Dr. Jon Greenberg Or How I Learned to Write a Generic Southside Article

Um—what more can I say? In the annals of generic, stupid stereotyping of fan bases—Jon Greenberg may have taken the cake in 2009 for his article ESPN.com article "Passion runs deep on South Side" So, excuse me for my best FireJoeMorgan.com impression (see: ripoff).

You White Sox fan.

Yes, yes I am, how are you doing?

You also love Ozzie's never-ending yap, the sweetest Spanglish you've ever heard, and you love Kenny's cool confidence or arrogance, take your pick.

No, not really. I have trouble loving anybody who feels Dewayne Wise is an everyday player.

and you love big, bad Bobby Jenks because he kind of looks like your cousin from Bridgeport.

He does look a little like my tall, fat (DEEP DISH PIZZA!!!!!!!) cousin with the blonde chin beard.

You love Paulie and J.D., because they swing for the fences, like they ought to.

Darn tootin! When you hit .240/.344/.438 you earn some respect on the South SIDE!

You loved Jerry Reinsdorf. Then you hated him. Then you loved him again. Then you hated him again. Now he's got a lifetime pass. A World Series will do that for you. White Flag trade? Who can remember that far back?

Correct. 11 years is way too long for me, I am Southsider Sox fan—who just happens to be from the suburbs or from another part of the city, like a majority of my fellow fans.

If you're a little younger, you cherish Joe Crede's defense, Aaron Rowand's hustle, El Duque's one inning and Robin Ventura's very existence.

Direct Aaron Rowand to hustle/grind/grit reference—YEEEEEEEESSSS!!!

Geoff Blum and Scott Podsednik can drink on your tab anytime.

Maybe Podsednik if he brings his hot ass wife.

You are a White Sox fan and you drive to the game -- and always try to park on a side street for free.

Well that's pretty accurate. Oh wait, no it's not. In the past two years of attending a White Sox game I've taken: Metra + Red Line Train, Pace Park and Ride, and have parked in the US Cellular parking lot four times. But I did park on the street near Armour Park one time. SOUTH SIDE!!!!!

You have eaten a grilled cheese at Jimbo's and washed it down with a beer ... or six.

Jimbo's sucked.

You wish you could still smoke in the park. You know it's not politically correct, but you do.

Um, what?

You are Scott Johnsen.

No, I'm Sox fan, remember?

You have a Sox tattoo that runs from your left shoulder halfway down your massive arm, just shy of the full-color Bears logo that adorns your equally massive forearm. That was a going-away gift from a buddy, when you left for the Army. You're a mechanic now, or you were until you got laid off.

See also: Typical Chicago meatball. Scott Johnsen is probably still yapping to his friends about wanting Kyle Orton back.

How do you describe your fellow fans? "We're hard-core," you say. "You have to be hard-core. We were bad for a lot of years. We're South Siders, blue collar."

Except that various studies done by organizations that actually realize the Superfans SNL skit was a joke have shown that the difference in income or occupations between White Sox fans and Cubs are virtually non-existent—and in fact per capita income for White Sox fans was higher. But um—STOCKYARDS!!!!!!!

You are a Sox Sider. You live on the South Side, but you don't have to, to be a real fan.

So do I live there or not? Am I still Scott Johnsen?

No, the whole South Side mindset is beyond geography. It's more about an ideal, a historical yearning perhaps. A South Sider has a timeless sense of being overlooked, underappreciated, downtrodden, but still tough.

GRINDERZ!!!!!!!

Always tough. Tough enough where you don't care about ephemeral things, like respect from the so-called experts.

Apparently you've never talked to a White Sox fan after a Baseball Prospectus prediction article comes out. For a stereotypical group of fans we sure do bitch a lot.

"We're better when we're underdogs," you say. "Pick us last every year, I don't care."

Out of the 19 ESPN expert, exactly 0.00% predicted the Rays would be in the World Series. ST. PETERSBURG PRIDE!!!!!!

You are Michael Seymour.

So I'm not that tattooed meatball anymore?

You are 57 and live in St. Charles. You have no connection to the South Side.

Well then why they hell do we care about him. I'm too tough to care about you, I'm a Southsider, remember?

The only time your mother, God bless her heart, could get you boys to a game was at night. You became a Sox fan.

Cool. So you're a lot like Cubs fans all over the country who became fans via the access to the WGN Superstation or Braves fans via TBS.

You're at Opening Day with younger brother Steve, a 55-year-old with a full head of white hair.

Keith Hernandez can probably fix that for you—Your beard IS WEIRD.

You are a White Sox fan

Oh I get what you're doing now. You're showing that we're all connected through a similar bond, nicely played Mr. Greenberg

and you still call it Sox Park, even though it was named for Old Man Comiskey from 1976 until U.S. Cellular, a cell-phone company you probably don't use, forced itself unto your tongue in 2003.

First off, it was never Sox Park, so you're already lazy as hell. And US Cellular was forced unto your tongue, much like US Cellular has forced millions of dollars of amazing renovations to turn the sterile, generic new Comiskey Park into the lush, very accommodating US Cellular Field. SOX PARK!!!! STUBBORN!!

Maybe you still call it Comiskey or you call it The Cell, because it's funny and for a while it seemed like someone was getting arrested there every night.

