We came together at the end: Remembering the 2008 White Sox

Carlos Quentin wasn’t sure what he was in for when he reported to Tucson, Ariz. for his first spring training with the White Sox in 2008.

He wasn’t alone. White Sox veterans like A.J. Pierzynski or Paul Konerko didn’t know what was in store for them that season either.

Quentin was part of a talent influx as the White Sox attempted to rebound from a wildly disappointing 2007 season, when they went 72-90. Going from the World Series to 90 losses in two seasons was an unexpected descent.

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“The progression was we win the World Series in ’05, ’06 was a really good team that just dropped the ball at the end,” Konerko said. “And then ’07 happened and it was like, after that year, I don’t know if anybody knows what you’re going to get, no matter what you do because it was so bad.”

The Sox needed to figure out how to right their ship. Of course, they would do it in their own colorful style. On a backfield that spring, Quentin, who was at a crossroads of his career, quickly figured out what kind of organization he was joining.

“I will remember that for the rest of my life,” Quentin said in a phone conversation. “Seeing Kenny Williams in his golf cart yelling at Nick Swisher, his big trade, to fucking run to first. I was just like, ‘Fuck, I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into.’”

With Quentin, Nick Swisher and even Ken Griffey Jr. added to a veteran mix, with John Danks and Gavin Floyd showing up in the rotation, with Joe Crede playing his last season on the South Side, the 2008 White Sox returned to the postseason. Until now, it was the last Sox team to make the playoffs.

It took a three-game winning streak and a dramatic, unforgettable Game 163 at home to do it.

“We came together at the end,” Konerko said.

With the White Sox finally returning to the postseason with their wild-card round in Oakland, The Athletic talked to Konerko, Pierzynski and Quentin about their memories from that year.

In 2007, veteran Sox hitters underperformed, new faces didn’t pan out and the bullpen was atrocious with a 5.49 ERA.

“It was never a good idea back then to bring in the Royals bullpen,” Pierzynski said. “Basically we traded for the whole Royals bullpen. That wasn’t good.”

Andy Sisco and Mike MacDougal were only part of the problem, however.

“I remember that year looking up at the field, especially in the second half, there were guys on that field who would’ve been happy playing Triple A or Double A and they’re on the big league field,” Konerko said.

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That September, Kenny Williams gave manager Ozzie Guillen a contract extension. The collapse wasn’t on the manager and Williams got busy remaking the team. In fact, he had already started the year before.

Just before Christmas in 2006, he traded Brandon McCarthy to Texas and got John Danks and Nick Masset in return. Earlier that month, he traded Freddy Garcia to Philadelphia and got Gavin Floyd and Gio González back.

In mid-November 2007, Williams traded Jon Garland to the Angels for Orlando Cabrera and then a day later, released World Series hero Scott Podsednik. Williams signed reliever Scott Linebrink a few days after that.

On Dec. 3, 2007, he traded Chris Carter to the Diamondbacks for Quentin. And then, just days after the new year, Williams dealt González in a package to acquire Swisher from Oakland.

Two weeks later, the Sox signed Cuban free agent Alexei Ramirez and reliever Octavio Dotel.

In those two offseasons, Williams acquired talent that would help the Sox for years to come. But the headline move, of course, was Swisher, a brash 27-year-old with decent power and outfield range.

It did not work out. At all.

On a recent White Sox postgame show, Guillen said, in his own unique style, “I hate Nick Swisher with my heart.”

Yeah so @OzzieGuillen really didn't hold back when discussing Nick Swisher pic.twitter.com/KJyvwJTWOM

— White Sox Talk (@NBCSWhiteSox) August 6, 2020

Yes, 12 years later.

That might have been a little strong, but Swisher was undeniably unpopular in his one season on the South Side. Bringing up his name is akin to mentioning Adam and Drake LaRoche. Despite only one season on the team, Swisher lives forever in the dark corners of White Sox lore.

On one hand, you could say acquiring him was an awful trade for the Sox, losing a pitcher (for the second time) to acquire an unpopular outfielder who slashed .219/.332/.410 in 153 games. But on the other hand, he brought his teammates closer together.

