Jim Margalus @sulagram-blog - Tumblr Blog

Sox Machine is back

After seven years with SB Nation at South Side Sox, I’ve returned to my first (and last?) home for White Sox writing at Sox Machine. Likewise, the South SIde Sox Podcast is now the Sox Machine Podcast.

The White Sox-Giants World Tour of 1913-14

One hundred years ago, the Chicago White Sox and New York Giants played 46 games across five continents over five months to spread the game of baseball around the world. For a trip that spanned 35,000 miles, it had a surprisingly short afterglow. The establishment of the outlaw Federal League stole headlines from the tourists during the winter, and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand threw the world they just circled into turmoil a few months after they returned to the United States.

(The ballplayers returned to the United States on the Lusitania, which was sunk by German U-boats one year later.)

In terms of finances and attendance, the trip was an unquestionable success. Yet its legacy was immediately muted, and when future international ventures failed to find the same success, its impact was largely forgotten. Major League Baseball is giving a nod to the tour’s centennial by staging the season-opening series between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks on the Sydney Cricket Ground, but the stories don't provide a whole lot of additional detail besides the score and attendance. The White Sox and Giants haven’t said much, if anything, themselves. Heck, even a paper in Sydney got the year wrong.

That’s a shame, because as Rob at South Side Sox said, the modern-day equivalent of the ambition required by Charles Comiskey and John McGraw would be Jerry Reinsdorf challenging the San Francisco Giants to a series on the moon. And when you discover what the 67 members of the traveling party experienced and endured, it’s even more mindboggling.

So this winter, I spent the entire offseason at South Side Sox digging into the world tour and recreating the journey with day-to-day updates of their “globe-girdling” adventure. Besides my own research, I received some assistance from James E. Elfers, who wrote the book on the topic and shared items from his trove with me. The result is a section comprising 54 posts, historic photos and an interactive map. It’s a fascinating trip and an enlightening one, tying in some important early baseball figures (Comiskey! McGraw! Christy Mathewson! Walter Johnson!) with some of the world's most important people (Pope Pius X! King George V! Sir Thomas Lipton!), and it hints at an influence the White Sox could have wielded had scandal not wrecked the franchise for decades.

Talking about where the White Sox stand before the trade deadline on The McNeil & Spiegel Show on 670 The Score.

Making my Score debut on with Mully and Hanley.

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"There's actually a very fine White Sox fan blog called South Side Sox that I see every day and I like. Maybe not additional information, because obviously their information is incomplete, but I like to see how they approach our decisions and analyze where we're going and not just how it's playing, so to speak, but what is an outsider's point of view from someone who clearly wants what's best for the organization. There is a real role for fan blogs, for lack of a better description."