On May 8, 2025, Mike Downey, the senior director of promotions and marketing for the Chicago White Sox, took a break from work to swing by the office lunchroom on the third floor of the ballpark. A news channel playing on a television screen said the papal conclave at the Vatican had finally selected a pope. Mr. Downey, a lifelong Catholic, checked social media for more details.

The pope was American, for the first time in the church’s history. Interesting, he thought.

The pope was from Chicago. How cool.

Oh, he’s from a suburb just south of Chicago.

Do I know him? wondered Mr. Downey, incredulously.

Word was that the pope was a fan of the Chicago Cubs, the White Sox’ rivals on the North Side. The Cubs quickly announced the news on their marquee (“Hey, Chicago. He’s a Cubs Fan!”) and posted a photo on X.

Around the White Sox’ office, staffers and executives lamented their bad luck. A South Side Cubs fan? What a shame!

Then, just as suddenly, came a rebuttal from the pope’s brother: No, actually, Pope Leo XIV, formerly Robert Prevost, was a White Sox fan.

Mr. Downey — who had the forlorn job of enticing Chicagoans to spend money to see the lowly White Sox — immediately recognized the opportunity before him.

He distinctly remembers his first thought: Oh my god.

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, they remained firmly in control of last place in the American League Central. Their average home attendance in both seasons was the fourth-worst in Major League Baseball.

It was Mr. Downey’s job to find something to celebrate amid the gloom. He and his team had a long list of promotions planned for 2025, the team’s 125th anniversary season. A plush blanket. A 1907 replica jersey. A 1972 Dick Allen M.V.P. bobblehead. A working radio shaped like Comiskey Park, the team’s home for most of its history.

“That also was, honestly, trying to shield people,” Mr. Downey said. “Make people forget about what happened the year before.”

On the day the new pope was elected, the White Sox rewarded his enduring faith in them by losing to the Kansas City Royals, 10-0. Still, the pope’s fandom gave the team a new promotional angle, a way to respectfully capitalize on the joy sweeping over the city.

After confirming that Pope Leo was one of theirs, the White Sox made sure everyone knew it. Their social media team cheekily corrected the Cubs’ marquee, posting a photo of the White Sox’ scoreboard with the words, “Hey Chicago, He’s a Sox Fan!” Sales of their primary baseball cap increased by 33 percent in the next week. By the end of the year, three of the 10 White Sox social media posts that got the most engagement had something to do with the pope.

But those were one-offs; gaining an ally in the 266th successor to St. Peter called for grander ideas, so Mr. Downey and his colleagues set to work.

The team’s senior director of design services created a digital mural of the pope for a wall between Sections 140 and 141. In the top right corner is a smaller image — a screenshot from a television broadcast of Game 1 of the 2005 World Series when Pope Leo, then the leader of the Order of St. Augustine, was caught on camera during the final out. The team also added a commemorative plaque to the seat he occupied that day.

The obvious next step was to get the pope back in the stadium, at least in spirit.

Chicago has a large Catholic population, and the Archdiocese of Chicago is the third-largest diocese in the United States. According to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of adults in the city identify as Christian and 29 percent say they are Catholic, the largest of any denomination. The White Sox have hosted a small Mass for stadium employees for 30 years, when the Bertucci family, which still runs the Patio, the field-level hospitality area where the Mass is held, organized it.

A month after the pope’s election, the White Sox helped the archdiocese schedule a public Mass at Rate Field, where the team plays. About 35,000 tickets were sold at $5 each, during a season when the White Sox averaged 17,849 fans a game. Some tickets wound up on the secondary market for more than $1,000, according to The Chicago Sun-Times.

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.”

The pope sent an eight-minute recorded address, his first comments to an American audience. He directed much of his message toward young people, saying that he recognized the isolation they experienced during the Covid pandemic but that they could still be “beacons of hope.”

He thanked them for gathering at Rate Field, but he didn’t call it that. He called it White Sox Park.

The bobblehead is the essential promotional giveaway of sports teams everywhere, regardless of whether the head on the spring belongs to an actual player. When you consider that the Atlanta Braves twice gave away Outkast bobbleheads with Big Boi and André 3000 in a red convertible, and the New York Yankees are about to hand out their third version of a George Costanza bobblehead, a Pope Leo bobblehead was all but inevitable.

Mr. Downey called the team’s bobblehead producer the day the pope was elected. He ordered four samples with Pope Leo wearing his traditional robes while holding a White Sox hat over his chest. (He later ordered four more based on a photograph of Pope Leo wearing a White Sox hat.)

He shared the prototypes with Mr. Boyer, who gave two of them to Cardinal Blase Cupich of the Chicago archdiocese during the stadium Mass. He hoped that on the cardinal’s next visit to the Vatican he could present the bobbleheads to the right parties for approval.

