William Blake probably wasn’t a baseball fan. The Romantic poet of mystical prophecy, of beautiful and terrible visions, died in 1827, well before he could write about a magnificent dinger, and probably couldn’t even in his wildest fire-breathing fantasies conceive of Shohei Ohtani (though given that he believed all of the human species was essentially god, would have understood his power).
Regardless though, I was thinking about baseball while leafing through a collection of his the other night,
right after the Sox walloped Kansas City, 22-1. A short early poem titled (almost as a placeholder) “Song,” begins like this:
How sweet I roam’d from field to field
And tasted all the summer’s pride
‘Till I the prince of love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide
He shew’d me lilies for my hair
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow
It’s nice, right? It feels like summer. And this summer feels different. It feels like there are possibilities inherent in the season. That games aren’t lost until they are over. And there are games like the 81st game of the season, the halfway point, where the Sox walked off Kansas City, 2-1. Probably closer than you’d like against Kansas City, but what the hell. Some games are easier than others, and a win is a win. It brought the White Sox record to 43-38, near a season high for over .500.
A win is a win. That would not be the case the last couple of years. In 2025, the Sox won Game 81, a 7-3 victory of Arizona. It was the team’s third win over a 14-game streak, and brought the record up to 26-55. The 81st game in 2024 was a respectable 4-3 loss to the Dodgers, during a mild, four-game losing streak. The record after that was 21-60.
So, if my math is correct, after 162 combined games, the 2024-25 Sox had 47 wins.
The 2026 Sox have 43. After 81 games. This is a beautiful and terrible state of affairs.
It’s beautiful to believe. It’s beautiful to have a summer of hope. It’s beautiful to feel confident that the boys are going to pull out a close game, that the crowd will roar, that they’ll run after each other with youthful exuberance, tongues wagging, excited for whomever is the hero of the moment. It feels like baseball. It feels like summer.
So why is it terrible? Well, as the poem goes on — and I’ll do you a favor and skip the third stanza — the prince of love captures the narrator and puts her in a cage.
He loves to laugh and hear me sing
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing
And mocks my loss of liberty
And, hell, that’s where we are now, isn’t it? The season is halfway over and the Sox are in first place. We’ve gone through 81 games with ups and downs, but as fans we are locked in. It’s impossible to look away. Every game matters.
That’s how baseball traps your summer and moves you into fall. When the season doesn’t matter — when it is over by the end of April — you pay attention, but don’t care. Now each bad move feels like agony. Now each loss resounds far more than anything during a lengthy losing streak. Even though we know we’re playing with house money, and the season is already a success, it doesn’t feel like it.
It feels important. It feels dangerous. It feels nauseating to think about a losing streak. We’re watching the Cleveland scores. We’re worried about Detroit (note: future column using Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger”). Anything short of the playoffs will feel like a letdown, a sentence that would have been ridiculous at the beginning of the season.
Baseball has its claws in us again. It’s a loss of liberty. We’re hooked, heavy as lead.
There will be slumps and streaks; there will be moves we love and moves we hate. There are important bullpen decisions, as David James deftly analyzed on Saturday. There is the minutiae and the sticky everyday of July and August through which we’ll sweat. But that sweat, as uncomfortable as it may be, matters.
We’re halfway home, and the season fireworks with possibilities. Which way will it go? Well, as Blake said in “Auguries of Innocence”:
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
Sweet delight? Endless night? It could go anywhere. And after 81 games, not knowing how this season will end is far beyond what anyone prophesied.