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“Not a lot of love coming out of the clubhouse for him, I think you guys could tell,” Quentin said with a laugh. “But he was a uniting figure where people united with each other to fuck with him. He did present a role.”

Quentin was only half-joking. So why was Williams yelling at him in spring training in the first place?

“Swisher gets his first hit in any type of baseball activity with the White Sox,” Quentin said. “It’s on a backfield. He gets a single right up the middle off Octavio Dotel. Smokes it. He was leading off, he hit it left-handed. He cruises and pimps the single as he kind of jogs to first. Doesn’t run through the bag, just touches the base and Kenny yells, ‘Fucking run! We fucking run out here!’ Just in front of everyone, media and everybody. Blows him up. And I’m like, ‘Holy shit.’ Swish is like, ‘My bad.’ Honestly, that was the rest of his tenure with the White Sox, that set the tone for everything.”

It was a bad fit from the beginning with a veteran team. Swisher was a self-promoter — he called himself “Dirty 30” after his jersey number, with Sox fans calling him “Dirty .230” — and a bit of a goofball. Without production, his act just didn’t fly on the South Side.

“You could be weird, you could be an asshole, but you couldn’t be fake in that clubhouse,” Quentin said. “That’s one thing I can say about that clubhouse. To some degree, me being the way I was, there was no act, it was just the way I was.”

“There were times where you kind of felt bad for Swish because he just said things and did things that were like completely wrong and he didn’t know any better,” Pierzynski said. “There were times where you’re like, ‘All right, well, if you would just not do that, it’d be fine.’ He would do something else and you’re like, ‘OK, well, he just doesn’t get it.’ Then I played with him later on in my career in Atlanta and it was much better. He kind of matured a little bit.”

Konerko said he liked Swisher and he thought he had a good heart. He claims that instead of ribbing him, he would often build him up. The Sox captain couldn’t imagine being that outgoing, particularly without the on-field results.

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“I couldn’t relate to it, so I fed into it,” he said. “Like, ‘Hey Swish, wouldn’t it be great if you had a warm-up jacket that you could wear like a fur coat you could wear on the on-deck circle and you could take it off like a wrestler?’ I don’t want to say I was supportive, but I was never down on him.”

Williams was, though. Months after he told Swisher to run it out, the GM had soured on his acquisition and traded him to the Yankees in the offseason. The Sox got Wilson Betemit and two minor-league pitchers in return.

Swisher rebounded the next season on a World Series champion Yankees team. During the 2009 season, as the White Sox won 79 games, veteran players would see his highlights in the clubhouse and chuckle about Swisher getting the last laugh on Williams.

While Swisher bombed, which led Williams to trade for Griffey at the deadline, it was Quentin, the sometimes introverted, almost always intense slugger, who turned out to be Williams’ big addition. Once he heard how Williams ripped Swisher, he knew the ground rules on his new team.

“I’m just going to shut my mouth and play hard,” he said. “That’s easy. I can handle that. That was my approach to it all. I think it was appreciated.”

Quentin, a Stanford product, was 25 and had played 138 games over two seasons with the Diamondbacks, the team that drafted him in the first round in 2003. He didn’t quite fit in Arizona, but he appreciated the vibe in Chicago, where people just kind of let him be himself: an intense student of hitting.

“When I came to Chicago, I was no one,” he said. “But I could see a bunch of Hall of Famers, established big-league veterans, men playing baseball. And I could watch and could learn their swings. I could be quiet and no one would care. They would appreciate it. I had to kind of earn every piece of it because no one had any clue, especially at that time no one in the AL had any idea who was in the NL. It was a little bit elitist, you know. I was like, ‘Great, I’ll just get better.’”

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Quentin said he felt lucky to make the team out of spring training, which happened because incumbent outfielder Jerry Owens was injured. Ramirez was actually the center fielder for the first two games of the season, both of which the Sox lost. Quentin started the third game with Swisher moving to center field. Quentin then became the everyday left fielder. By the end of April, he had a .302/.434/.616 slash line and a new home.

“I started starting hitting some home runs and it snowballed from there,” he said.

No player was safe from Guillen’s barbs, whether in the media or the clubhouse, but Quentin said he enjoyed playing for him, despite their disparate personalities. Guillen was a character. The Sox clubhouse was full of characters.

