Religious devotion

In 2024, the White Sox set a record for the most losses in modern Major League Baseball history, with 121. More than a month into the 2025 season, things weren’t looking much better. The Sox were firmly in control of last place in the A.L. Central. Their average home attendance was the fourth worst in baseball.

Then, a miracle happened. Or something like it.

The papal conclave at the Vatican selected Robert Prevost to be the new pope. He was an American, a first for the Roman Catholic Church. And Pope Leo XIV, as he’s now known, was also a White Sox fan.

Since then, the White Sox have made a dramatic turnaround. They are now in first place in their division, and while there are real, baseball-related reasons the team is better (they added some talented players during their down years and are better managed), it’s more fun to wonder if this is all because their most famous fan is the Holy Father.

After all, some funny things have happened around the ballpark since then.

During a game against the Kansas City Royals on June 26, pitcher Mike Vasil wore a microphone for the TV broadcast. Catcher Drew Romo, who is Catholic, approached him in the dugout.

“Pope Leo, if you’re watching this game right now, say a quick prayer for a Jacob Gonzalez homer right now,” Romo said so the mic could catch it.

Seconds later, Gonzalez hit his first home run at Rate Field. Vasil bellowed, “It’s working, Leo!”

I went to Chicago last month to get a sense of the excitement and speak to people in the organization. I attended the no-frills Mass that the team hosts before every Sunday home game, where stadium workers sit next to players, coaches and executives at gray picnic tables. I visited the seat where the pope sat for Game 1 of the 2005 World Series (an incredible view, especially for a World Series game) and, for likely the only time in my life, saw the world as the pope might have seen it.

Mike Downey, the team’s senior director of promotions and marketing, tried so hard to make a pope bobblehead happen. He was planning his daughter’s baptism when I reached out Thursday night with some fact-checking. The bobblehead idea, he told me, was the third thought he had when he found out the pope was a White Sox fan — after “Oh my god,” and “Can we get him to throw out the first pitch one day?”

The church was less excited by the bobblehead idea, though I do wonder if the pope secretly finds it fun; most of the American Catholics I spoke with did. Alas, a Vatican press official did not respond to my email requesting an interview.

Downey ultimately went with a pope hat promotion: At this Tuesday’s game, about 40,000 people will get White Sox-themed papal miters as a gift with their tickets.

I had wondered if some of this pope-mania might border on offensive, but the White Sox were very careful to be respectful. They consulted clergy members as they made their plans. And there’s a strong Catholic identity that permeates the organization.

For Brooks Boyer, an observant Catholic who is the team’s chief marketing officer, having any kind of association with the pope was heady stuff.

“We’ve had sitting mayors of Chicago, we’ve had governors of Illinois that have been avid White Sox fans, we had a president of the United States in Barack Obama,” he said. “I didn’t expect anything bigger than the mayor when I started this job, but we’ve kind of climbed the ladder. What’s next? I mean, I feel like we’re one step away from God.”

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“There’s this little devil on my shoulder that tells me I don’t deserve any of this, and thinks that I should be in some little trailer somewhere addicted to drugs, not a penny to my name. So it does feel like I’m playing for my survival.”

— Billy Strings, the acclaimed bluegrass guitarist, in conversation with David Marchese. They spoke about Strings’s difficult upbringing, his discovery of music and becoming a father. Read more of their conversation or watch it here.

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