Misery loves company.
The Chicago White Sox had never lost 14 consecutive games in a single season coming into 2024.
Now they’ve done it twice.
The Sox matched their single-season franchise mark with their 14th straight defeat Sunday, losing 6-3 to the Seattle Mariners in front of 17,100 at Guaranteed Rate Field.
“Tough,” starter Garrett Crochet said of the slide. “We’re competing. We’re just not winning. There’s really nothing to be said about it. It sucks. It’s terrible. Everyone in the clubhouse, we’re all pretty let down with how we’ve been playing throughout the season. But when you have stretches like this, yeah, it sucks.”
The Sox established the record with 14 straight defeats from May 22 to June 6.
That’s not the only dismal team record the Sox pulled even with Sunday.
At 27-81, the Sox are 54 games under .500. That matches the franchise record, which occurred in 1932 (46-100).
The Sox became the fourth team in Major League Baseball history to lose 81-plus times in the first 108 games of a season, and the first since the 1932 Boston Red Sox (26-82).
They were swept for the 16th time this season.
“It’s tough,” said third baseman Paul DeJong, who went 1-for-4 with a two-run home run. “We’re out here trying to compete. We’re trying to win games. I think everybody’s preparing the right way, it’s just not going our way. We’ve got to do the little things better, myself included.”
Some of the characteristics of the season-long struggles were on display. The Sox were held to three runs or less for the 10th consecutive game and went 3-for-22 with runners in scoring position in the three-game series (2-for-5 on Sunday).
And they made two errors during a two-run third inning, both fielding miscues by DeJong.
“We’re going over our mistakes,” manager Pedro Grifol said. “We just have to do a really good job of getting out here every single day and try to minimize those and execute on the field. We’re losing games in many different ways that we have to clean up.”
It was another planned short start for Crochet, who allowed five runs (three earned) on six hits with three strikeouts and one walk in three innings.
Crochet threw 64 pitches. He had 28 pitches on July 12 against the Pittsburgh Pirates and 74 pitches on July 23 against the Texas Rangers.
Crochet said physically, he feels “like I’m still picking up steam.”
“I feel like, personally, my stuff was great today,” Crochet said. “Just kind of mixed results, positives and negatives. I feel really good with where I’m at.”
Crochet made his final start before Tuesday’s trade deadline. He’s one of several Sox players mentioned in trade speculation. Crochet hasn’t found the trade talk to be a distraction. Asked how he’s blocked it out, Crochet said, “Focus on my routine.”
“I’ve talked to a few managers out there and they’re all telling me the same thing that this deadline is wearing everybody out,” Grifol said. “But again, it’s part of it. It’s part of going through it. The reason he’s such a hot topic is because he’s that good. On one end of it, it becomes a little bit of a pain in the ass. But on the other end, you’ve been really good, man. There’s a lot of interest because people out there, teams out there think you can take them to where they want to go.
“That goes for everybody that’s out there in the trade market that can make a difference for another team. You just have to understand that’s the way the business is and you’ve got to get through it mentally. He’s done a really good job of it. He doesn’t talk much about it. Maybe he does at home, but he doesn’t here. He’s done a really good job. He goes out there and he competes his ass off. So I’m proud of him, the way he’s handled this. It’ll soon be over.”
Crochet referred to Sunday as, “just one of those days they had a good plan.”
The Sox joined the 1911 Boston Rustlers, 1935 Boston Braves and 2021 Baltimore Orioles as the only teams in the modern era (since 1901) to record multiple 14-plus game losing streaks in a season, according to Elias Sports Bureau.
“It sucks, it’s not fun,” Grifol said of the losing streak. “We’ve been in nine or 10 of these games. We’ve had an opportunity to really close five or six of them, maybe seven of them, close them out. We’ve found different ways to lose these games.
“We’ve got to lock in. We’ve got to lock in as a group. We’ve got to lock in as a coaching staff. I’ve got to lock in as a manager and get through this thing and come out on the other side of it more than we have been.”