“Ozzie appreciated that I was intense, he just wanted to let me be and go out there and play,” Quentin said. “And I appreciate him putting me in there. I played hard for him and he knew it. I think we had a really good relationship because of that.”

Quentin gave off a serious vibe, but teammates found out he has a quirky sense of humor under that facade. In a clubhouse full of practical jokers, Quentin showed he could take it and dish it out.

“They would mess around with him and just when you think he was about to kill somebody and be serious, it was really him playing the joke back on them,” Konerko said. “He would turn the tables on them and show he was getting the joke.”

Quentin made the All-Star Game that season with Crede and later in the summer, he really heated up. In 50 games in July and August, Quentin hit 17 homers and had an on-base percentage of .404, thanks in part to a propensity to get hit by pitches. He was leading the AL in home runs with 36, he had 100 RBIs and was the Sox’s first legitimate MVP candidate since Frank Thomas in 2000.

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“My first thought of him that year was just how utterly locked in mentally he was, with a purpose, every day coming to the yard,” Konerko said. “Just so focused and so locked in. He was really on track to win that MVP.”

“He should have won the MVP,” Pierzynski said.

On Sept. 1, the Sox were neck and neck with the Twins in the AL Central when they got shut out by Cliff Lee in Cleveland.

In his last at-bat of a 5-0 loss, Quentin punched his bat with his right hand after fouling off a pitch. He didn’t think anything of it. What hitter doesn’t give their bat a little knock when they miss a pitch?

But the pain worsened overnight and Quentin got it checked out. He broke a bone in his right wrist.

“I was like, it didn’t look like he hit it that hard,” Pierzynski said. “And the next thing you know, he’s like out for the year. I’m like, geez, that was the dumbest bat punch I’ve ever seen.”

Quentin obsessed about a lot of things, but he was more just disappointed.

“You know, it was truly this freak thing that I never thought could ever happen,” he said. “And I watched the video over and over. It was like, really? And yeah, it was a strange thing. It sucks. A wasted opportunity. I could have won an MVP and it may have changed the course of my career. But who knows?”

He was the Sox’s best hitter and now he would miss not only a pivotal month but the postseason too. After the season of his life, he was sidelined when it mattered most.

“I didn’t read much of the papers, but I’m sure I got a lot of bad press on it,” Quentin said. “But that was rightfully so. So, you know, it was something you have to live with. And yeah, super disappointed. It was a tough blow. And then we made the playoffs. And I mean, I would like to say that me being in there would have helped us at the time. The way I was hitting it, I think it probably would have helped, so it affected the team, no doubt. The only consolation is we were able to get into the playoffs and we didn’t miss them.”

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The Sox went 75-55 with Quentin in the lineup and just 14-19 without him in the regular season.

As a team, the White Sox never got as hot as Quentin, though. While they led or were tied for the division lead from mid-May until the beginning of August, it was always precarious. They led by as many as six games on June 9 after a four-game sweep of the Twins, but that lead evaporated by June 25.

“It wasn’t like we were a great team all year either by the way,” Konerko said. “We came together at the end. Minnesota really dropped the ball at the end and didn’t put us away. It was a combination of a couple of things.”

But there they were, hanging around in September. They even survived a sprained knee from Konerko, who was suffering through an injury-plagued season that saw his steady production dip considerably. When he returned for the last 13 games, he got 10 hits — six were home runs and two were doubles.

“Personally speaking I felt as dangerous as I’ve ever felt going into the playoffs and I couldn’t have felt less dangerous throughout most of (the season),” Konerko said.

After rough introductions in 2007, not to mention slow starts to their careers elsewhere, Danks and Floyd were revelations in ’08. Floyd won 17 games and had a 3.84 ERA. Danks won 12 and posted a 3.32 ERA. They were the young workhorses the team needed.

“It was great to see those two guys have success,” Pierzynski said. “Because, you know, you get these young guys and you want to root for them and you want them to do well.”

Much like this season, the Sox were looking good for an easy road to a division title until the end. But as White Sox fans know, there are always bumps in the road.

