How Many Wins Is a Pope Worth?

A papal conclave is the ultimate news story. It’s an event shrouded in ceremony and secrecy, which takes place incredibly rarely; only three times in the past 40 years, in fact. Even in this era when seeing everything has made the mysterious mundane, the world is left waiting in total ignorance for news of white smoke. Billions of observers, Catholic or not, look on in rapt fascination. And when the conclave produced the first American-born pope, Leo XIV, things only got more fascinating.

I come from a Catholic extended family, but for the most part, I was a devoted low-church protestant in my youth and am largely irreligious now. Nevertheless, I’ve always held the Vatican in a certain esteem. Its grandeur, its rituals, its dense and ancient jargon — all of that looks mystical and romantic from a distance. Is it the sole conduit to Almighty God? Perhaps not, from where I sit. But it’s a fascinating institution nonetheless.

That cloud of fairy tale wonder evaporated in an instant on Thursday, when the cardinal electors chose Cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago to inherit St. Peter’s throne.

The pope of my youth, John Paul II, was a serene, austere cleric from a faraway land, who’d faced off against dictators and survived assassins. Leo XIV has lived his life as a guy named Bob from Illinois, who taught high school for a while and did missionary work in Peru. He went to Villanova, and retweeted a post about Kris Jenkins’ buzzer beater to win the national championship in 2016. I know people like this, and now one of them is one of the most revered and influential people on the planet.

The Cubs tried to claim Leo XIV right off the proverbial bat, but the myth of Pope Cubs Fan didn’t survive the afternoon. (For what it’s worth, and again I say this as an irreligious person, I think falsely claiming the pope’s allegiance is legitimately profane. Like the kind of thing that gets you sent to a circle of Hell you don’t visit until near the end of Inferno.)

The truth is even weirder: The pope is not a Cubs fan, but a White Sox fan. (What a massive blow to Barack Obama, who surely woke up last Thursday thinking he’d go down as the most famous White Sox fan of all time.) So said his brother, and a family friend whose dad went to Game 1 of the 2005 World Series with the man then known as Father Bob. He even showed up in a crowd shot during the broadcast of that World Series game.

“A Pope Who Ministers to the Suffering? Yup, He’s a White Sox Fan,” read the New York Times headline. The joke has been made roughly 100,000 times in the past week, but the sentiment behind it is true enough we can give a little leeway. With more than a billion Catholics in the world, surely someone out there hasn’t heard it yet.

A sober and respectful observer would either treat the pope’s White Sox fandom as a bit of trivia, or at most use it as a literary device to half-jokingly illustrate his concern for the poor and vulnerable.

I have additional questions. The absolute leader of the largest church on the planet, and one of the most influential organizations of any kind, is a lifelong fan of one of the worst major sports teams in the country. The juxtaposition of absolute cosmic power and (not to put too fine a point on it, but) cleanup hitter Matt Thaiss is not only compelling, it’s inherently volatile.

Surely the pope’s favorite team can’t be this bad forever. The first will be last, and the last will be first, it says in the Bible. (Matthew 20:16, right before Jesus predicts his own torture and death.) Leo XIV is the first pope who’s a baseball fan (he also reportedly likes tennis), but he’s not the first pope who has enjoyed sports more generally.

So let’s look back through history: What effect, if any, does the pope have on his favorite sports team? How many runs, or goals, is a pope in the stands worth?

I found reasonably credible evidence as to the sports fandom of the past four popes, including Leo XIV. Going further back, things got a little dicey. Professional sports weren’t quite as systematized as they are now. For example: Pope John XXIII was from Bergamo; someone who grew up there now would probably be an Atalanta fan. But Atalanta wasn’t founded until 1907, when the future Pope John XXIII was 26 years old.

Speaking of things that only became systematized recently: Italy itself! Only the eight most recent popes have been born since the unification of Italy in 1861. (The unified Italian state is only 20 years older than the Cincinnati Reds, so just bear that in mind the next time you think about getting snooty about Skyline Chili.)

All of this is to say that I Googled “Paul VI football,” and every single result was for the football team of Paul VI High School in Haddon Township, New Jersey, and I decided that was a good place to stop. Paul VI does have a baseball tie-in, as it happens; it’s the alma mater of former big league closer and current Red Sox pitching coach Andrew Bailey. (Though nearby Bishop Eustace Prep is Camden County’s premier producer of major league pitchers.)

