‘It’s crazy. It’s painful.’ White Sox champs of 2005 weigh in on team’s massive struggles

Into a private upstairs room at Bridgeport’s Ramova Theatre they strode, one, two, three at a time, looking very much like baseball players.

The boyish looks on their faces and the White Sox jerseys on their backs gave them away.

But who were these guys? Where did these names come from?

Schultz, Smith, Ramos …

They aren’t your “championship window” Sox of a couple of years ago, that’s for sure.

Varland, Meidroth, Burke …

It’s a real who’s-who of “Who?” on the South Side anymore.

Baldwin, Thorpe, Montgomery, Montgomery again …

Wait, there are two of them? We knew about Colson Montgomery, the shortstop expected at Rate Field sometime in 2025. Maybe he has a brother or a cousin.

Once upon a time, the annual SoxFest in January carried some weight, even if it was kind of like the overlooked little brother of Cubs Convention. For one thing, the Sox usually had at least a few players who might walk down a city street and be recognized. For another, the Sox weren’t in the practice of hiding from their devoted fans.

But chairman Jerry Reinsdorf and SoxFest went dark after 2020, first due to the pandemic and later due, presumably, to a preference to avoid being angrily chastised and lustily booed by the shrinking number of fans who might attend such an event.

And yet here we were Friday, ushering in a new, much smaller-scale fan event called SoxFest Now. The Sox billed the weekend as a “reimagination of a traditional fan convention into an immersive fan experience.” Sheesh, if Sox fans could reimagine anything to do with their sad-sack baseball team, they’d hardly need an invitation to do it. And the last thing any of them would want to do is immerse themselves in the current reality.

That goes for the players who carried the Sox to a World Series title in 2005, too. Some of them — terrific Sox pitchers Mark Buehrle, Jose Contreras and Freddy Garcia — threw on jerseys Friday and walked around the Ramova as well. Same jerseys, same sport, different planet.

“It’s crazy,” Contreras, 53, said about how low the Sox have sunk the last couple of years. “It’s painful. I played 11 years in the big leagues, [more than half of it] here in Chicago. I love Chicago and the White Sox. We had such a great team, you know? It was a great organization. But how it got this bad? No, I can’t believe it.”

The old dudes won 99 regular-season games, then blasted through the postseason with a record of 11-1. They milled around the theater with current players and prospects who simply are trying to land a spot on the worst roster in the big leagues — a Sox team that will try to lose fewer than 121 times, the all-time record set in 2024.

As often as they can this year, the Sox will celebrate their last World Series win on the 20th anniversary of an unforgettable season. This year also marks the 125th anniversary of Sox baseball. Those pleasant milestones will clash with perhaps the worst on-field product in the sport at a time when Reinsdorf has never been less popular and greenhorn general manager Chris Getz has yet to make any sort of mark whatsoever.

“I love the fans and I love the city, but why would any fans be happy now?” Garcia, 48, said. “Hell, no. You broke the losing record. Man, I never thought that would happen. It was painful to see that. For me, [2005] happened, like, yesterday. I still got it right here, what we did …”

Garcia pointed to his heart as he looked at a roomful of newbies and shook his head.

“They gotta build something,” he said. “This has to change.”

Harold Baines was Ozzie Guillen’s bench coach on the 2005 Sox and is “forever grateful” for the team that got him the World Series ring that had eluded him as a Hall of Fame player. He’s an organization guy and a Reinsdorf guy, but he doesn’t have a whole lot of tolerance for the baseball he has suffered through lately.

“You would think it only can go up, but we’re way at the bottom,” Baines said. “It’s hard to watch. I looked at it last year from a coaching aspect, what I like and what I dislike. I just didn’t think it was good, fundamental baseball to me. A lot of mistakes were made. Too many mistakes. We have to learn to do the small things that lead to big things.”

Baines, 65, was in Maryland when the Sox lost No. 121 and called it a “bad one.”

“I actually thought about Reinsdorf,” he said. “I knew how much it had to hurt him. I hope all these young guys know it [has to be] different.”

Contreras is a grandfather five times over.

“I’m an old man,” he said, laughing, “and we still aren’t back in the World Series.”

Not even close. SoxFest Now is an OK name. SoxFest Someday might be more fitting.