On Sept. 21, they beat Kansas City and had a 2 1/2-game lead over the Twins in the division. Then they went to the Metrodome and got swept, the third loss coming on a walkoff hit in the 10th inning.

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The Sox came home to play Cleveland and lost two more, but Minnesota inexplicably lost two in a row to Kansas City.

Mark Buehrle won what should’ve been the regular-season finale and then Floyd won a makeup game against Detroit that had to be played on Monday. The Tigers, led by former Sox pitcher Freddy Garcia, had a 2-1 lead into the bottom of the sixth when Garcia left the game with an injury. The Sox tied the game and took the lead on an Alexei Ramirez grand slam.

Both the Sox and Twins had 88 wins. That set up a tiebreaker game.

“I think of Game 163 more than anything,” Pierzynski said of that year. “The Blackout Game. The home run by Thome, the throw by Griffey. The way John Danks pitched.”

“I felt like that was a surreal thing, no one had ever played in one,” Konerko said. “And definitely the Twins had always been a team that had our number. From my early days on, when there needed to be a game won against the Twins, it always seemed like we lost.”

The game should have been played at the Metrodome because the Twins had a 10-9 head-to-head edge. But thanks to a coin flip that Rick Hahn’s son Jake won earlier that month, the Sox hosted at their park.

“They were pissed,” Konerko said. “They knew they owned us at the Metrodome. They were probably thinking, ‘We should never be here playing this game,’ and they were right. That’s kind of asinine. They took the season series. We had some demons at the Metrodome, I’m not going to lie.”

Danks and Nick Blackburn were dueling, but Danks was in trouble in the fifth with Michael Cuddyer on third base and one out. Brendan Harris hit a fly ball to shallow center field and Griffey,  who probably shouldn’t have still been playing center field at this stage of his career, threw out Cuddyer at the plate.

“I always joke to him you’re at shortstop and you three-hopped it to me,” Pierzynski said.

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In the bottom of the seventh, Thome, the future Hall of Famer, sent Blackburn’s first pitch into the seats in center field. The crowd, dressed entirely in black, celebrated like the Sox were back in the World Series. Who knew it would be the closest they would get for 12 years running?

Danks pitched another scoreless inning and Bobby Jenks shut the door to give the Sox a 1-0 win and the division title.

“I felt for me, personally, about nine years in, Sox-Twins was always feeling like they got the better of us,” Konerko said. “It was a proud moment for me like we finally beat them in a game that mattered.”

But without Quentin, the Tampa Bay Rays, the darlings of baseball under Joe Maddon, were a tough matchup in the ALDS. The Sox couldn’t get their rotation in order for the series, but with a more potent offense, they could’ve been a tougher out.

“I mean, we had chances,” Pierzynski said. “We had all kinds of chances. … We just couldn’t get like the hit we needed.”

But they take solace in winning Game 3 behind Danks and a balanced offensive attack, before bowing out in four games. By advancing to a fourth game, they outlasted the Cubs, who were swept in embarrassing fashion by the Dodgers.

“I remember they were out and we always joked that we made it farther than they did that year because we won one playoff game,” Pierzynski said.

That win, in front of 40,000 fans in a late-afternoon start at U.S. Cellular Field, remains the last home playoff win for the franchise, which begins this postseason run on the road in Oakland.

After 2005, it looked like the Sox were headed to an age of playoff berths, full houses and title hopes. But from 2009 through 2019, the Sox only had two winning seasons. They finished six games behind the Twins in 2010 and three games back of the Tigers in 2012.

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“That’s insanity. That is the last time they made it,” Pierzynski said of 2008. “You look at like the Mariners and you’re like, how have they not made the playoffs since 2002? Like, that shouldn’t even happen. So it’s crazy it’s been that long. I’m happy the White Sox are back in the playoffs.”

Guillen left the team before the end of the 2011 season to take the Marlins job and Quentin was traded. Robin Ventura didn’t work out as his replacement. Rick Hahn was promoted to GM, while Williams moved into a higher office. Chris Sale’s promising Sox career ended in a trade.

A dedicated rebuild began in 2016 and now, finally, for the first time since 2008, they’re back in the postseason.

(Photo: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)

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