You might think life is hard enough without being a Chicago White Sox fan. There's another way to look at it. The poet A. E. Housman tells of King Mithridates, who survived all the many venomous attempts on his life by incrementally dosing himself with poisons. I have survived to report that rooting for the White Sox similarly immunizes one against life's vicissitudes. Could this rugged wisdom explain why so many college professors are baseball fans? Probably not, since its darkness has affinities with the congenital pessimism of conservatives, and most academics say they are liberals. Yet our traditional national pastime's magnetic pull on professors—not to mention their resistance to any dean's suggestion to try anything new—makes one wonder.

What if we used professorial baseball loyalties as a Rorschach test? Think of a professor who hails from Nebraska or Alabama and in adulthood roots for the New York Yankees or the Los Angeles Dodgers. This person is so used to a winning college football team as to fall right in with a winning baseball team, and rooting for the overdog does not build character. Such a one, like the stereotypical conservative, is likely to be soft on big corporations, too.

It's quite another story with those who play rotisserie-league baseball. This is a parlor game. Participants mix and match players from any and all major-league rosters in search of their baseball Dream Team. Thus do they deny existing reality and fulfill their utopian urges. Utopians always imagine that they are in charge and not among those who need the perfecting touch of superior spirits. Rotisserie-league owners (the title of choice) follow sports pages, not baseball. They chart statistics. This is bean-counting in pristine form, and its only conceivable good is as career preparation for government work.

A non-Chicagoan who roots for the Cubs is probably a liberal. Assuming devotion to a team legendary for its ineptitude signifies a desire to identify with an underdog, which is the right thing to do. Artificially induced empathy is better than no empathy at all. But these nonnatives should search their souls to see if they are real Cubs fans or just garden-variety masochists. Either way, they really set me off.

As everyone knows, the Sox are the second team in the Second City. It has always been that way and still is. The World's Greatest Newspaper bought the Cubs, not the Sox; and until this season the tv station bearing its initials carried every Cubs game. The Sox get on only when the Cubs aren't playing. The Sox had to build a new ballpark to avoid being shipped to Saint Petersburg (Florida, but it might as well have been Russia). Since the Sox have historically been every bit as futile as the Cubs and have lower status, I call on all honest liberals everywhere to reconsider their baseball allegiance.

As a Chicago boy, I know what it means to be a real home-team fan. In recent years, I have come to believe, as the Sox ads say, that good guys—or girls, too, now—wear black. This belief may depend on a memory of past Sox uniforms, which alternately looked like clown outfits or pajamas. On the uniform front, the Sox are finally one up on the Cubs, whose uniforms were always—I admit it—adequate. And what's so great about Wrigley Field's ivy-covered brick walls? Players still get hurt running into them.

I became a Sox fan as soon as I was old enough to stay awake while lying in the dark on the living-room floor with Dad listening to the dulcet tones (that's what everyone called them) of Sox announcer Bob Elson. This father-son bonding was unavailable to fans of the Cubs, who back then played only day games (in God's own daylight, their fans said, and they had us there, though they never knew how unearthly bright the green grass of Comiskey Park under a black sky looked to a kid sitting next to his dad). Growing up before the rebellious sixties, I never once thought to quit cheering for the team my dad cheered for. One does not question laws of nature.

Since we were three-generation North Siders, the Cubs' side of town, it is a puzzle how Dad became a Sox fan. If it's because his dad was, a step along the path of eternal regress solves nothing. Maybe Dad was just ornery, but I prefer to think he was an independent thinker. It's good but hard to swim against the tide; here is where being a North Side Sox fan has real-life payoff. It bolsters the ego and braces one for stand-alone "nay" votes in committee meetings, and let the social constructionists make of it what they will.

Boyhood arguments—me against the world—seesawed. In earliest memory, I won on points when I brought up Luke Appling and Wally Moses; they could hit, though, admittedly, the Sox were cellar dwellers. Later on, I now concede, I lost when my pals brought up Ernie Banks, though the Cubs were cellar dwellers. Our team was best, we said back and forth ungrammatically, not to mention falsely.

These arguments spilled over into our play. In choose-up-sides softball, the boy who got top fist around the bat handle and held on while the other tried to kick the bat out of his hand got to choose the team name. The Cubs, always. I couldn't get my side to call themselves the Sox until my brothers got old enough to play with us, and then we reveled in taking on all Cub comers and trouncing them and telling Dad.

