An OK giveaway does not a good jersey make
In 2021, the White Sox were ascendant: A fun, brash, exciting team that seemed poised to compete for multiple World Series. There were a few potential dark clouds on the horizon — a lack of depth, a few position players that were out of place, the hiring of Death’s grandfather to manage the club — but surely the Sox were a team on the rise. A team that seemed like it could be the face of baseball.
That year was the first year the Nike City Connect jerseys came out. While there may have been some kerning issues that could make “South” look like “Smith,” the Southside jerseys were an instant hit, and seemed to capture the club perfectly. They were cool, they channeled the energy of the team’s players, and were a clothy embodiment of what made the club so fun to watch.
One could even say they were iconic, in the degraded way that word gets tossed around today. (“I put extra mustard on my sandwich.” “Bro, that’s iconic.”) Indeed, if the future had gone as planned, we would probably put this Nike marketing ploy on a pedestal.
But the future only goes as planned when those planning it are cheap and greedy, when they mold the world to their limited horizons, and seek a future of ruins rather than romance. The future is easy to foresee when you can’t see past your parochialism, and have the means to make everyone live in the confines of your pinched imagination.
So fast-forward to now. No need to belabor of how far the White Sox have fallen, how 100 losses in 2025 would be a marked improvement over last season. But a good shorthand for that is the (so far unofficial, but following a pattern of “leaks” for the Houston and Washington jerseys) 2025 White Sox City Connect uniform.
@chgo-whitesox.bsky.social
Now. At first glance, this isn’t bad. It is an obvious reference to the Bulls, a citywide team, but with West Side grit to match South Side pride. The pinstripes are a callback to a lesser Bulls alternate, but the Bulls have had an (sigh) iconic look for the entire history of the franchise.
It’s very weird to not have something that celebrates, you know, the White Sox, especially on their 125 anniversary season. Maybe an outline of the old stadium. Maybe incorporate pinwheels. Hell, maybe even hint at the ridiculous softball collar. It may be a goofy history, but it is our history.
Still, this isn’t a terrible shirt. It would be a pretty cool giveaway to the first 20,000 fans on a random Saturday.
Except, of course, it’s not. It’s an actual jersey, that looks like, as our own Chrystal O’Keefe said, a knockoff you’d find at a Chicago-area Marshall’s. Not a professional baseball jersey. Something cheap, and ill-thought, and ill-planned. It looks more like Nike put “Make a baseball shirt for Chicago but not Cubs” into AI and this is what they came up with. Revisions? Who has time for that!
And, honestly, probably something like that happened. In 2022, the writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification,” which he used to talk about how things get worse. Essentially, vendors attract consumers with good products and services, then those services degrade as they shift focus from the individual consumer to enterprises (but you’re already stuck with it!), and then degrade everyone’s experience to maximize shareholder value.
That’s a very specific case, but we see it all around us. Make better products? No, that costs more. Focus on customer service? No, just put a chatbot in. Maintain a consistent profit by making consistently good things? No, fuck you, that’s loser talk. Instead, make enormous profit by stripping overhead to a captive customer base so we can cash out before everything crashes.
In that, you see echoes of the late-stage Reinsdorfian White Sox. The product matters less and less. There is a captive fan base, and guaranteed TV money, so the actual baseball barely matters. There are plenty of bells and whistles and a generally positive fan experience, so that’s more or less good enough.
Now, Reinsdorf isn’t a rapacious post-human capitalist like the Ricketts family, or so much of the new breed of tech owners and failchild inheritors. The team isn’t just part of a portfolio. His decay is much more genteel, in its own way, a sort of wearied and monied indifference.
But Nike? The people who designed these uniforms? They’ve gone from upstart to behemoth and have fully entered the enshittification phase. Their products keep getting worse. Imagination and creativity are a distant memory. They’ve turned themselves over entirely to the shareholder model, with predictable results.
So these City Connect jerseys are, while not terrible as a shirt, a good amalgamation of overlapping indifferences. I don’t know the exact process of Nike design and White Sox approval, but it seems that in this, as with so much else right now, no one involved really seemed to care that much, no one felt it was worth the effort — and as long as a few more dollars could be made, then effort is for chumps.