They Elected A White Sox Fan Pope

Free Friday Newsletter

May 09, 2025

Robert Francis Prevost AKA Pope Leo XIV AKA Bob from Chicago was chosen to run the largest church in the world yesterday. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

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Now, on to the big news of the week.

No, I’m not talking about the fact that 133 voting cardinals elected the first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church yesterday. While shocking in itself—an American pope in THIS economy?!—we quickly got our answer as to why this man’s colleagues overlooked the church’s typical view of American Catholics as the cute little junior varsity squad on the world’s stage.

Robert Francis Prevost AKA Pope Leo XIV AKA Pope Bob from Chicago has known suffering. He has spent decades wandering the desert like Moses, wondering why God has forsaken him. He watched his favorite baseball team lose 121 games last season and apparently still believes in the Mother Mary and the Ten Commandments and Heaven. He read the part of the Beatitudes when Jesus climbed up to give his Sermon on the Mount and underlined this part “blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” in red ink.

Then he wrote the 2025 White Sox starting lineup into his Bible and said “bet” softly to himself and shook his head.

Because none of us had ever considered a Baseball Pope let alone an American Pope, every Illinois adjacent person raced to claim Pope Bob from Chicago as a fan of their favorite team. “They tell me he’s a Cubs fan” Senator Dick Durbin said, loud and wrong.

The Cubs then put this on their social media accounts, also loud and wrong.

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We are all as blessed as Pope Bob, however, because Pope Bob has a chatty brother named John, who he talks to every day, and who has not yet been instructed to stop yapping to the press. “He was never, ever a Cubs fan so I don’t know where that came from. He was always a Sox fan," John Prevost said on his hilarious media blitz.

The White Sox then scurried to light up their scoreboard and troll the Cubs:

Here are the funniest two lines that have ever been written, courtesy of a local Chicago NBC story:

NBC News has also confirmed from a Vatican spokesperson that the Pope roots for the South Siders.
Father Farrell, the vicar general of the Order of St. Augustine, also said he texted the pope to confirm his allegiance and received a "papal text" back confirming he is a Sox fan.

Imagine calling the Vatican yesterday not to ask for the new Pope’s views on the LGBTQ+ community or migrants fleeing their homelands, but to confirm that the first American pope roots for a team that is currently running out one of the worst baseball rosters ever assembled. Imagine receiving an emphatic “yes.”

It’s too good. I don’t need to know this man’s papal qualifications. He has the patience of a saint. The loyalty of the unhinged. He communes with the downtrodden. He has compassion for masochists who can’t get out of their own way. He is a Sox fan, which makes him more than qualified to fight for those less fortunate around the world.

Pope Bob from Chicago, top left corner, at the 2005 World Series.

I cannot emphasis this enough: the man running the largest church in the world knows who Juan Uribe is. And Brandon McCarthy. And Scott Podsednik. There’s a chance he has read or even liked one your dumb baseball tweets, or one of mine.

There is also a chance that the last thing Pope Bob saw before they took his phone away and he sequestered himself with the other cardinals in the conclave was Chase Meidroth taking a pop fly off his head:

If I were running the White Sox, I’d slap a pope bobblehead night on the schedule for next week. I’d buy two bullpen carts and turn them into pope mobiles. I’d include a rosary with the purchase of every hot dog. “A pinstripe White Sox jersey with his name on it and a hat is already on the way to Rome, and of course, the Pontiff always is welcome at his ballpark,” the White Sox said in a statement.

What do we think the back of that jersey says? Probably “Leo” with “XIV” as his number underneath it, right? But I hope they also sent him a jersey that said “DAAAAA POPE.” Why stop with one jersey? This is certainly the highlight of the last 20 years of the White Sox. I need the Sox to improve so that when he makes his triumphant return to his hometown to (maybe!) give a sermon on the mound, the local nine doesn’t humiliate him.

I know the Sox will figure out a way to screw this up, because the team’s owner Jerry Reinsdorf still lives in 1993. Pope Bob knows this, too, and his brother racing to clear up the record of his baseball fandom yesterday means that the Holy Father has the sickness like all of us, and watches Lenyn Sosa and Miguel Vargas and Andrew Benintendi flail at baseballs at 2 am on the MLB at-bat app when he can’t sleep.

The White Sox, for their part, took the field yesterday a few hours after their most famous fan was made the head of the most famous church in the world, feeling inspired and blessed and ready to turn their season around.

They lost 10-0.