Welcome to BP South Side

I’m a little surprised this place exists too.

The White Sox finished 26th in MLB attendance last season — a marked improvement from the year before, driven by spirited marketing and ultimately unfounded Spring optimism — and dead-last in local TV ratings. These dreary figures are no doubt strongly influenced by a seven-year playoff drought, historical factors such as the team never making the playoffs in consecutive seasons in 115 years of existence (admittedly it used to be a lot harder) and the fans they lost for being an early adopter of shifting TV broadcasts to cable. Or maybe they’re just a small fanbase.

The South siders also boast a front office that prides itself on secrecy, and enjoys the misperception that they resist sabermetric analysis. There’s probably a great book to be written about Don Cooper, Herm Schneider, their unique process for keeping pitchers healthy and the crazy success stories they have had with guys like Esteban Loaiza, Mark Buehrle, the rise of Chris Sale, or even Philip Humber, but as Cooper said in a recent podcast, “you gotta pay for that information.”

For some or all of these reasons, despite providing the baseball world a truly dominant march to a title just 11 years ago, the South side of Chicago has managed to stay tucked out of the limelight of recent. Suffice it to say, if you want to start a White Sox blog, you must really want to start a White Sox blog.

It is with that mandate and faithful support that we launch BP Southside, a new entry in Baseball Prospectus’ wonderful team site initiative. Hopefully, you are familiar with the work of The Catbird Seat, since every member of the regular writing staff previously posted there. If not, well…

We’re adept at advanced statistics — we’re at BP, after all — but not beholden to them. We’re baseball nuts but also journalists, lawyers, researchers who are aware of sports impact on the world culturally and economically. And while this group was originally assembled, two blogs ago, as a collection of White Sox fans, we’re very serious about the work of covering this team, and looking at their actions and writing about them with a critical eye.

While we’ve been doing what we have been doing for awhile (this is my FOURTH White Sox blog), the power and platform of BP compels us to widen our ambitions. This will be a more robust site with daily rundowns of Sox news, summaries of every game, series previews, weekly podcasts and more.

To follow along with all of it, it will really be necessary to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. I genuinely do not see another option.