“We don’t use his likeness without permission of the Vatican,” Mr. Boyer said.

Mr. Downey felt sure that the Vatican would greenlight the idea.

“And then we just heard nothing,” he said. “Each month went by and it was nothing, nothing, nothing.”

In November, he emailed the Rev. Tom Hurley, who had officiated his wedding to his wife, “to make a last-ditch attempt on bobblehead approval.” Father Hurley sent Mr. Downey to another priest, the Rev. Tom McCarthy, a South Side native of the Augustinian order, the same as Pope Leo.

Father McCarthy had strong fan credentials. His mother had worked at a steak stand in the White Sox’ old stadium, and he had been to games with his father. Father McCarthy has known Pope Leo for 35 years, he said in an interview, but no longer has a direct line to him. Instead, he emailed a Vatican communications office. “I did get a response, and they just said that they were not interested.”

He laughed.

“I think they may think a bobblehead is disrespectful,” Father McCarthy said. “But in the United States, I think people understand a bobblehead can be very complimentary.”

The team communicates with the Vatican through the Archdiocese of Chicago, Mr. Boyer said. But when contacted by The New York Times, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese said, “The White Sox do not seek, and the archdiocese does not offer, approval of individual promotions.”

So anyway, no White Sox pope bobblehead.

Mr. Downey’s other promotional idea was to give away “the full pope get-up,” as he put it — the miter, robe and chasuble. He ran it by Father Hurley, who suggested sticking just to the hat.

The team planned to give out 1,500 pope hats to fans who bought a special ticket for the White Sox game this Tuesday against the Cincinnati Reds. The tickets sold out so quickly that they added 500 more. And then another 500.

Finally, Mr. Downey and Gareth Breunlin, the team’s vice president for marketing and advertising, approached Mr. Boyer sheepishly about giving the hat away to everyone who comes to the game. Mr. Downey recalled telling him, “The pope hat is going bonkers.”

Mr. Boyer agreed, which means miters for about 40,000 people.

It would be easy, in an article like this, to resort to cutesy speculation about God’s rooting interests, given the pope’s proclivities. We are above that. Still, it must be said that the White Sox, who lost 102 games last year and finished in last place, are now in first place in their division.

Nobody is saying God is a White Sox fan, but they’re not not saying it either.

During a game against the Kansas City Royals on June 26, pitcher Mike Vasil wore a microphone for the team’s broadcast partner. 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,” Mr. Romo said so the mic could catch it.

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

The White Sox scored 22 runs in that game, the most they had scored in a single game since 1970.

“I was having fun with that but also kind of being real,” Mr. Romo said in an interview. “Like, Pope Leo, if you are watching this game, your prayers probably would help the team.”

If the pope wasn’t watching live, he almost certainly heard about it the next day. When A.J. Pierzynski, one of the stars of the White Sox’ 2005 championship team, got an audience with Pope Leo in late June, he told him the White Sox were in first place. The pope said he already knew that.

Mr. Pierzynski presented Leo with the game ball from the final out of the World Series game the pope had attended.

“He gets a million jerseys,” Mr. Pierzynski said. “I had the ball. That was the one thing he could never get. I’m sure it means more to him than it does hanging on my wall.”

A few weeks later the Athletics, who were on a six-game losing streak, visited the White Sox. Their manager, Mark Kotsay, who is also Catholic, sought out the mural of Pope Leo.

“I was asking just for peace,” Mr. Kotsay said. “And, yes, a change of luck, for sure.”

For him, it didn’t work. The A’s lost their next four games, including all three against the White Sox, whose fans are noticing their success. On average, the team has drawn 6,135 more attendees per game this year than they did in 2025 — the fourth-largest increase in Major League Baseball.

Recently, the pope had dinner with Brian Burch, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. Mr. Burch, also from Chicago but a Cubs fan, joked in an interview that the pope’s rooting interest was “the first heresy of this papacy.”

The pope’s fandom, he said, “is a reminder of his American roots.”

“Often people kind of imagine the pope as some sort of ethereal, otherworldly spiritual leader,” Mr. Burch continued. “And because he’s the first American pope and because he does what Americans do, which is root for their hometown baseball team, and he’s a very devoted fan at that, there’s a sense of connection to the papacy that has never been possible before.”

The connection will be evident at Tuesday’s pope hat giveaway game, which is almost sold out, Mr. Downey said.

Still, Mr. Downey is keeping the bobblehead prototypes on his desk at Rate Field. The White Sox would not allow photographs of them for fear of getting on the wrong side of the church. But if the Vatican ever changes its mind, Mr. Downey will be ready.