When we got to be teenagers, two new elements set in: reality and (what I now understand was) the incipient appeal of liberalism. We kept our loyalties but switched the terms of the debate, arguing now with the perversity of Original Sin about which team was worse. For a while, the Cubs kids lost hands down since history is history, and their guys had been in the World Series as recently as 1945 (and lost, of course), whereas the Sox hadn't been in one since 1919, the year of the "Black Sox scandal," which they said with such smirks that you'd've thought they'd thrown their own rotten tomatoes at poor Shoeless Joe Jackson in person.

But then, in the fifties, the Sox got uncharacteristically good. "Little Looie" Aparicio came up from Venezuela to lead off. He would get on, steal second, and score on a hit by number-two hitter Nellie Fox. Minnie Minoso, a castoff from the Mexican League who was already so old he wouldn't state his age, would keep the inning going, and the go-go Sox were off and running to yet another victory—and enough of them so that by 1959 they got into their first World Series in 40 years and partially undid the Black Sox ignominy (and lost).

Since I had left home by the time the Sox pennant arrived, only right at the end of my years among Cubs neighbors did they win all the which-is-worse arguments. I didn't mind. But, for verbal jousting's sake, I would explain that the Sox had players of limited ability who got the most out of their talents. I daydreamed of being just like Nellie, a left-handed hitter who was neither strong nor fast nor otherwise gifted but who played so far above his talent level as to merit Hall of Fame acclaim. In identifying with him, I could maintain a certain purity of heart as an underdog-loving Sox fan.

After leaving Chicago for school and work, I never returned to live there. But something in me warmed when I read Edmund Burke on the power of locale with its accompanying prejudices (a word in need of rehabilitation). Transient people usually get so captured by their new locality that they break old friendships without intending to. They may make fitting fans for the transient teams that soulless corporations buy and sell like jujubes, but they have necessarily loosened themselves from that special claim to the spot of earth where they were born.

I know this sense of loss. And it's only partial compensation to have eventually settled in elsewhere. Remaining faithful to the White Sox, even when it joltingly imposes the unfamiliar sensation of identifying with a power hitter of the magnitude of Frank Thomas, gives me a small sense of rootedness. If ever so slightly, it keeps me a Chicago boy in the sports-page-reading present, not only in the ever-dimming memory of the past. I keep what Burke praised: local affection for my little platoon.

Fan loyalty matters. It resists our fast-paced culture's assaults on a sense of abidingness. As fidelity breeds fidelity, I'm guessing that adults who still root for their childhood baseball teams don't cut and run when their denominations get a-squabbling; something in their life story inhibits church hopping. On the Fourth of July they think patriotism, not barbecues. I'd like to think that when the whole nation once tipped southwest and all the loose marbles rolled down into the L.A. basin, most White Sox (and, OK, Cubs) fans stayed at home and dealt with their problems instead of trying to run away from them. And some enterprising sociologist should investigate the correlation between fan loyalty and divorce rates.

Christian scholars worry that sport has taken the place of religion for many Americans. Although the statistics for church attendance, even on autumn Sundays when pro football is all over tv, put the matter in considerable doubt, I'll grant this much: that everything in God's creation and human culture, including sports, has come under the curse of the Fall. But all spheres of human activity can also be redeemed. Fans who are (etymologically correct) fanatics violate sphere sovereignty. Matthew Arnold erred in asking literature to substitute for religion, and sports fans can commit the same idolatry in their sphere. But they don't have to.

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that fan loyalty, properly held, helps one cultivate the virtues. And I don't mean any old virtues, either; I mean specifically Christian virtues. I mean even more than the humility in which Sox fans are so well schooled. Just line up the cardinal virtues of the two great streams of Western civilization, and you'll see what I mean.

Classical antiquity bequeathed to us the virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude. Of these, Sox fans know only fortitude. Although I've just spoken a word in favor of temperance, baseball does not foster it; it comes, if it comes, from elsewhere. In no way is it prudent to be a Sox fan, which is why non-Chicagoans don't join up. And, for very sure, there is no justice in the world for Sox fans.

But now let's list the Christian virtues: faith, hope, and love. You don't have to be a Deep Thinker to see the point. Faith? It's the evidence of things not seen, such as a pennant. Hope? We keep it alive, as Chicago South Sider Jesse Jackson learned early to say, and if it is the fate of the Sox to win a pennant once every 40 years, watch out for 1999. Love, the greatest of the three? Not even Bad Albert Belle can turn it aside. It abides. Thus does baseball help develop good habits of the heart.

You don't have to be a White Sox fan to understand all this, but it doesn't hurt.

Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is professor of English at Calvin College.

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