White Sox 1 of a kind City Connects years in the making
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This story was excerpted from Scott Merkin's White Sox Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
CHICAGO -- The new White Sox City Connect uniforms were unveiled last Monday night at a festive party in Chicago including Bulls Hall of Famer Toni Kukoc as part of the dignitaries. They went on sale last Tuesday and were worn in game action on Friday night and Saturday afternoon to mixed results, as in one victory and one loss.
Among the White Sox players, though, there’s nothing but winning assessments for this collaborative effort with the NBA’s Chicago Bulls creating the first of its kind jersey.
“I like them. When I saw the pictures of them, I didn’t know what they would look like in person,” right-hander Sean Burke told me this weekend. “The red looked like a cherry red almost, so it looked a little bit different.
“Now I’m seeing them in person, and I like them a lot. I like the gear we get with them, too.”
Burke showed off the players’ swag coming with the City Connects, situated in his home locker at Rate Field. There were hoodies, dugout jackets, a batting practice top and a bomber varsity jacket. Then, he opened a box with the top presentation: A pair of Jordan’s dugout shoes kind of going with the uniform.
This Jordan connection means something to Burke, as a one-time standout AAU basketball player.
“Yeah, I liked Jordan. My dad was a big basketball fan, too. He loves Jordan,” Burke said. “He grew up in that era. It’s his guy. The Last Dance came out and I was super into that sort of stuff.”
“We wanted to do something that has never been done before, and so to do this crossover with the Bulls, nobody had done that,” Brooks Boyer, the White Sox executive vice president, chief revenue and marketing officer, told me during an interview last week. “The Reinsdorfs own both teams. There’s a connection there. ... There’s one player who played for both teams that I would say has some interest.”
Boyer smiled when asked if that one all-time greatest player, who won six NBA titles with the Bulls and played Minor League baseball for the White Sox Double-A affiliate Birmingham in 1994, was invited to be part of the City Connect rollout.
“I don’t know if we are going to get him out of Florida,” Boyer said. “Obviously when you have the great history of the Bulls and you have the history of the White Sox, to try to put both of those things together made a lot of sense.”
A 2025 White Sox City Connect origin story truly takes root back in ‘21 with the iconic and original Southside City Connects setting the baseline. Boyer was realistic in that the organization wasn’t going to exceed that immense level of popularity but wanted to reach it.
Their journey became a passion project for Boyer, who worked for the Bulls for 10 years before being part of the White Sox for the last 20.
“You look at some of the things other [teams] are doing: Bright, loud colors? That’s not us. That’s not the White Sox,” Boyer said. “This started two years ago. When you think about a collaboration like this, this involved the NBA and it involved Major League Baseball, NIKE. Fanatics is a launch partner for us.
“There are a lot of people that were involved including the Bulls. It started when the Bulls' creative team met with our creative team, so Jon Shoemaker of the Bulls, Toby Ramos and Gareth Breunlin here, got together and were like, ‘How could this possibly work, where it’s still a baseball jersey, but certainly there are nods to the relationship with the Bulls that we have?’”
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There are existing similarities in jersey layouts between the two franchises.
“When you look at it, we have red in our history, which can work for us,” Boyer said. “We both have pinstripes in our history.
“There are some easy crossovers we can make. To be able to do it in a city like Chicago and put Chicago across the chest, we thought it also was an appealing jersey if you are just a fan of Chicago.”
White Sox fans understandably aren’t easily pleased in these current lean times. There was a bad picture leaked out with no context of the new City Connects, weeks before its debut, which didn’t help, according to Boyer.
But Bulls legend Derrick Rose liked the jersey when he was one of the first ones to view it before his Opening Day first pitch at Rate Field. The fans and White Sox players also back this special combination.
“You have to have something that was truly unique, and this collaboration was what we thought was unique,” Boyer said. “Our fans have high expectations, and we want to reach those expectations.”