Culture
Infamy, thy name is White Sox. We’re past the point of embarrassment here
It was another day and another loss for the Chicago White Sox, but there was something extra special about Sunday’s defeat.
Sunday’s loss, a standard 13-7 defeat at the hands of the Minnesota Twins, marked their 20th in a row — a nice round number to give this franchise the national stage it deserves. No team had lost 20 in a row since the 1988 Baltimore Orioles, who lost 21 times in succession.
In Chicago, we’re used to the White Sox losing. It’s kind of their thing. But 20 in a row? We’re past the point of embarrassment here.
In Chicago, we’ve been laser-focused on the Sox being on track to break the 1962 Mets’ modern-day record of 120 losses, but now we’re at the point where they could surpass the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies’ record of 23 straight defeats.
Infamy, thy name is White Sox.
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On NBC Sports Chicago’s beloved, painfully honest postgame show Sunday, host Chuck Garfien was rattling off some familiar insult statistics.
“Twentieth loss in a row, 40 games back, 1-12 against Minnesota,” he said. “I could go all day on this, 1-12 against Kansas City …”
That’s when Frank Thomas interrupted him. Thomas is, of course, the greatest player in franchise history and a semi-regular co-host on the show. As a hitter, Thomas was a stickler for details. On this show, too, he wanted it to be accurate.
“Sixty games under .500,” he said. “Under. Sixty games.”
That’s when Garfien realized his mistake. With the loss, the White Sox had dropped to 27-87. Talk about a Big Hurt.
“Sixty games,” he said. “I said they were 40 games under .500.”
With a little theatrical flourish, he slammed his stack of papers on the carpet.
“They’re 60 games under .500!” Garfien yelled, before settling back in his chair.
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That’s when Ozzie Guillen, Garfien’s everyday co-host and the team’s World Series-winning manager, brought up the stat that I came up with recently: If you take out the Sox’s two franchise-record losing streaks, they still have the worst record in baseball.
See, it’s one thing to be the worst team in baseball in a singular season. Someone has to do it, after all. But add to that a 14-game losing streak and a 20-game (and counting) losing streak, and it makes them a contender for the worst baseball team in modern history. A laughingstock for the ages.
The ’62 Mets were an expansion team with a certain sense of whimsy. They had Marvelous Marv Throneberry and Casey Stengel. Jimmy Breslin’s book, “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” was a classic, and seven years later, the Amazin’ Mets were world champs.
But the White Sox have been around since 1901. Their franchise record for losses is 106, which should be eclipsed before Labor Day. It’s been a long way down from the rebuild that was supposed to bring multiple championship parades to Chicago.
Two years after the Sox won 93 games and the AL Central, they hit what we thought was rock bottom. That was last year when they lost 101 games and Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf made the move none of us saw coming by firing his longtime front-office duo of Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn. Reinsdorf promised a quick turnaround behind new general manager Chris Getz. No one believed Jerry then because why would they? He has no trust left with the fans, not after all these years.
For some reason — OK, money — the team kept manager Pedro Grifol, whose managing record is currently 88-188. But he’s been a dead manager walking all season, and after the trade deadline passed, the focus quickly turned to his job status. It almost seems cruel that Getz and Reinsdorf haven’t fired Grifol yet. Maybe they’re waiting for him to win a game so he can go out on a high note.
“That means Pedro is 100 games under .500 since he got the job,” Guillen said. “Hoo, hoo boy.”
Ozzie is having an existential crisis on the Postgame Show right now pic.twitter.com/5eCUlirBgI
— White Sox Talk (@NBCSWhiteSox) August 4, 2024
Guillen, who led the Sox to their World Series victory in 2005, said he needs to see a psychologist because he’s been more angry and sad than usual lately. The reason?
“I don’t think I was that bad a manager, but they picked Pedro in front of me,” Guillen said to laughter on the show.
After Tony La Russa stepped down following health issues in 2022, Guillen was given a token interview for the open job, the one that he gave away in 2011. Guillen has wanted this job back for years, but the previous regime of Williams and Hahn didn’t want him back and they had no intention of hiring him two years ago. I agreed with them but only because the organization needs to move forward, not backward.
Guillen added: “I swear to God on this, when Rick Hahn called me and said I don’t have the job, he said, ‘We found the next Ozzie Guillen.’”
While Hahn was trying to compliment Grifol, Guillen, who went 678-617 (.524) in eight seasons, sure doesn’t appreciate the comparison now. But I bet he’s getting a kick out of how bad the Sox are without him.
A lot of fans want Guillen to immediately replace Grifol if and when the team fires him, but why would he want that headache? If I were any of the coaches on Grifol’s staff, I wouldn’t want to take the job, either. You don’t want to have to answer questions about this team, this season, twice a day.
Now, in what could be his waning days in the job, Grifol took some time to do what a lot of failed coaches and managers do in a Reinsdorf regime: kiss up to the boss.
“I’ve said this before and I’m going to say it again,” Grifol said according to the Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune. “This gets taken out of context and somehow it gets turned around over and over again, how people want to perceive it. Jerry’s a winner, OK? He’s an absolute winner. He’s a competitor. No, he’s not content. Who is?”
People have funny definitions of what makes someone a winner, especially when they work for a perennial loser.
The Bulls are under .500 since their actual, absolute winner, Michael Jordan, retired in 1998. The Sox have made the postseason just seven times in Reinsdorf’s 44 years of ownership. The 2005 playoffs were the only time they won a series, and 2020 and 2021 were the only years they reached the playoffs in back-to-back seasons.
But Grifol is speaking to an audience of one, even as he’s left dangling.
If the Sox get swept in Oakland this week, they could break the ’61 Phillies record at home Friday against the Cubs. The atmosphere will be somewhere between funereal and riotous.
I can’t imagine Grifol is on the top step for that one. How could you do that to him? How could you insult the fans’ intelligence by keeping him around?
It’s an awful situation for everyone, but this isn’t just on Grifol, though he’s certainly culpable for making a bad situation worse.
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While he’s focused on building up the farm system, Getz tried to add some defense to last year’s slapdash fielding team to make the major-league product more palatable, but he failed in a very public fashion. The core hitters who are always hurt were, surprise, injured again early in the season (Yoán Moncada has played only 11 games and is in the team’s top 10 for bWAR), and the season fell off the rails with a 3-22 start. The starting pitching, at least, has been solid, and Getz and his staff have bolstered the organization’s pitching outlook.
That’s all part of the upside to losing: It allows a front office the runway to improve an organization, sometimes fairly quickly. That was the plan after the 2016 season, and it worked until it didn’t. But in his first trade deadline, Getz’s moves were widely panned, and new baseball rules are limiting the Sox to the 10th pick in next year’s draft.
Money is going to be an issue. The Sox are having another attendance decline, and their TV broadcasts, which were a highlight for the team, are now thought of as the worst in baseball. The team’s deal with NBC Sports Chicago is ending and a new RSN (in partnership with the Bulls and Blackhawks) will debut this fall.
It’s going to be a long road back to respectability. At least there’s still the TV pre- and postgame shows, which were as unfailingly honest and critical as ever Sunday. Those shows, the Campfire Milkshake and the pitching in the minors are the only things the organization has going for it.
The White Sox lose and lose and lose, and they’ve gotten so much practice, they now might be the best to ever do it.
(Photo of Nicky Lopez reacting to Sunday’s loss: David Berding / Getty Images)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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