The South Side Shuffle: White Sox finally grew a sense of humor about it. We think.

By Jeff Kallman

Cue the immortal blues and soul singer Etta James warbling “At Last.” At long enough last.

The White Sox, that band of baseball blight slouching toward a new record for getting their heads handed to them on the regular season, finally grew the one thing this month that they’d lacked sorely beforehand: a sense of humor.

It didn’t exactly begin in the top of the fifth against the almost as hapless and hopeless Angels Tuesday night. But this was one time you saw two or more players suffering a defensive brain fart without wanting to have them shot, hung, lethally injected, or forced to watch reruns of My Mother, the Car. And, without them wanting to hand you the weaponry.

At the plate: Angels left fielder Mickey Moniak. First-pitch swinging against White Sox starting pitcher Jonathan Cannon. Popped up around the plate to the right side but fair enough. Converging: Cannon, first baseman Gavin Sheets, third baseman Miguel Vargas, and catcher Chuckie Robinson. The latter three all but surrounded Cannon, who had so good a bead on it that he could have just held his glove forth.

But someone called Cannon off the play. And the ball went not into another White Sox glove but onto the Guaranteed Rate Field turf with a thump before Sheets retrieved it, perhaps a bit sheepishly.

“Folks,” purred one of the Angels’ announcing team, “that’s how you end up with a record of 36 and 120. It’s not just the dogs barking here on the South Side.”

The box score says only that Moniak got himself an infield base hit and then stole second with Angels third baseman Eric Wagaman at the plate. That’s as far as Moniak got before the side was retired. The game remained scoreless until the Angels plated one each in the seventh and eighth—before an RBI double and an RBI infield single set the table for White Sox left fielder Andrew Benintendi’s tiebreaking single.

That 3-2 score held up. Then, the White Sox performed the heretofore unthinkable: they went on to sweep the Angels to finish their regular season at home. It falls now to the Tigers to hand the White Sox that one loss that sends the 1962 Mets packing from the regular season record book.

They sure knew how to see and raise a pair of late-season foul-ups that finally began showing these Blight Sox were beginning to learn to laugh at themselves, somewhat and somehow.

Not too long ago, Vargas plowed into Benintendi on a play. Infielder Lenyn Sosa didn’t know a catcher throwing around the horn would start the routine at second base and caught it with his face. And the Guardians beat the White Sox a fortnight ago with a pair of two-run infield hits.

Said that day’s White Sox starting pitcher Davis Martin: “You walk that fine line of being on the edge of losing your mind—always on that razor’s edge. We’re just watching it all, and we’re like, oh my gosh, this happens and this happens. Truly, it’s so many things.”

That’s not exactly 1962 Mets manager Casey Stengel hailing incoming Polo Grounds customers, “Come an’ see my amazin’ Mets. I been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I never knew were invented yet.”

It’s not exactly Hall of Fame outfielder Richie Ashburn finishing his splendid career as a 1962 Met and observing, “I don’t know what to call this, but I know I’ve never seen it before.”

“I think if there was any other group of guys in here, it would be the most miserable existence ever,” Martin said to ESPN’s Jeff Passan. “People are like, 'Oh, how are you not losing your mind?' We're a bunch of young idiots just trying to make sure we have a job next year."

“Any losing team I’ve ever been on,” Ashburn told journalism legend Jimmy Breslin (for Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?), “had several things going on.”

One, the players gave up. Or they hated the manager. Or they had no team spirit. Or the fans turned into wolves. But there was none of this with the Mets.

Nobody stopped trying. The manager was absolutely great, nobody grumbled about being with the club, and the fans we had, well, there haven’t been fans like this in baseball history. So we lose 120 games and there isn’t a gripe on the club. It was remarkable . . . I can remember guys being mad even on a big winner.

Don’t tell that first part to White Sox infield vet Nicky Lopez. He’s been playing clubhouse DJ all season. He cranks the post-game music. He helps remind his mates what wins mean, especially when wins seem extinct enough that a three-game winning streak earlier in September feels like a World Series triumph.

So does interim manager Grady Sizemore. The one-time Cleveland matinee idol is now the family man who still looks like a matinee idol (despite the mullet) and has been nothing but a look-on-the-bright-side influence upon his players. Enough so that he’s gone from not even a consideration in the conversation for the permanent White Sox managing gig.

In fact, the man who once boasted of a large female fan club known as Grady’s Ladies now credits parenthood for teaching him “a lot of patience . . . how sometimes you have to say things over and over again.”

As a parent, it's very hard. Even after you've figured it out, you haven't figured it out. So I think the best part about where I'm at is I know that I haven't figured anything out and that every day is a new day to learn something new and to get better.”

Not once has Sizemore surrendered to the temptation to call for a rescue team to lift him up, up, and away from the disaster into which he walked when dour Pedro Grifol was ordered to walk the plank.

Sizemore’s White Sox may have a .261 winning percentage since he was anointed. He’ll be on the bridge when they pass the Mets. But he’s not going to let them go down without a fight or a smile or something, anything positive to take to next spring training, no matter who’s on the bridge.

Enough of his players won’t, either. Even if there are no Stengels or Ashburns in the clubhouse or Breslins in the Chicago press corps. (Has any Sox player hailed any reporter yet the way Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr. did when his Orioles opened 1988 with what proved to become a 21-game losing streak: "Join the hostages.")

Casey Stengel looked bemused during his tenure as first manager of the Mets.Photo byNew York Mets

In ’62, Stengel told his New York barber, “Haircut, shave, and don’t cut my throat, I may want to do that myself later.”

Sizemore won’t even think about cutting his own throat yet. But somebody might want to counsel him on the mullet. That may yet become a metaphor for Blight Sox baseball no matter how the team finishes off.

Even if they could have gone from Tuesday night onto a season-ending, expectation-defying, record-denying six-game winning streak. They’re halfway there. But the odds still favor their passing those ’62 Mets.

There’s a piece of any truly empathetic baseball fan that wishes that they’d continue to run the table with a closing sweep in Detroit, settling for a tie at 120.

No matter how truly bad White Sox baseball was for most of this season.

Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.