By Roger Wallenstein

It’s not really the gooey descriptions like “the verdant expanse” or “emerald jewel,” the “lush outfield” or the “symmetry of the diamond.”
No, it’s more like Williams, Mantle, Berra, Aaron, Feller, Ford, Pierce and Miñoso, the men who left indelible impressions on the boy.
It’s the mustard smell, the iron pipes with layers of yellow paint surrounding the box seats, the non-descript scoreboards listing the results of the other seven games. It’s not rap, but the organ belching “Roll Out the Barrel,” and Whitey the Field Announcer telling us to “Get your pencils and scorecards ready.”
It’s the vendor hawking “Hey, Lemonade,” and the men in the left field stands stacking an ever-expanding snake of empty beer cups, a live monument representing their prodigious thirsts when no one focused on their ability to drive home.
What’s noteworthy is that the games, moments, personalities and milestones of 50 to 60 years ago provide more clarity to someone my age than those of the ’80s and ’90s when work, family, health and stability interfered with the attention one could pay to the sport. Even now White Sox pinch hitter deluxe Smoky Burgess (1964-67) occupies a clearer presence in my long-term memory than the team’s DH in 2005 – it was Carl Everett – when they somehow won the whole shebang.

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Posted on April 4, 2016

By Roger Wallenstein

Being a single dad 35 years ago living on a school teacher’s salary, my second job was hawking concessions at Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field in the summer and at Soldier Field and the old Stadium in the winter.
In those days Chicago’s soccer team, the Sting of Karl-Heinz Granitza, played indoors at the Stadium where I was climbing the aisles one frigid January afternoon selling my load of popcorn. Sales were slow, and my two young boys were back at my apartment on the North Side with a sitter to whom I was paying more than the commission I was making. So early in the second half I decided to check out at the concession’s cashier window.
Turned out that this might not have been the wisest choice since the union steward – we vendors were SEIU members – spied me as I headed for the exit.

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Posted on March 21, 2016

By Roger Wallenstein

The conversation this week may have gone this way.
“Rick, I really need to talk to you,” began the beleaguered Adam LaRoche. “These back spasms have been killing me, and I’ve had a lot of time in the past ten days to do some thinking. Rick, I think I’m going to call it quits.”
“Oh my god, Adam, this is a shocker,” gasped Sox GM Hahn. “What’s going on?”

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Posted on March 17, 2016

By Roger Wallenstein

Eddie Einhorn was unfamiliar to longtime White Sox fans when he surfaced in Chicago as Jerry Reinsdorf’s partner, leading a team of investors who purchased the ballclub prior to the 1981 season.
Einhorn, who died last week at 80, has been credited with bringing college basketball into the living rooms of millions of Americans beginning in the 1960s via his innovative TVS Network. But as far as baseball on the South Side was concerned, there was no connection when he surfaced 35 years ago.

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Posted on March 2, 2016

By Roger Wallenstein

The White Sox opened spring training with a number of question marks, not the least of which are back of the rotation, right field, and outfield defense. But none is quite so glaring as the shortstop position.
Gone is Alexei Ramirez, a seven-year fixture in the middle infield on the South Side. (Ramirez played eight seasons for the Sox but only 16 games at shortstop his rookie year of 2008.) Ramirez’s $10 million salary was predictably declined by the front office which, like the rest of us, saw that the 34-year-old’s better days were behind him.
The Padres will pay Ramirez $3 million this season, and we wish him well.

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Posted on February 20, 2016

By Roger Wallenstein

This is the right size and mercifully the right shape. We can sit back, relax and strap it down. Put it on the board. Yes!
Few of us had ever heard of 32-year-old Jason Benetti until he was named to the White Sox broadcast team on Wednesday. Before he so much as utters a word, though, it’s safe to say his presence and voice will be a refreshing breeze in the team’s media package. The predictable clichés, the ego-boosting hyperbole, and the “in my 55 years in baseball” of Ken (Hawk) Harrelson will be carried primarily when the Sox are on the road during the 2016 season while Benetti handles the home schedule.
Either by dumb luck or savvy judgement, the Sox have hired a young guy who wasn’t a former player ready and willing to regale fans with frequently embellished stories about his athletic past. Benetti is a Sox fan from south suburban Homewood who graduated from Syracuse University’s top-rated broadcast communications program and then earned a law degree from Wake Forest.

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Posted on January 14, 2016

By Roger Wallenstein

With all the flashy, headline-grabbing moves the Cubs have made the past few weeks, we Sox fans could be excused for feeling like a stray mongrel watching the purebreds parade their wares at the Westminster Show.
But we’re moving up in the world. Not enough to gain admittance to Madison Square Garden, but we don’t have to feel like a stray canine, scavenging the alley for leftovers anymore. We’ve been rescued.

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Posted on December 16, 2015

By Roger Wallenstein

Call it our National Pastime
Or America’s Game,
But the way the White Sox play it,
Is just a doggone shame.
Where is the energy?
What happened to the drive?
Management keeps reminding us
They won it all in two thousand-five.

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Posted on October 4, 2015

By Roger Wallenstein

The Yogiisms and the lovable gnome of a man are not what I remember most. No, the havoc Lawrence Peter Berra, who died last week at the age of 90, wreaked on a consistently talented White Sox team in the 1950s is what I recall most clearly.
As the current sorry edition of White Sox players – most of whom no doubt recognize Berra solely from AFLAC ads – gazed from their dugout at Yankee Stadium prior to last Thursday’s game as New York manager Joe Girardi, a former Yankee catcher for four seasons in the ’90s, along with three present Yankee catchers laid a flowered wreath in the shape of Yogi’s number 8 in the catcher’s box at home plate. No doubt nostalgia hung from every rafter of The Bronx shrine, but aging Sox fans could be excused for recalling the manner in which Berra extinguished hopes and dreams.

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Posted on September 28, 2015

By Roger Wallenstein

Sitting in the September warmth last Thursday as one of the announced crowd of 12,406 at the miserably named U.S. Cellular Field, I couldn’t help but think that my beloved team is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
This was even before heralded closer David Robertson was tagged for a ninth-inning, three-run homer off the bat of Billy Butler, giving the Oakland A’s a 4-2 win and a split of the four-game series.
I can understand if most observers realized long ago the irrelevancy of this team and its franchise, but there is this emotion called loyalty which gets in the way for many of us. Some might call it stupidity.
However, last week ghosts from across the street might have been stirring. Not White Sox ghosts from the old ball park called Comiskey which, of course, resided exactly where we had parked our car last Thursday. Cardinal ghosts.

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Posted on September 20, 2015