Rongey: Konerko's return a reminder of great moments
The White Sox recently shared a short video on various social media platforms and their website. In it, a couple dozen fans told their favorite Paul Konerko memory, intertwined with some of the most famous highlights in team history.
Obviously, most people in the video picked the World Series Game 2 grand slam, the definitive moment in the career of the player whose number was retired on Saturday. And, really, if you're a Sox fan, how could you pick anything else?
I wasn't one of the fortunate ones at U.S. Cellular Field in person on that frigid, damp October night in 2005. I had to watch it from a bar in Lincoln Park.
Well, I didn't have to, but I wasn't going to watch by myself. I needed to be around people, and hopefully recreate the madness I was missing out on.
The funny thing is that I've seen the highlight so many times, I almost don't remember seeing it live, and I couldn't even tell you whom I was with when I saw it. It's almost as if I were actually there - at least, it seems that way now.
In an interview for "White Sox Weekly" this week, I asked Konerko about what he feels when he runs into that highlight. "The stadium holds 40-something thousand, but I swear I've talked to 300,000 people that said they were there that night," he said.
It's an amusing thought, but I figure many Sox fans feel about that moment the same way I do, and have relived it too many times to count, just as I have.
One of the more irksome things people tend to do in the smartphone era, to me, is take phone video of events happening right in front of them. I can't stand it. Especially in a televised event like a World Series that will surely produce an endless amount of perfectly captured highlights you'll be able to watch infinitely when the game is over and you're back home.
The videos you take with your phone are choppy, shot from too far away, shaky, and will surely sound terrible. I would always recommend falling back on the images captured by professional TV crews.
Yet I absolutely cannot get enough of the low-quality mobile phone videos of that slam. Videos shot with technology from a decade ago, by people who were too busy losing their minds to keep their phone still enough to capture the moment.
I LOVE them.
I don't even know what it is about them, except they make me feel like I was actually part of the bedlam, wearing a raincoat and having my beer dumped on me in excitement.
That's how great that Paulie-created moment is for me. So great that I want to see it from every possible angle, even if he's just a tiny white dot on a pixilated backdrop.
Having Konerko back for the ceremony is a reminder of how much he provided for Sox fans, how much we miss that, and how badly we want a new Sox player to force us to shoot grainy cellphone videos of the next great championship moment.
• Chris Rongey is the host of the White Sox pregame and postgame shows on WSCR 670-AM The Score. Follow him on Twitter @ChrisRongey and at chrisrongey.com.