Vintage 1998 MLB Folding Fan ⚾ Chicago White Sox It’s Baseball Season

Who Made the 1998 Chicago White Sox Folding Fan? ⚾ A Vintage 1998 Chicago White Sox MLB Folding Fan, Play By Play

Size: 11" x 9 1/2"

A pleated paper hand fan on two black plastic sticks, printed in black, gray and white stripes with CHICAGO WHITE SOX across the top and the Old English SOX logo on each wing - open it all the way and the stripes look a lot like the team's pinstripes. It folds to about 6 3/4 inches. They came a dozen to a box marked GENUINE MAJOR LEAGUE MERCHANDISE - the licensing line Major League Baseball Properties used on official goods - FOLDING FANS, with a painted ballpark scoreboard on the front and Play-By-Play, MLB 1998 on the end. You're buying one fan - the box in my pictures is the dealer box they came in, shown for reference. Never used at a game.

🧸 Play By Play of San Antonio

The Play-By-Play on the box was Play By Play Toys & Novelties, a San Antonio, Texas company that made stuffed toys and novelties for the amusement and retail trades under licenses for cartoon characters, comic heroes and pro sports teams. In 1997, the year before this box, it did $74.2 million in sales with 620 employees and traded on the Nasdaq. It later made Pokemon plush and in 2002 moved its business to Valencia, Spain.

The man behind it was Arturo Torres - he came over from Cuba as a refugee, washed dishes, and worked his way up to running 240 Pizza Huts and Taco Bells before he started supplying prizes to the vending and carnival trade. By the late 1990s the company was public, owned Ace Novelty of Bellevue, Washington, and kept a big warehouse plant and showroom in Chicago. Its own 1998 annual report put it at the top of the domestic amusement-prize business, and that year it added MLB, NFL and NBA Fanimal beanbags to the line.

⚾ The White Sox

The White Sox were a charter member of the American League in 1901, under Charles Comiskey, and won the World Series in 1906 - upsetting the crosstown Cubs - and again in 1917. South Siders will tell you, without a second's hesitation, that theirs is the real history of Chicago baseball. Then came 1919: eight players, Shoeless Joe Jackson among them, were accused of throwing the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, and new commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned the Black Sox for life, the start of the commissioner's office as baseball's final word. The team played at the old Comiskey Park from 1910 through 1990 and moved across the street to the new park in 1991 - since called U.S. Cellular Field, Guaranteed Rate Field and now Rate Field - which is where these fans would have been waving in 1998, with Frank Thomas, the Big Hurt, in his prime. Old-timers on the South Side will tell you the 2005 World Series title - the team's first in 88 years - felt less like a party than the whole city finally letting out a breath it had held since 1917.

🖤 The SOX on the wings

That Old English SOX went back on the uniforms in September 1990, for the last series at old Comiskey - a simpler version of the Gothic SOX the team wore from 1949 to 1963, and the moment the colors went back to black, now with silver. In 1998 the Sox, in Jerry Manuel's first season managing, went 80-82 and finished second in the AL Central; Albert Belle hit .328 with 49 homers and 152 RBI, and the Big Hurt added 29 and 109.

📅 How old is it?

The box is printed MLB 1998, so these are 1998.

⚾ About these

It's about 11 by 9 1/2 inches open. It's a great one for a Sox fan, a game-day bag, a man cave, a South Side kid who grew up at Comiskey, or anybody who misses the 1990s at the ballpark. The supply is finite - nobody's making 1998 Sox fans anymore, and once these last ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.