Pope John Paul II grew up in Wadowice, Poland, not far from Kraków, and played soccer as a boy. It’s not surprising, then, that he became a fan of one of the local teams, KS Cracovia, which won the Polish league title three times between 1930 and 1937. As you might already be aware, the ensuing 50 years of Polish history were eventful to say the least. World War II and the early years of Communist dictatorship became formative experiences for the young Karol Wojtyła, and they also had a deleterious effect on KS Cracovia, which fell to the second and even the third division at times.

Cracovia achieved promotion to the second division in 1978, the season before their most famous fan was elected pope, and in 1982-83, they reached the first division and took part in their first Europe-wide cup competition before falling on hard times again.

Cracovia got promoted back to the first division again in the final year of John Paul II’s papacy, 2004-05, and with one interruption, it has remained in the top flight ever since. I was unable to find game-by-game stats from Polish minor soccer leagues, but I do have the results from 2004-05, and was able to produce a table of Cracovia’s results both before and after the pope’s death on April 2:

On the one hand, Cracovia had more wins and more points in fewer games after the pope’s death than before. But on the other hand, Cracovia’s goal differential was worse; four of those seven wins came by a single goal. If anything, that suggests more favorable bounces of the ball after the death of John Paul II than before. Perhaps, once relieved of the considerable burdens of leading the Church, John Paul II’s spirit was free to intercede in the fortunes of his favorite soccer team.

John Paul II’s successor was his chief adviser, Benedict XVI, né Joseph Ratzinger. Born in Bavaria in 1927, Ratzinger’s Bayern Munich fandom was notable, though overshadowed by other allegiances he expressed in his youth.

Ratzinger was one of the most powerful figures in the Vatican for almost 25 years before he became pope; so too Bayern Munich in German and European soccer. When white smoke emerged from the 2005 papal conclave, Bayern Munich was on its way to its 14th Bundesliga title since Ratzinger had been elevated to cardinal in 1977. Ratzinger’s 28-year tenure as cardinal also saw Bayern Munich win 11 domestic cup competitions, plus the 2001 Champions League:

But, as you can see, Bayern’s fortunes got even better under the papacy of Benedict XVI. It was during the late 2000s that Germany’s biggest club consolidated its stunning run of dominance. And after Benedict XVI’s retirement, things got even better:

Benedict XVI vacated the papacy on February 28, 2013. In the months afterward, Bayern Munich became the first German team to complete what in soccer is known as a “treble” — winning the domestic league, domestic cup, and the continental cup title in the same season. The 2012-13 season kicked off a run of 11 straight league titles for Bayern Munich, including a second treble in 2019-20. The first full Bundesliga season after Benedict XVI’s death in 2022 was the first title won by someone other than Bayern Munich since before Benedict XVI’s retirement.

Coincidence? I think not.

If you watched The Two Popes, you probably remember the coda, in which the newly retired Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins) and Francis (Jonathan Pryce) get together to watch the 2014 World Cup final between Benedict XVI’s Germany and Francis’ Argentina. The film is heavily fictionalized, but I’ll watch any film where two heavyweight actors get put in a room and argue with each other for two hours. (This was also the highly successful premise of, among other films, Crimson Tide.)

One aspect in which The Two Popes was true to life: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, was a huge soccer fan. You might have seen then-Cardinal Bergoglio’s membership card for CA San Lorenzo de Almagro, a club from Buenos Aires.

Bergoglio was created a cardinal on February 21, 2001, and comparing the period from that date to his election, San Lorenzo’s aggregate results were almost exactly the same as they were during Francis’ papacy:

San Lorenzo won two league titles and the Copa Sudamericana (South America’s second-tier continental club cup competition) when Bergoglio was a cardinal. Within 15 months of Francis’ election to the papacy, San Lorenzo won another league title (its last to date), plus the 2014 Copa Libertadores, which is the South American version of the Champions’ League — inarguably the club’s most prestigious result in its history.

Having already mentioned the 2014 World Cup, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also take notice of Argentina’s victory at the 2022 World Cup. Indeed, Francis was the first sitting pope since Pius XI in 1938 to watch his home country win the World Cup. La Albiceleste is also currently the two-time defending Copa América champion.