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! I REMEMBER THAT!!!! THE TIME WHERE THE GUY RAN ON THE FIELD THAT ONE TIME. THEN YOU SHORTENED US CELLULAR TO CELL WHICH REFERS TO A JAIL CELL!!! WOOO!!!

One thing's for damn sure, you don't call it U.S. Cellular Field.

I and about 95% of my fan base does. If we called it anything else, we'd be wrong. The name of the park in which our team plays baseball is called U.S. Cellular Field.

You like going there because it's not Wrigley Field. You hate Wrigley, even more than you hated Sosa, Mark Prior, Kerry Wood and Ronnie Woo Woo. You hate Wrigley because of what it stands for -- tourists, fake fans and stuck-up suburbanites.

Yes because there isn't a single Sox fan from the suburbs.

You are Paul Konerko, the captain of the Chicago White Sox.

Oh good god no.

Baseball players might act like they don't need the media, don't want the media buzzing around their lockers, but when the nightly news leads with your rivals, every night, you get a South Side-sized chip on your shoulder, too.

I should probably be worrying more about my declining power skills and inability to run like a normal human being as opposed to how much Steve Berthuaine talks about my team on the 30 minute Baseball Tonight at midnight.

"I think the mindset is to do better than the Cubs," you tell a reporter on Opening Day. "I think some fans are like that. Since we've won the World Series, some fans are just more focused on us."

I'd say the mindset is to do better than most teams in the league. I like World Series Championships, personally.

And now you know the fans have changed since that fall. When you win it all, "with that comes the expectation that you have to do that every year," you say. And you kind of like that pressure.

As long as that pressure doesn't include a man on first base, one out, and a ball low and inside.

You are a White Sox fan

I'm BACK!

and you are optimistic.

About as optimistic as someone who has Dewayne Wise starting every single day in CF.

It's April, the squad is 3-3, and the season will unfold soon enough. Now is still the time to dream. And, yeah, if you were in charge, maybe you don't stick with Dewayne Wise in center, Chris Getz at second and the rotund Bartolo Colon at the back of the five-man rotation. But you know that Kenny has a plan. After all, who thought Podsednik for Lee was a great deal?

I thought it was a great deal at the time. Podsednik was a very good leadoff hitter with Milwaukee to the tune of a .276/.344/.401 line with a ton of stolen bases. We had enough sluggers on our team so Carlos Lee was quite expendable.

A.J. Pierzynski?

Better than the Ben Davis/Jamie Burke combo we were throwing out in 2004.

Then later, Brandon McCarthy for John Danks?

Um, John Danks was the 59th rated MLB prospect and 2nd in the Rangers system in 2006 and the 56th and 1st in 2007, with pretty similar stats. Most people would gladly have the lefty. Danks.

Carlos Quentin? All madness.

Carlos Quentin also a top prospect who was traded not because of skill but more or less a logjam of OFer in their MLB team and minor league system. UNDER THE RADAR!!

You are a White Sox fan and you have a chip on your shoulder, just like Kenny usually does, because the White Sox won the whole thing and brought a parade to downtown that crisp October afternoon, and more than half the city just didn't give a damn. It was as if the Red Sox won.

Half of Boston doesn't care if the Red Sox win?

Three million people showed up to the parade.

And you feed off that disrespect, even though "Da Mare" is a Sox fan and President Obama is a Sox fan and the only leader of the free world to have a summer home on the South Side of Chicago.

SOUTH SIDE!!! STOCKYARDS!!!

But it all comes back to respect and that other team in town. The Cubs get the celebrities to come to their games and bellow out "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and gab about how great Wrigley is, and how real baseball is played on the North Side, just because that stadium has some plants on the walls, an old scoreboard with no replays and a bunch of bars flanking its expanse.

Honestly, most Sox fans worry about winning, not about impressing fans they supposedly don't care about.

But then you think about this: The Sox have Obama, Daley and the late, great Bernie Mac. The Cubs have Rod Blagojevich, George Will and Jim Belushi.

Our team is whole hell of a lot better. Dead Bernie Mac is still funnier than Belushi.

The South Side has jazz and the University of Chicago, Saul Bellow and Richard Wright, Upton Sinclair's "Jungle" and Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH, Kanye West and Muddy Waters.

Well Sinclair's Jungle was written a little while ago. Muddy Waters was born in Westmont, a GASP, Suburb. Jazz? Really? I have a friend that's a jazz guitarist and he plays most of his shows on the—GASP!—North side.

The South Side is the proving ground of the Daleys and the atom bomb.

UNDER THE RADAR!!

You are a White Sox fan, and it's better to love something and feel pain sometimes, because you were rewarded once and you never know when fate will smile on your hard-core, tattooed arm once again.

Please don't associate me with that meatball earlier in your article.

One thing's for sure, only one baseball team has won it all this century in the great city of Chicago.

You are a White Sox fan, and you know the score.

OMG!!! CUB FANS DON'T PAY ATTENTION TO THE GAME!!! It is funny how every single person at a White Sox game is absolutely fixated on every single pitch and at-bat during a game at Sox Park. There is absolutely zero time for talking, eating, the Fundamentals Deck, the Patio, the Bullpen Sports Bar or anything of the such.

STOCKYARDS!!