Gene & Me: The Ecstasy of Defeat

      Hard to express just how small a part of my consciousness is taken up by the White Sox. I think about topology more. Somewhere between the mental energy expended on Q-Tips and that dedicated to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. 

     But Gene Weingarten is my hero — the best newspaper writer alive. His column collection, "Fiddler in the Subway," made me proud to be in the same profession. Even if I never did anything remotely as good, and never could, we share the same rough job description, as people who arrange words on a page. A stretch, I know, like saying you resemble someone because you both have bilateral symmetry. 

     Bottom line: when Gene asked me to engage in a colloquy about the White Sox and their historic losing streak, you can be damned sure I was going to engage in a colloquy on the White Sox and their historic losing streak. He posted the results on his Gene Pool blog Tuesday, and I want to share it with you here today. This is his introduction — I show up later on, adding my perspective on the perennial South Side losers, for what it's worth.

     We live in turbulent, truculent times. Matters of grave importance are in flux; one day you think the country faces a certain depressing storyline, and then, seemingly overnight, the scene shifts momentously and who knows where we wind up?
     I think you know what I am talking about. We are confronting what we have become as a nation, and wrestling over whether this is really what we want to be: bullies and braggarts and bigots and weirdos? Or do we want to be miserable defeatists mired in despair? But now, suddenly, there is a third reality, a bright beacon around which we can flitter like moths, and coalesce: I am talking about the Chicago White Sox. 

     Let’s take a breather from the furious frenzy of politics. Let’s enjoy the beauty of failure, embrace it, and grow mighty from the purity of it. Remember, Chicago will be the scene of the Democratic National Convention: There is resonance in this.
     The White Sox are a bad baseball team, but even better than that, they appear to be on the cusp of becoming the worst baseball team the modern world has ever known. Their ineptitude is degrading and pathetically wound-licking: One of their better players is “Andrew Benintendi,” whose last name, as i see it, tepidly translates into “good intentions.”
     This team is so bad it is seriously statistically challenging the comically feckless 1962 Mets, the losingest team in modern baseball history, for the distinction of being immortally bad. Can we not love this team for their failures? Indeed, can they love themselves? Can we not celebrate humanity in its glorious totality — strong and weak, good and bad?
     It was just three months ago, in the Gene Pool, toward the very start of the season, that I envisioned exactly this scenario, but cited … The Miami Marlins, a team that, at the time, stank like a deceased mackerel in the sun. I proposed launching The Badwagon, a takeoff on “The Bandwagon,“ Tony Kornheiser’s famous 1991 mid-season columns urging fans to join his online club rooting for the Redskins to keep winning games, and then win the Super Bowl. (They did, and did.). The Badwagon would be similar, but different. I was urging readers to root intensely for the Marlins to keep losing, on the theory that there is nobility in abject failure.
     That was three months ago. Time, that thief of joy, intervened. The Marlins found a small degree of competence. They began winning occasionally. Right now, they are a very bad team indeed, but not a historically, world class very bad team.
     But Time, and Fortune, have once again smiled on us all. The second worst team from three months ago, the Chicago White Sox, girded their loins and roared stunningly backwards. You can practically hear the urgent bleat of a garbage truck in reverse. As of this morning, The White Sox were on a spectacular 21-game losing streak, a mere two losses from the worst frenzy of decay in history. They are now way worse than the Marlins. As of today, their record was 27-88, which is a winning percentage of .235. That’s even crappier than the uber-crappy ‘62 Mets, a brand-new team, one composed almost entirely of castoffs from other teams, a team that included the famously maladroit Marv Throneberry, a team that finished the season at 40-120, the most losses ever. Their winning percentage was .250. The 1916 Philadelphia Athletics finished even lower, at .235.

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