I do think that Argentina’s international dominance in the 2020s is the result of divine influence, but not from the Vatican. During much of his papacy, Francis was arguably not Argentina’s most revered spiritual figure — Diego Maradona was.

From Maradona’s international retirement in 1994 until his death in 2020, Argentina got shut out at the World Cup and Copa América, despite having Lionel Messi in the team for more than half of that period. Messi’s only international triumph during that stretch was an Olympic gold medal in 2008, and the Olympics are not a full international competition in men’s soccer.

But since Maradona died, Argentina has won every men’s World Cup and Copa América that’s been held. That says to me that there are metaphysical forces at play beyond even the comprehension of the Catholic Church.

Maradona’s ghost controlled the Argentina national soccer team, but the late Pope Francis had a huge impact on the 2025 conclave. During his 12-year papacy, Francis elevated 108 of the 135 cardinal electors who voted on his successor. Little surprise, then, that after two days they settled on someone who’d worked closely with Francis in the past few years.

But this was not a Benedict XVI situation; then-Cardinal Prevost had risen up the ranks very quickly, and entirely during Francis’ papacy. He was elevated to bishop in 2014, and to cardinal only in September 2023. Given Leo XIV’s relative youth and the tremendous depth of baseball record-keeping, we can recognize a disturbing pattern: The higher up the church hierarchy the new pope climbs, the worse his favorite baseball team gets.

When the Fox broadcast caught Prevost in the crowd at the 2005 World Series, he was prior general of the Order of Saint Augustine, but he merely held the rank of priest. It wasn’t until 2014 that he was elevated to bishop, and not until 2023 that he rose to the senior roles within the Vatican that preceded his papacy.

Then-Cardinal Prevost was only a cardinal at all for 20 months, and those 20 months coincided with the worst 20 months in the history of the White Sox. Indeed, they were 20 of the worst months any major league baseball team has ever suffered.

I’m not exaggerating. Seeing that galling .255 in the win percentage column, I went to Stathead. In the 200 games the White Sox played while Prevost was a cardinal, they won just 51 times. That’s the 12th-lowest win total in any 200-game stretch by any AL or NL team in the past 100 years.

Not the 12th-worst record or anything like that; the 12th-worst 200-game stretch. As of this writing, the 30 extant major league teams have played exactly 353,000 discrete 200-game stretches since the start of the 1926 regular season. And the White Sox are 12th from the bottom in winning percentage.

Actually, it’s worse than that; four of the 11 worse streaks are from other White Sox teams since 2023, in periods that overlapped substantially with Prevost’s tenure as a cardinal. (The other seven are the 2002-03 Detroit Tigers, taken at various endpoints. Poor Gail from The Last of Us.)

White Sox fans were surely hoping the new pontiff would intercede on behalf of their downtrodden community, and indeed their accursed team is 2-2 since the cardinal protodeacon announced, “habemas papam.” Which is better than 51-149, but three of those four games came against the Marlins, so in accordance with scripture, I am choosing to judge not at the moment.

The declining fortunes of Pope Leo XIV’s favorite baseball team lead me to one of three possible conclusions. First, that the White Sox will recover to competitiveness during the papacy of Leo XIV, and that such a recovery will be cited as one of the two miracles required for canonization of Pope Leo XIV as a saint.

Second, that the pope is capable of securing divine intervention for the White Sox, but is declining to do so. Christian theology holds that God’s power and mercy are limitless, but it’d be unseemly to say the least for the pope of all people to call on God’s blessings for selfish ends. Leo XIV celebrated mass for the first time as pope on Sunday, and from the pulpit he called for an end to war generally, and specifically for an end to the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.

I think we all can agree that ending war is a more righteous use of both temporal and metaphysical power than influencing the AL Central race.

The final possibility is that, as much as the pope might want to call upon the divine power of the Almighty to fix his favorite team, he can’t, because the White Sox are beyond salvation.

The list of mortal sins is longer than I had realized; in addition to murder, blasphemy, and simony, apparently wage theft can also separate a sinner from God’s grace. Nevertheless, I don’t know that the White Sox, for all their other failings, are noticeably more wicked than any other franchise. Certainly not enough to warrant this kind of punishment. But the will of the Almighty can be mysterious, and his wrath, well, that’s been discussed at length.