A small but focused crowd is expected Tuesday night on the South Side to see if the Chicago White Sox can avoid making major-league history.
Wearing black is optional.
Rookie Jonathan Cannon, who has done a respectable job since joining the rotation, takes the mound against the Los Angeles Angels in what should be a strange, playoff-type atmosphere between two last-place teams playing out the string.
On one hand, most Sox fans coming out want their team to win. On the other, who doesn’t want to say they witnessed history?
A White Sox loss would give them 121 for the season, breaking the 62-year-old record set by the 1962 New York Mets, an expansion team set up to lose. A Sox win gives them a chance to do it all over again on Wednesday night, and Thursday in the home finale if they win the first two games. The Sox must go 6-0 the rest of the way to finish tied with the Mets.
White Sox interim manager Grady Sizemore has repeatedly said he and the players are not focused on the record. What else can he say?
But the Sox’s social media department has made it clear they are well aware of the mark. Instead of tweeting out the scores after recent losses, as they do most games, they’ve sidestepped the number with messages avoiding the loss completely, posts like: “FINAL: Can be found on the MLB app” and “FINAL: the number of runs we scored was not greater than the number of runs they scored.”
FINAL: the number of runs we scored was not greater than the number of runs they scored
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) September 21, 2024
Ironically, that post was an inadvertent reminder of something former manager Pedro Grifol actually said back in 2023: “You either have to score more than them, or have them score less.” Grifol sounded like Casey Stengel, and now will have his name linked forever to the famous manager of the ’62 Mets.
The Sox are generally not known for their sense of humor, making the self-effacing posts an outlier in their season-long handling of the nonstop losing. A Sox spokesperson said the four posts from the recent losses reached an audience of 24.6 million on their social media account, turning a negative into a positive by showing the team can still laugh at itself.
“As we planned for this unfortunate milestone, we were looking to come up with creative ways to acknowledge the reality of the situation, engage with our fans and with a wink, maybe disarm the negativity just a little bit,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
It’s a noble effort. But it also begs the question: Are the ’24 White Sox a comedy or a tragedy?
I posed the question to an old friend, veteran Chicago stage actor and director Richard Cotovsky, a Sox fan who was asked a similar question after appearing in “The Bear.”
“A comedy, for sure,” Cotovsky replied. “I’ve been rooting for them to get the record all season, and now my dream is coming true.”
We can all laugh about the Sox, but not everyone thinks it’s funny. One player approached me recently in the visiting clubhouse at Wrigley Field and asked if I felt sorry for the Sox. The same question was asked by a broadcaster, a bartender and a brother-in-law, among others.
Shouldn’t we sympathize with their plight as fellow human beings?
I told them I felt sorry for some of the players who gave their best and have always been accountable, including Garrett Crochet and Gavin Sheets, and for friends who work at Sox Park and have had to watch this brand of baseball every day.
But not for the Sox organization as a whole. No professional sports team owned by a billionaire deserves sympathy for skimping on the product and pretending they’re trying as hard as everyone else. When a big business fails, whether it’s the White Sox or Red Lobster, it’s on ownership for making a series of wrong decisions that led to the downfall.
Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf has insulated himself from the media and taken no responsibility for the many issues that have led to this moment, from a lack of signing quality free agents to downplaying analytics to hiring his friend, Tony LaRussa, against the advice of his own front office.
It’s impossible for anyone to feel sorry for Reinsdorf, his fellow board members, or the board of directors who don’t push back on any of his decisions. If Reinsdorf were truly accountable, he’d apologize to Sox fans for the product he’d put out, like Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores did last December after his team had lost 25 consecutive games on their way to setting the single-season NBA record with 28-straight losses.
Gores decided to speak to the media and was asked who was most responsible.
“It has to be me,” he said. “I was very optimistic at the beginning of the season. Maybe I missed something in the combinations. If you want to shoulder (blame) on anyone, I’d say it’s me and (general manager Troy Weaver). We made these decisions.”
Easy enough, Jerry? Try it sometime.
Sox general manager Chris Getz, who put the team together on a reduced payroll ordered by Reinsdorf, has accepted the bulk of the blame. Whether you like him or not, Getz has not run away from it and deserves credit for being available.
Grifol didn’t take much responsibility and even suggested after the Sox’s seventh-straight loss in July during a 21-game losing streak that it was all part of a bigger plan.
“It’s painful, but my faith is in the good Lord up there, man,” he said. “There’s a reason I’m going through this. There’s a reason we’re going through this as an organization, a reason these young kids are here with this opportunity to perform and develop.”
There was also a reason Grifol was fired Aug. 8, and it had nothing to do with the good Lord. He was promptly replaced by Sizemore, a mop-up man who couldn’t stop the slide and soon will share co-billing with Grifol as the two leaders of the worst team in modern major-league history.
Grifol is fortunate to not be sitting in the Sox dugout Tuesday answering questions about the record. Sizemore, in his final week as a major-league manager, will be back in the hot seat, repeating the same lines he’s uttered the last six weeks.
Many of the players who share responsibility for the record are gone as well, including Eloy Jiménez, Michael Kopech and Martín Maldonado. The only ones who’ve been here the entire season are Crochet, Sheets, Andrew Vaughn, Andrew Benintendi, Korey Lee, Nicky Lopez and Chris Flexen.
Luis Robert Jr. suffered a right hip flexor strain April 5 and missed two months. Third baseman Yoán Moncada, part of the core of the original rebuild in 2017 who later signed a five-year, $70 million deal, suffered a left adductor strain April 9 and didn’t return until Sept. 16.
“One more body that can help us,” Sizemore said that day, before chaining perhaps his best hitter to the bench for the entire 1-5 road trip, where Moncada was given only one at-bat.
At least it’s almost over, for Moncada and the rest of us.
We’ll always have the Campfire Milkshake to look back on.
