Sixteen days. That’s how long until the White Sox play their first regular-season game of 2026, and I’ve had Opening Day tickets in my coat pocket since February, and I’m not going to pretend I bought them for any rational reason. I bought them because I’ve had Opening Day tickets since approximately 1979, and breaking that streak now would feel like something I couldn’t come back from. My daughter says this is a sunk-cost fallacy. I told her that may be, but it’s my sunk cost, and at least I’m not the one who spent four years getting a degree in behavioral economics to end up living in Wicker Park.

For those who weren’t paying attention last season — and I envy you, genuinely — the White Sox did some things on the field that I would rather not recount in specific numeric terms because my blood pressure is already where it is. What I will say is that it was bad. It was historically, epochally, cosmically bad. I went to seven home games last year. I left three of them early, which I have never done in my life, and I once sat through a doubleheader in 1991 that ended at 11:43 on a Tuesday. I did not leave those games early. I was younger then, and more optimistic about what the ninth inning would bring.

The word I’ve been hearing for three years now is rebuild. They’re rebuilding. The kids are coming. The process is working. Trust the plan. When I hear “trust the plan” from a baseball front office, I reach for my antacids, because in my experience the plan is usually fine and it’s the execution that’ll kill you. But here’s the thing — and I can’t believe I’m saying this, so I’m going to say it quietly — I’ve watched some of these kids play. There’s actual talent down there. Not “well, maybe if he develops” talent. Real, observable baseball-playing talent, on an actual major league roster, wearing the pinstripes. When I told my buddy Carmine this, he stared at me for a long time and then asked if I’d had a stroke.

The front office has been active this offseason, though I’ll admit I stopped following every transaction around the time I got confused about which outfielder was on which minor league affiliate. What I do know is that people in the organization are using phrases like “competitive by June” and “building something sustainable,” which is either genuine optimism or extremely sophisticated fan management. Could be both. In Chicago, it’s usually both. The good news is that the floor of my expectations is so low at this point that “competitive by June” would genuinely constitute exceeding them, and I’ve learned to find joy in that.

I’ll also say this about Guaranteed Rate Field, even though I hate saying it: it’s a good baseball stadium. I’ve been going to games there since the mid-nineties when we still called it Comiskey and I refuse to use the current name in casual conversation, but architecturally speaking, the sightlines are fine, the sausage is fine, and when the stadium is actually full of people watching a team that’s playing well, there’s nowhere else on earth I’d rather be. The problem is that “full of people watching a team that’s playing well” has been a specific combination of conditions that has not obtained with great frequency in recent memory. But it’s spring. The conditions could obtain. I’ve seen stranger things.

My father took me to my first White Sox game in 1974 at the old Comiskey. We sat in the upper deck and ate peanuts and I didn’t really understand what was happening on the field but I understood that my father was happy, and that happiness had something to do with what was happening down on the grass. I’ve been trying to reproduce that feeling, in some form, every April since. Some years it shows up in the second week. Some years you get one good inning in late June and you hold onto it through winter. Last year, I’ll be honest, I’m still looking for it. But you go back. You buy the tickets and you go back. That’s not a sunk cost. That’s just who you are.

March 26. Section 108. I’ll be there with Carmine and my neighbor Pete and a large Italian beef from the stand on 35th Street, and we will watch whatever happens with the particular combination of hope and dread and involuntary loyalty that has defined my relationship with this franchise for almost fifty years. If they win, I’ll feel great. If they lose badly, I’ll feel bad, but the familiar kind of bad, the kind you’ve built a tolerance for. Either way, it’s baseball, and it’s spring, and I’ve already paid for the tickets, and there’s no use in pretending the alternative was ever really on the table.