The final day of August was steamy in Chicago: a stormy morning that gave way to rain interspersed with muggy stillness and a hot evening made noisy by the mournful lust of the last cicadas. We tick into September, and toward the fall, with summer heat. This has never been unusual; September is mostly summer, and in these changed days the seasons stretch on shapelessly.
What is unusual, though, is for September baseball to have shape for White Sox fans. This is the month when playoff dreams are fulfilled or, like most dreams, dissipate into a vaguely sad awakening, in which you’re unable to grasp what just moments before seemed so true and clear and vital.
That’s baseball, and that’s September, and this is the rare time when we can feel it. The Sox entered the last day of the month three games ahead of Cleveland for the division and 2 1/2 games in front of Houston for the all-important No. 2 seed in the playoffs. Both of these ideas seemed like insane propositions going into the season. We’d all have killed for the chance to blow it against the Astros this week. But now that we’re in the nut of it, anything less than a division title will seem like a waste.
This tension — that without a wildly and implausibly entertaining summer, we wouldn’t be so tense and nervous heading into the last few weeks — is what makes September baseball so nerve-wracking. You feel, in that Bart Giamatti poetry sense, the coming of winter’s stark loneliness and know that a bad month will transform the summer from joyful to a waste. Had they fallen apart in July or slumped enough in August, we’d spend the winter thinking about how the rebuild was going and celebrating the months of giddy baseball we watched.
But blowing a lead in September? That will make those dark winter nights even darker. It’s not rational, of course — we’d be irritated because they played more winning baseball than in the other scenario. But rationality has little to do with being a fan. And anyway, we’re not used to it.
When is the last time September genuinely mattered to the Sox? Let’s look back, quickly.
- 2023–25: Not at all
- 2022: In theory, yes. The Sox were as close as 1 1/2 games back on Sept. 10. But that season never felt right, hovering around .500 and dealing with Tony La Russa’s joy-sucking bullshit. The Sox rewarded our doubt by frittering away the rest of the month, falling as far as 11 games back after being swept at home by Cleveland. A dead-cat bounce made for a fittingly pointless .500 finish
- 2021: September was a coronation; the Sox were never challenged for the division. In retrospect, they shouldn’t have coasted, but September baseball seemed nothing more than a prelude for October.
- 2020: This sort of counts, since they blew a division lead, but I don’t remember feeling very strongly about it, other than it was fun and unexpected and as weird as everything in that hot and deadly and terrible year.
- 2017–19: They were never closer than 24 games back in September. Jesus, really?
- 2016: A season that started great fell apart in the ugliest fashion, and by September they were an afterthought, hovering between 13 1/2 and 16 games back all month.
- 2013–15: Never within single digits in September.
- 2012: Depending on how you feel about counting 2020, the last time September meant something for the standings. And of course the Sox scratched their way to a three-game lead on Sept. 17, before blowing it to finish three back. I had forgotten that they pulled within one game at the end of the month, only to lose the next two to make the collapse academic.
- 2011: Started 6 1/2 back and a game over .500, peeking at contention, before finishing 16 back.
- 2010: Four games back to end at seven games back, peaking at 12. Never really happened.
- 2009: Never within five.
- 2008: Here we go! Started that month tied for first and seesawed back and forth with some generally uninspired baseball. Needed to win two in a row to force a Game 163, and did so, punctuated by Alexei Ramírez’s joyous grand slam. Then came the Blackout Game: a tense, nervy, thrilling affair that was the best of September baseball and gave a weird season a shape that became something awesome in our collective memory.
- 2007: Ugh, pass.
- 2006: The defending champs relinquished first place in May of that year and never got it back. By mid-September it was clear they weren’t catching Detroit. The hitting was better that year than in 2005, but the pitching magic wasn’t sustained. For me, at least, this didn’t feel that bad. We still seemed like a good team; Detroit was simply special that year and, anyway, complaining felt churlish. But I’d call this a September when the baseball didn’t really matter.
- 2005: Did your stomach just clench thinking about September 2005? Did you remember the nauseating feeling as the division lead slipped away, day after day? When the dream season became nightmarish, and our friends on the other side of town were counting down to one of the biggest collapses ever? Readers, I can’t even open the page for the 2005 schedule. It makes me sick thinking about it. Until, you know, we finally clinched, ran Cleveland out of the playoffs and only allowed one gentleman’s loss the rest of the year.
OK, so that’s 21 years of baseball, with, to me, three Septembers (2005, 2008, 2012) where the games really mattered. You might disagree about 2006, 2020 or 2022. But even if you add those, that’s six out of 21, with only two or three ending well.
So to say we aren’t used to this is an understatement. We don’t know how this will turn out; the future perfect is right now unknown (hell, at the moment, I don’t even know if we beat Houston tonight). This autumn could be an extension of summer or an early winter. September is when seasons go either way, even if White Sox fans barely remember how.
