Ahoy!

Today is Feb. 1, 2026, which marks the 20 years since the official launch of Sox Machine. We intended to use the day to celebrate our existence, but then the White Sox decided to make an unusual-for-them trade to knock the commemoration post out of the top slot, at least on good ol’ soxmachine dot com.

The newsletter form still has our reflections on two decades of covering the White Sox above the fold, but continue reading on for the latest news on a pair of White Sox transactions, as well as our impressions over the weekend from SoxFest at the Ramova Theatre.

As always, thanks for the support. We literally could not do it without you.

By JIM MARGALUS

If you told me back when Sox Machine launched on Feb. 1, 2006, that I'd still be covering the feats and foibles of the Chicago White Sox on these same pages 20 years later, I don't know if I would've been shocked. I wouldn't have dared assume any level of success, but people practice instruments for decades even if they never play on stage, and it didn't take long for writing about the White Sox to similarly feel like a natural extension of myself. 

For those who don't know the origin story: I'd just moved to Albany, New York, for my first real job in the middle of the 2005 season, and when the White Sox won the World Series that October, there weren't many avenues for sharing the excitement. On the professional front, I'd been a reporter in college, but took an online producer job that didn't involve writing, and I realized I missed the exercise. Then my first upstate winter arrived, and since it'd be years until I happened upon the life-changing joy of curling, I needed something to do.

Blogs were just starting to become a valid creative outlet, if not yet a respected form of media. New ones popped up every day; many were abandoned soon after. I thought I might have some talent to start a site, and I'd been sitting on a domain name that was somehow not taken by a Boston writer. I also knew that my threshold for shame is low, and I didn't want to publicly ditch a project like a poorly considered New Year's resolution. 

While Sox Machine's official birthday is Feb. 1, I started writing in early December 2005 for nobody, figuring that if the daily obligation got old in a hurry, then I'd delete the site with only a handful of people knowing it ever existed. But I also considered that if I found satisfaction in writing without an audience, then I probably wouldn't be deterred by launching the site to negative or, worse, nonexistent feedback. 

As evidenced by the headline of the post you're reading, baseball turned out to be the ideal vehicle for daily writing practice. Putting my own experiences into words for others to read is brutal and unnatural. Ask me to document the struggles of strangers under harsh and unrelenting objective measurements, and paragraphs pour out. Twenty years later, they still do; muscle memory checked and balanced by scar tissue from the many, many times I discovered what I didn't know.

Over two days, the White Sox struck two deals to bring in three new names on the 40-man roster.

By JAMES FEGAN

"How about 19 more?" Chris Getz offered when asked about further improvement in 2026, even repeating it to make sure the room heard his playful response. This is the dichotomy of the current state of the Sox. Back-to-back 19-win jumps would be truly remarkable, require a significantly more difficult and impressive improvement than last season represented, and quickly make the Sox the subject of national feature stories about their exciting progress. Executive of the year, or manager of the year votes might even follow.

It was also, in effect, a GM floating a losing record (80-82) as a season ambition to a crowd that applauded his boldness in response.

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