Getty Image / ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/David Banks-Imagn Images
Pope LEO XIV in front of a group of Chicago White Sox fans wearing the Papal Mitre hats
The Chicago White Sox expected a few thousand people to pay extra for a Pope hat and instead discovered that apparently half the South Side wanted to dress like the Vatican had opened a team store. What began as a 2,500-voucher promotion for Pope Leo XIV turned into more than 40,000 Pope hats, forcing the organization to multiply its original order roughly 16 times.
The White Sox had planned to make the hats available through a special ticket package for Tuesday’s game against Cincinnati. Those 2,500 spots disappeared so quickly that the team added 500 more, watched those vanish too and eventually decided the only reasonable response was to make one for essentially everybody in the building.
The White Sox Accidentally Created Baseball’s Holiest Giveaway
The hats are shaped like a papal mitre with the White Sox sock logo planted in the middle, which means thousands of baseball fans spent Tuesday night looking like they were attending the world’s strangest conclave.
Chicago prepared just over 40,000 hats for the promotion. Rate Field drew 38,113 fans, and marketing executive Brooks Boyer said the organization could not remember another promotional item that forced it to scale an original plan all the way to 40,000.
That is a spectacular escalation.
A normal giveaway meeting starts with somebody asking whether 10,000 bobbleheads are enough. This one apparently ended with someone calling the vendor and saying, “Good news, we need to outfit an entire diocese.”
The demand makes more sense when you remember the pope involved is not merely some celebrity the team randomly adopted.
Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Prevost and raised in the Chicago area, is a genuine Sox fan. Archived footage showed him attending Game 1 of the 2005 World Series, and his fandom has become one of the funniest recurring sports stories since he was elected pope in 2025.
The team has leaned into it hard.
It installed a tribute near the seat where Leo watched that World Series game, hosted an event celebrating the first American pope and even presented Paul Konerko with a jersey signed by Leo. The Pope himself has worn a White Sox cap and once responded to a fan yelling “Go Cubs” with “they lost.”
That is not ceremonial fandom. That is a man who understands the assignment.
The Original 2,500 Buyers Got An Upgrade
There was one obvious problem with turning an exclusive paid promotion into something everybody received. The people who bought the original ticket package could reasonably ask why they paid extra.
Chicago solved that by giving those fans a special white jersey reading “CHICAGO’S POPE” with No. 14 on the back.
So nobody had to file a grievance with the Vatican.
The actual game even leaned into the theme. Brenton Doyle, Edgar Quero and Miguel Vargas homered, and White Sox players celebrated by wearing the Pope hats in the dugout. Chicago built a 4-0 lead before Cincinnati rallied for a 5-4 win in 10 innings, proving divine intervention apparently has limits in the late innings.
The result did not ruin the promotion.
A team that originally expected 2,500 people to care enough about a novelty hat ended up preparing more than 40,000 because demand blew past every projection.
Baseball teams spend millions trying to manufacture buzz. The White Sox put a sock logo on a pope hat and accidentally created a pilgrimage.