By Ray Ratto
We have cheerfully enmeshed ourselves in the saga of the Chicago White Sox all summer largely for reasons of handy mockability—last night's suspended game against Texas, for instance, lasted only four pitches and one minute before the umpires invoked Rule 13:08, which reads, "What are we even doing here?"
We do this because it is the right thing to do, and also because it is our job, but we now have a more developed sense of empathy for the Sox and their exhausted elastic. There is, it turns out, a worse team out there.
Us.
Well, not "us" in the universal sense. Not even any of you, although had we spent our time making the life decisions you have we'd be checking the waiver wire a hell of a lot more frequently than you do. No, this is a definite "us" thing —a bocce team in St. Helena, north of San Francisco, so comprehensively poor that its final record would place it nine games behind the Sox at a similar stage. Like many of the Sox players, we lost the will to care about that record some time ago; unlike them, this is at least in part because we drink during the matches.
Not that this is unusual. Nearly everybody in the weeknight leagues in St. Helena drinks during matches. Everyone drinks during every bocce match ever, because bocce is that rare game in which you can drink during your shot. I mean, even in bowling you put the beer down when it's your turn, if only because you need both hands to hold the goddamned ball.
This is the moment for a brief tutorial on the game itself, which was created somewhere in the Roman Empire and perfected by old Italian men between the ages of 67 and "I think that growth on your neck is getting bigger" as an excuse to get out of the house that didn't require buying clubs or calling for tee times. It's a version of lawn bowling without the lawn, in which one player throws a small white ball—it is called the pallino, in a hint at the absurdities to come—and then two teams try to throw larger balls as close to that small white ball as possible. The rules are simple: first everyone throws their balls, which takes three to five minutes, and then everyone argues for twenty minutes afterward. This ratio is perfect for old Italian men, who have only two overarching skills—talking frequently and listening sporadically.
The St. Helena league has almost no old Italian men of proper bocce standard, but it does have nine courts located behind the tennis courts at St. Helena High School. Also, as we said earlier, there's drinking. The group of locals and travelers who meet there once a week to throw and drink does remarkably little arguing by prevailing standards, so they're getting the buzz without the rancorous authenticity. There is no money for the winning unless there is side betting that we don't know about—DraftKings offers no odds or parlay opportunities—and so one either learns the art of DGAF or becomes one of the "competitive ones." Those people uniformly suck.
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Your author was dragged into this sangiovese-soaked subculture by a pal who is also one of the people at ESPN who does not deserve to be thrown in front of a thresher (no, it is not our beloved Comrade Kahler). Said pal was dragged into it by a pal of his bride's, who thought it would be a fun way to kill the odd 103-degree summer night in wine country. St. Helena is at the far northern end of the Napa Valley, and to describe it as a wine town is grossly understating it. Wine is what gets done there, and the currency of choice. You can buy wine in a bicycle repair shop, at a kindergarten or a mortuary. A place that doesn't sell wine is known as "vacant, tenant sought." The best place to eat is an outdoor diner that used to be called Taylor's Refresher before some well-moneyed wine and food weasel bought the whole shebang (you can read about it here), and gussied up the menu; try the lobster BLT just to befuddle your friends. In short, St. Helena falls just short of obnoxiously elitist while landing squarely in the category, "What do you mean these pool shoes cost $229?"
Said pal of the pal got a bunch of friends together—somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-12 couples, though nowhere near that total ever showed up for a match—and put together a team of utter bocce neophytes whose battle cry was "We can't make it this week; going to a wedding. Good luck." Week after week it was a tough scrape to get the minimum number of contestants, and those who did show quickly learned that they'd been dumped in the Tuesday league, which is apparently the toughest night. We say "apparently" because we don't know for sure ourselves, and don't know who we could ask. We wouldn't have been sure that any such person even existed if not for the weekly standings update, which we realized early on that we, of all people, didn't need. We couldn't be arsed even to take a photo of the bucolic settings or of the other players in action because, well, there was drinking to do.
In any event, we were awful at bocce by any standard. While all the other courts had balls surrounding the target like a precision bomb strike, our court always looked like a playpen after a fussy baby had thrown all her toys across the room. After Tuesday's season-ending hammering, in which we lost all three games by a combined score of 36-5—it’s first to 12, three games per night even if you lose the first two—someone asked, "Are we the worst team ever?" The response wasn't "I don't know, let's check BocceReference.com," but "How could we not be?"
Our opponents were delightful, convivial folks who seemed to enjoy our company, probably because of our supine acquiescence to the inevitable. When a scoring dispute loomed and the actual measuring tape was to be brought out to adjudicate, our generously Pavlovian reaction was inevitably, "Aaaah, don't bother. It's going to be yours soon enough, so points to you." Time spent measuring is time spent not drinking, was the way we saw it. One member of their team momentarily forgot who he was talking to and tried to buck up our spirits by saying, "You'll get better" without realizing that a) we probably wouldn't, and b) we might not want to. The biggest excitement of the night was when someone broke an actual wine glass on the court next to us, a rookie mistake that we managed to avoid by realizing earlier in our career that Solo cups don't shatter and metal cups won't melt.
In any event, the beating was both pleasant and merciless. Their team had a woman named Donna whose eye was keen and throwing form was impeccable; she could put a ball on a dime and kick up two quarters and the keys to a late-model Lexus. We wanted to hate her, but she was very nice too. The point is, they had played for 14 years and were seemingly proud of the fact that they had never made the playoffs (yeah, there are actually playoffs). We'd played for 16 weeks and were eliminated in Week 7. They cared a little; we, not at all. Caring would only have made it all worse.
Indeed, our team won only one match all season in 16 tries, a Week 15 aberration that would have stunned the bocce world if such a thing existed; we won just six games out of 48 in all. The White Sox would laugh at us and be well within their rights to do it. Indeed, we barely matched the 2023-24 Pistons, who were 6-42 at one point in their lost season and ended up firing the coaching staff and front office at the end of it. We, in contrast, spent the start of our offseason trying to assess interest in doing this again next year.
And then we had another glass of something someone else bought (our favorite vintage) and realized this was both exactly what we deserved and what we'd come for in the first place. Crushing, comprehensive, disastrous defeat, followed immediately by the tools required to forget what had just happened and the wisdom to not give a damn. If only the White Sox could display such resilience. Instead, they have to play two games today, the poor grim bastards.
