in first place.