CHICAGO
I just couldn’t help myself. The heat index was 105 degrees when I hopped on the train in Downtown Chicago to head to Guaranteed Rate Field on Monday, August 26 — the day after the White Sox had lost for the 100th time of the 2024 season — and I had the sudden urge to send a snarky Slack message to Meg Rowley.
“What are the odds that I’m one of 20 people in the stands today?” I also included a screenshot of the AccuWeather Minutecast.
After her response, two words that appropriately acknowledged the sweltering conditions, the exchange continued:
Matt Martell: Only the true sickos watch a team in August with more losses than the temperature.
Matt Martell: Is that my lede???
Meg Rowley: i think it is
I received my Certified Baseball Sicko diagnosis at an early age, but even I wouldn’t have endured that heat to watch the worst team in modern baseball history if I didn’t have to be there for work.
Chicago was the second stop on a cross-country roadtrip that had begun the previous Wednesday morning in Poughkeepsie, New York — about 20 minutes from Hopewell Junction, where I grew up and where my parents still live — and would end in Seattle 17 days later. My first destination was Pittsburgh, where on Thursday I saw Paul Skenes start, and wrote about his impact on the organization and its fans. The next day, I drove to Chicago to spend the weekend at Saberseminar with eight other FanGraphs staffers, including Michael Rosen, who detailed “the preeminent conference at the intersection of dingers and calculators” for Defector.
I stuck around one more day to watch the White Sox play at home before driving to Minnesota on Tuesday to catch Wednesday’s Twins-Braves game.
Initially, I planned to ask a few dozen White Sox fans the same question: Why are you here? Of course, that is a question for the ages, one that could prompt a meditation on the meaning of life, but I was interested in a more specific context.
Really, the connotation of my question was this: Why are you spending money to witness the team that you love degrade itself with such historical ineptitude? If that sounds needlessly harsh, well, that’s why I would’ve gone with the more philosophical and broadly worded version, but the purpose of my asking such a question wouldn’t have been cynical. Quite the opposite, in fact.
There’s something romantic about cheering for a terrible team with the unconditional love that Roger Angell captured in his writings about the early-60s Mets. It’s the beautiful, irrational core of fandom that we sportswriters often overlook.
That’s what I intended to do at the ballpark that night, anyway.
Instead, the fans I encountered were there for a different kind of unconditional love. After spending an uneventful top of the first inning talking with White Sox farm director Paul Janish, I left the press box for the stands.
I never learned the journalist’s trick to estimate crowd size, so I can’t give you a number for how many people were in the ballpark for Davis Martin’s first pitch. What I can tell you is that the number was below the official 10,975 paid-attendance figure, and that I had no trouble finding good seats in the section behind home plate.
I looked around and saw there weren’t many White Sox fans in the area: A middle-aged man and his not-quite-large adult son sat in the back and to the left of me — back and to the left — and one preschool boy who ran down the aisle before his dad caught up with him. That was pretty much it.
After another look, I realized that I was sitting among a sea of Tigers fans who all seemed to know each other. They cheered with every strike, but they also had a nervous energy that they were trying not to show; some were more successful than others. A few were clasping their hands together as if they were praying, while others were choking their beer cups instead of drinking from them. They grew more anxious as Andrew Vaughn stepped in with runners on the corners and one out; they offered reassurances after Vaughn’s sacrifice fly gave the White Sox an early lead. Finally, they erupted when Gavin Sheets grounded out to end the inning.
The reaction seemed a bit excessive for a first-inning groundout against an opponent who at the time had a 31-100 record, but then I noticed something. Most of them were wearing a Tigers cap with the same lettering stitched into its side above the right ear: Ty Madden 8-26-24.
Ah, yes. That makes sense, I thought. I pulled the Tigers’ game notes out of my pocket just to be sure. Yup, Detroit’s starter that night was Madden, a 24-year-old righty who had just been promoted from Triple-A Toledo. Unknowingly, I was sitting with his family and friends — about 50 of them, as one of his mom’s friends later told me — watching him complete the first inning of his major league career.
Admittedly, I didn’t know much about Madden other than his name, so I pulled out my phone and checked his FanGraphs player page and prospect report. Entering this season, Eric Longenhagen evaluated Madden as a “high-probability no. 4/5 starter,” assigned him a 45 FV, and ranked him the fifth-best prospect in the Tigers organization.
Madden was bumped down to sixth when Eric updated the list midseason, after Detroit had drafted one prospect who ranked ahead of Madden and traded for another. (Colt Keith, who ranked third in the Tigers system before the season, exceed rookie limits during the year and wasn’t included on the latest list.)
While writing this story, I asked Eric for an updated evaluation of Madden based on his 2024 performance, and here’s what he said: He’s had a pretty surprising uptick in walks this year, and when you put on the tape, he is indeed struggling with release consistency. But he’s sustained above-average stuff and has been durable amid multiple delivery tweaks since turning pro, and I think it’s fair to expect that he’ll eventually either refine his feel for his current delivery or keep making changes until things click. He’ll operate in a starter’s capacity for the foreseeable future during the regular season, but his current strike-throwing issues make him more of a multi-inning relief fit on Detroit’s playoff roster.
Madden had a much easier time in the second inning. He allowed a one-out single to Dominic Fletcher, who was erased two pitches later on Lenyn Sosa’s inning-ending double play. A woman a few rows in front of me shouted, “Yeah, Ty!” as he walked back to the dugout.
It was around this time that I decided I would stick with the Maddens for the rest of the game and skip the White Sox fans story. So many great pieces have been written about fans watching the team’s futility — Ben Strauss of The Washington Post has been sharing his favorites on Twitter all week, and I’d encourage you to check them out — and I’ve enjoyed reading them, but I figured I’d probably never again get the chance to see a major league debut through the eyes of his family and friends.
I knew I would write about watching the Madden Family Cheering Section watch Ty, but I didn’t want to intrude on their special moment, so I set a few rules:
- I wouldn’t talk to them until Madden finished pitching, unless they said something to me first.
- I would tell them exactly what I was doing as soon as I introduced myself, and if they weren’t okay with it, I would figure out another way to do this piece or come up with something else to write.
- I wouldn’t interview them; they’d have enough going on without some stranger sticking a recorder in their faces. Instead, I would talk to them and take notes about what I experienced sitting there with them, but I wouldn’t quote any of them by name.
