Column: Anxiety is just part of Chicago White Sox's journey

The narratives surrounding the Chicago White Sox are familiar to anyone who has paid any attention during the regular season.

Resilient. Grinders. Collegiate atmosphere. Cinderellas with eye black. Too young and dumb to know they’re not supposed to succeed.

The team was blessed in absentia by Pope Leo XIV and routinely wanded by the wizard. They’re playing with house money, so anything more than a postseason appearance is gravy.

It’s a delicious story of a team overcoming the odds, ignoring the experts and sublimating their egos for the collective. The Sox’s pitching plans are a daily mystery, and worries over Grant Taylor’s right arm falling off have become nightly debates in South Side bars.

Can the Pope really pull strings with the guy upstairs and get the White Sox to a World Series?

Those narratives have led us to Game 4 of the American League Division Series on Thursday night, where the Sox could either clinch against the Cleveland Guardians and move on to St. Petersburg, Fla., to play the Tampa Bay Rays in the AL Championship Series — or send the series back to Cleveland for Game 5, putting their fans in widespread panic mode.

It goes without saying that no one believed they’d be here, including Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf.

The Sox were underdogs in spring training, and Reinsdorf admitted to Chicago Sports Network’s Brooke Fletcher on Wednesday that “probably 75 wins” was his guess, perhaps .500 if they were “lucky.” The Sox were overlooked by the national media during their second-half residency in first place in the AL Central, again at the start of their wild-card series against a .500 Houston Astros team and then again at the start of the ALDS.

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Now they’ve been “discovered” by media members who ignored them all season and are proclaiming they’re “legit.” The Athletic, which eliminated its Sox beat writer position a few years ago, had three reporters at Game 3. Only two local news stations — WGN-Ch. 9 and WLS-Ch. 7 — sent reporters to Cleveland. And no local radio reporters were in Houston or Cleveland. But now everyone is on board, and the White Sox clubhouse is getting more and more crowded.

Still, it’s a soft and fuzzy story with a drizzle of nostalgia. The Sox even invoked images of Little League players enjoying some postgame ice cream with their buddies at the local Dairy Queen.

“Ice cream cones are good luck,” catcher Kyle Teel said after news broke that teammate Sam Antonacci told WGN he was eating ice cream during Munetaka Murakami’s moon-shot home run in Game 1 of the ALDS. The headline on a recent MLB.com story read: “Magic ice cream? White Sox using sweet treat as latest good luck charm.”

Between the Pope, the wizard and magic ice cream, how could this team ever lose?

But then came the nightmare of Game 3, one of the Sox’s worst performances in weeks. The 9-3 loss to the Guardians included a postseason-record 19 strikeouts by Sox hitters, 10 walks by a half-dozen Sox pitchers and two wasted Automated Ball-Strike System calls by Teel in the time it takes to Google “Who is Belmont Cameli?”

It was reminiscent of Game 3 of the 1983 ALCS against the Baltimore Orioles at old Comiskey Park, when the Sox came home after splitting in Baltimore with expectations through the roof. A couple of fans carried a bedsheet banner around the park before the first postseason home game since the 1959 World Series with a simple message: “Don’t F−−− Up.” (Spoiler alert: The Sox lost in four games.)

After most of the sellout crowd filed out Wednesday, one solitary Sox fan stood at his seat under the press box, shouting obscenities about the Guardians and the city of Cleveland. It wasn’t clear whom he thought would hear him, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Sometimes you just need to scream into the void.

No one would’ve blinked if the Sox had lost in similar fashion in any season from 2023-25. That was their default mode. But after watching the Sox win four straight games to start the postseason, hopes were higher than ever, and a poor performance led to some booing at the end of Game 3.

The good news was that the Sox were still in the driver’s seat, with another home game Thursday and a 2-1 lead in the best-of-five series. Game 5 in Cleveland was a fallback plan in case disaster struck again.

The hope was that the Sox bullpen — which is basically everyone but Sean Burke — had enough bullets left for one more day. Well, metaphorically speaking, of course. Suffice it to say the mystery bullets that landed in Rate Field’s bleachers in 2023 and wounded two women definitely aren’t relevant to this feel-good story but are worth mentioning to remind us how much the Sox narrative has changed.

Expectations have risen, but baseball is baseball, and nothing is out of the realm of possibility.

“It’s a team sport,” Antonacci told CHSN’s Fletcher after the Sox won in late June after blowing a lead. “If you’re mad about giving up two runs in the ninth, take your ass to go play tennis or an individual sport.”

That was the quote of the season from the Sox and a great observation on the fickleness of sports fans in general. Anxiety is part of the package, so just deal with it.

When I asked Antonacci about the quote in Cleveland recently, he said it was misconstrued by some fans, saying he was talking about a team sport is a different mentality.

“In tennis, all you have is yourself out there on the court,” Antonacci said. “You don’t have to worry about anyone messing it up for you. It’s all your mistakes, all your errors and your success is solely because of you.

“When you sign up for baseball, you’ve got to rely on so many other people, and so that’s what the team aspect is about. Some people took it out of context. I was saying you’ve got to succeed and fail with your team. And if you don’t like failing, you can’t blame it on others when you’re playing tennis.”

Antonacci’s profile has grown immensely since the postseason began — and he has become a symbol of the White Sox’s unexpected rise. Few fans knew who he was at SoxFest in January, but now he’s the lineup’s designated igniter and the human piñata who gets hit by pitches and slaps his helmet in triumph.

Antonacci has been called a “psycho” by teammates, who good-naturedly mocked him in the clubhouse after a bad route in left field led to a running catch in Game 2. If you can’t mock your friends, what are friends for?

This White Sox story has been so fun to watch that it’s going to be hard to top. Imagine how it must feel to be one of the players on this long, strange trip from near anonymity to the postseason spotlight.

“It kind of reaches a threshold, because you work toward stuff your whole career, and after you get into this year, how can it get much better?” Antonacci said. “It’s going to be hard to conquer this year in the upcoming years. But you can only live in the present. I’m taking it all in, and it’s everything I could ask for.”

It’s hard to live in the present when you realize how far you’ve come to be here.

But for the White Sox to get to where they want to be, the present is the only thing that really matters.