WWhen the history books are written, there will be all kinds of different ways to describe the historical rot of the 2024 Chicago White Sox. The unprecedented loss total will be one. The incomprehensibly poor performance of the team’s position players will be another. The three separated losing streaks of 21, 14 and 12 games. There will be plenty of time for all this. The White Sox lost their 121st game on Friday night, the most in a modern era dating back to 1901. They are also the worst team of that era in terms of winning percentage, sitting at 39-121 with two games to play. After a scrappy home game by the Los Angeles Angels allowed them to avoid a 121st loss at home, the dam finally broke in a 4-1 road loss to the playoff-bound Detroit Tigers.
But perhaps the most modern barometer of the 2024 White Sox catastrophe is the media environment surrounding the team. The club’s rights-holding TV broadcasters have been at his throat the whole season. And as Chicago neared their milestone loss, the White Sox’s own social media stopped tweeting the team’s results (or they did, anyway). until a late, unexpected winning streak). Their effort turned out to be the only vaguely successful one of the entire season: ‘FINAL: can be found on the MLB app’ one postgame post read on X. Another had this zinger: “FINAL: the number of points scored was not greater than the number of points scored”. Soon there was only this:
After Friday’s record-breaking loss, there was only this much more somber but funny note:
That will be the legacy of these White Sox: that of a team so bad that the people who paid to put lipstick on this pig couldn’t even pretend anymore. It’s hard to imagine their bosses were even angry about it. If owner Jerry Reinsdorf doesn’t care enough to field a better team, what could possibly offend him? The “sell the team” chant that erupt during home games doesn’t seem to affect him. It’s a minor miracle that the organization thought of firing manager Pedro Grifol after he started in 28-99.
The South Siders have become a league-wide curiosity this year, just three seasons after reaching the postseason with one of the younger rosters in baseball. Many baseball clubs have suffered precipitous declines, and every year a good portion of Major League Baseball tries not to actively participate. But the sport has never seen anything like the Sox of 2024, and hopefully it never will again. This team is what happens when a shamefully bad front office crosses with good old-fashioned bad luck. Even clubs that are doing everything they can to be among the worst in baseball during a rebuild will struggle to be as terrible as these Sox.
Not every part of the 2024 White Sox is bleak. The club’s pitching staff is certainly bad, but not even an outlier for this year, let alone history. The White Sox’s 4.71 average through Friday was 28th out of 30 teams, as was their field-independent pitching grade of 4.57. They got 146 innings off of starter Garrett Crochet, who struck out nearly 13 batters per nine innings and was one of the most effective pitchers in the league. A few other White Sox arms were pretty decent in supporting roles.
So you might imagine that the White Sox’ position players have been bad on a level that’s hard to put into context. You would be right. The White Sox have exactly one batter who has reached base one win above replacement pass by the calculations at FanGraphs. That player is shortstop Paul DeJong, who hasn’t played for the White Sox since late July, when the team traded him to the Kansas City Royals. Only one qualified hitter on the White Sox was league average at the time, based on the league-adjusted “runs created” statistic. That player, outfielder Tommy Pham, was also traded in July. The team’s best player, outfielder Luis Robert Jr., has been uncharacteristically bad — when he hasn’t been injured.
All told, White Sox hitters were worth a negative seven wins above replacement. They were about five times worse than the next worst group of position players any team in the 21st centurythanks to a combination of that poor batting and terrible defense. To watch the White Sox is to watch a parade of poorly played balls, bad pitches and staggering errors in the field. Not that it’s a surprise that they can’t find the right players: according to The Athleticthe 88-year-old Reinsdorf isn’t sold on analytics, an integral part of modern baseball. While most successful clubs have hordes of mathematicians staffing their analytics departments, the White Sox have none at all.
Then there are the regular bad breaks. The White Sox are extremely bad, but close games have broken out against them to a ridiculous degree. They are 4-10 in extra innings, which starts with a freebie runner at second base for each team. They are an improbable 13-29 in one-run games, and miles the worst in baseball. Their Pythagorean record, a projection of how they ‘should’ perform, says they should have won eight more games than they have. The White Sox may indeed have a silver lining to take away from this season: They really weren’t that far removed from being a team with 110 losses out of 162 games.
But for now, as has been the case for weeks, the only White Sox employees worth watching will be the ones running the social accounts.