On April 20, 2008, I decided it was time to take the sheer joy of CSS hacks and database security into my own hands and out of the wreckage of South Side Baseball, The 35th Street Review was born.

Since then, with your help, Reader, we’ve gone 0-for-pretty-much-everything in looking into the distant future, but in a good way. We bore witness to the worst game of all time. We watched the lamest of division winners become the best playoff team in Chicago. We wished happy trails to the Most Interesting Man in Baseball.

We declared war on The Enemy, and The Enemy made us look stupid. Then we declared war again. And again.

We fought the voices inside our head and surrendered, just the way we assumed we would. We foresaw doom and gloom, again, but opted to make the best of it. We handed over the keys and paid the price. We watched hope spring eternal, and we saw the return of some old friends for some starkly different reasons.

When I first hatched this site, a lot of what I had in mind was that this would be, for lack of a better word, the literary Sox blog. By this I don’t mean I’m the only Sox fan who knows how to read, but that so much is covered out there in the Soxosphere (and covered so well) that there’s no point in trying to scream over the crowd. I could break down the numbers behind the team, but South Side Sox shames me in that department every time I try. I could look deep into the mechanics of the roster and tell you what each player brings to the team, but Jim at Sox Machine is The Man where that type of writing is concerned (and if you’re not reading his site every day you’re just plain stupid). I could have tried for breaking news, but the Sun-Times, Tribune, Associated Press and official team site somehow kept scooping me on pretty much everything that ever happened.

What that left, of course, was room for some loudmouth with the kind of self-delusion and grandiosity to continually try to answer the question of What Does It Mean. How does it feel to root for this team? What’s it like to be a Sox fan? Why should anyone care about any of this? What Are We Going Through And Why Do We Bother?

You know, the small stuff. The barfly stuff. Stupid, but important all the same. Memories of growing up with a team. Dreams of growing old with them. Hexes upon the bad guys, assuming we even know who the bad guys really are.

So what does it mean? It means if Sox Machine is The Economist and South Side Sox is The New York Times, consider this site the Gawker of White Sox blogging, buttering our bread with highly-informed, self-justifying opinions and the occasional slice of serious reporting.

But whatever the case, my point is not that anything is a good or bad approach, but simply that there is some great Sox-centric writing going on out there and I am honored to be a part of it. Jim, Cheat, Jeeves, J.J., WSB, Steve, WIK: you guys are great neighbors. Don’t stop what you’re doing. Ever.

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Of course there are people to thank for 35th Street lasting even this long, not the least of which are our good friends and all our esteemed contributors, whose insights by turns hilarious, insightful and moving have given this publication more life and greater depth than I could ever dream of doing on my own.

Most of all, I need to take a moment to say thanks to each of you taking time out of your busy days to check in with this little hack operation of mine. The site traffic reports tell me there are more of you each day, and that means nothing less than the world. Every commenter, every subscriber, everyone who writes in, everyone who links to a piece posted here, everyone passing through and everyone who stops by to tell me how much this site sucks: you all make this worthwhile. Every word of this site is worthless until someone else reads them.

This first year was a great one, and I promise to deliver a second even better.

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Andrew Reilly
Chicago, IL / April 20, 2009