So let me get this straight. Kyle Teel — who is, as of this writing, the Chicago White Sox’s starting catcher, a designation that in 2026 carries roughly the same prestige as being named hall monitor of a school that’s already on fire — pulls his hamstring running the bases in the World Baseball Classic. For Italy. Not the United States. Not the White Sox. Italy. And now he’s out four to six weeks, which means he’ll miss the start of a season that most South Siders were already planning to miss themselves.

I’ve been a Sox fan for forty-seven years. I have watched this franchise lose in ways that would make a philosophy professor weep. But this is new territory. This is a man getting hurt in a game that doesn’t count, for a country he represents through what I can only assume is a genealogical technicality, during a tournament that half of baseball pretends to care about every four years. And I’m supposed to feel something about it? I genuinely don’t know what the appropriate emotion is. Anger? Resignation? A kind of bemused pride that our guy was good enough to get hurt on an international stage?

The discourse on Sox Twitter — or whatever we’re calling it now — has been predictably unhinged. One faction holds that the WBC is a meaningful showcase and Teel’s participation reflects well on the organization. Another faction, which I’ll call “the realists,” points out that the White Sox have not reflected well on the organization since approximately 2021 and that one catcher playing for the Italian national team does not change the fundamental arithmetic of a roster that lost 121 games two seasons ago. A third, smaller faction has simply posted the Italian flag emoji followed by the crying face emoji on a loop since Saturday, and I respect their efficiency.

Here is what I know about Kyle Teel: he’s 24 years old, he was the twelfth overall pick in the 2023 draft, and he is, by most accounts, the single brightest spot in a farm system that the front office has been “building around” for what feels like the entire duration of my second marriage. He hit .281 in Triple-A last year. He calls a good game. He is, in short, the kind of player that White Sox fans are genetically conditioned to become emotionally invested in right before something goes wrong. And right on schedule, something has gone wrong, except this time it happened in a Team Italy jersey, which adds a layer of absurdity that even I wasn’t prepared for.

The optimists — and yes, they exist, like those fish that live next to deep-sea volcanic vents, surviving in conditions that should not support life — will point out that four to six weeks is manageable. He’ll be back by late April. The Sox don’t play a meaningful game until, well, let’s be honest, they may not play a meaningful game at all, so the timeline is largely academic. But that’s not the point. The point is that the White Sox cannot go a single offseason, a single spring training, a single international exhibition tournament without finding a new and creative way to make their fans stare at the ceiling at 11 PM wondering why they chose this.

I called my buddy Ronnie, who’s had season tickets since 2004 and has the emotional scar tissue to prove it. I asked him how he felt about the Teel injury. There was a long pause. “Tom,” he said, “I watched the 2024 team lose a hundred and twenty-one games. I watched them trade away every good player they had for prospects. I watched them rename the stadium after a credit card. At this point, our catcher pulling a hamstring for the Italian national team is maybe the sixth-worst thing that’s happened to me as a fan this decade.” He paused again. “Seventh, if you count the parking situation at Rate Field.”

Shane Smith, meanwhile, continues his emergence as the probable Opening Day starter — a sentence that would’ve gotten you laughed out of any bar in Bridgeport eighteen months ago. Smith’s story, at least, is the kind of thing you root for: an undrafted guy who clawed his way through the minors and now finds himself holding the ball on March 26 in Milwaukee because, as is tradition, the White Sox’s plan A through D all pulled hamstrings, got traded, or moved to Italy. Good for him. I mean that sincerely. Somebody on this team should get to feel joy, even if the rest of us are still doing the math on whether an injury in Rome counts toward our suffering quota.

Opening Day is nine days away. The Sox play the Brewers at American Family Field, which is in Milwaukee, which is a city that also has problems but at least has the decency to keep its catchers in one piece during the offseason. I’ll be watching from my booth at Schaller’s, same as always, nursing a Old Style and hoping for something — anything — that resembles competence. If Teel is healthy by May, I’ll consider the Italy experiment a wash. If he’s not, I’m adding “international hamstring incidents” to the long and growing list of things this franchise owes me an apology for.

Hennessey’s Take runs every Tuesday and whenever the White Sox do something that requires a public processing session.