White Sox fan whose first team was 1962 Mets has finally had enough
Baseball fan Bill Dowgiallo knows a thing or two about rooting for a losing team. And not just any old losing team, mind you, but one of the all-time greatest at being un-great, one that has elevated failure — make that lowered it — to an art form.
Dowgiallo, you see, follows the 2024 White Sox. For a fan of this sad-sack squad — easily the worst in Sox history — that means being offended, revolted, stomped on emotionally and eventually, perhaps inevitably, unable to keep hanging in there.
“Can it get any worse?” he says. “I don’t see how.”
If anyone could see how, it would be Dowgiallo. Because before he became a partial season-ticket holder at Guaranteed Rate Field, before he married a Sox diehard from the South Side and raised a Sox family, before he moved to Chicago and became a Sox fan half a century ago, Dowgiallo and his heart belonged to a different big-league nine: the 1962 New York Mets.
The very first team for which Dowgiallo cheered — at 7 years old — was the expansion Mets, who lost 120 games, still the modern baseball record.
Who is Dowgiallo? “Just” a fan and a Sun-Times reader.
But as a boy in Rye, N.Y., he fell in love with baseball with timing so hilariously bad, it at least would always make for a good conversation piece. Both the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers had moved away in 1957, leaving his father, also Bill, without a team. Backing the Yankees simply wasn’t going to happen, but when the Mets came along, the Dowgiallos hopped on board. Father and son watched and listened together, often from the stands of the Polo Grounds, where the team played its first two seasons.
By God, those Mets were awful. The boy was hooked anyway.
“I don’t think I was aware of how bad they could be,” he says, “but we watched them and there were some characters. ‘Marvelous’ Marv Throneberry, Roger Craig, Casey Stengel. They got to 50, 60 games out and it was, ‘How low can they go?’ But it was fun, too.”
Dowgiallo, 69, of Palos Heights, emailed in response to a column on the Sox that appeared in Wednesday’s paper. It was the first time I’d heard from him, but he mentioned the ’62 Mets and that grabbed my attention.
“Sorry for the rant,” the email concluded, “but the potential to break the season-loss record is not one to be proud of.”
There are only so many ways to write that these Sox — on a 17-game losing streak and on track to top 120 losses entering a weekend series in Minneapolis — are a disaster. Still, there was an urge to get on the phone with a stranger and hear a fresh perspective.
Dowgiallo moved here in 1973 to attend IIT, whose campus sat right across the expressway from Comiskey Park. The Mets didn’t play there, but the ballpark called out to him because, well, baseball. By and by, he was married to Kim and working for IBM, and in due time came two boys and a girl — Sox fans all — and a 2005 World Series victory so glorious that Kim and Bill bought a ticket package for a couple dozen games heading into 2006.
They kept buying those tickets through 2018, when the Sox lost 100 times and missed the playoffs for the 10th straight year. That was enough to pull back on going to games. A Sox rebuild that produced playoff teams in 2020 and 2021 “led fans down the primrose path,” Dowgiallo says, but then it fizzled and led to all this.
The Dowgiallos have a place in Arizona where they stay warm in the winter, and that always meant going to some spring-training games at Camelback Ranch — usually with friends visiting from Chicago — until the last couple of years.
“Why waste money doing that when I can put on MLB Network and see better teams playing better ball?” Bill says.
At home, they have enough Sox gear to stuff a closet, but Bill — retired from IBM for 10 years — has taken to wearing a Mets cap again and Kim has thrown in the towel altogether.
“I’m not going to sit here and watch this,” she says. “It’s not worth my time.”
She won’t even read about the Sox in the paper, a true tragedy.
Dowgiallo misses the good times, the best of which were the greatest of times. He was at the Cell for Game 2 of the 2005 division series, a 5-4 win against the Red Sox. He was at the Rate for Game 3 of the 2021 division series, a 12-6 win against the Astros. As Mark Buehrle was throwing a perfect game on July 23, 2009, Dowgiallo was in his office following along online and practically hung up on a colleague who called just as the tension at the ballpark had gotten extra-thick. His list of favorite Sox includes Buehrle, Paul Konerko, A.J. Pierzynski, Frank Thomas and Carlton Fisk.
Owner Jerry Reinsdorf, on the other hand, heads a far different list.
“I think he’s past his prime,” Dowgiallo says. “I think he’s lost contact and touch with the fan base. He’s eroding his own fan base, and I’m not sure he even realizes it.”
The ’62 Mets had their own Frank Thomas, and he belted 34 homers that season. By 1969, Thomas was long gone — as were the other members of the franchise’s early stopgap rosters — and an exciting group with real talent suddenly was soaring to a world championship. As a young fan, there’s no turning away from baseball after experiencing that.
For half a century, though, Dowgiallo has loved two teams. Indeed, it is possible to do so. These days, though, it’s so much harder.
“The difference with the Sox?” he says. "The way things have gotten, I just don’t see it changing. I don't see them going anywhere.”