The 2024 Chicago White Sox deserve to be in the record books. A team this bad — this arduous even to watch — shouldn’t just toil away in obscurity. It should be remembered for posterity, and thanks to Monday night’s 5-1 loss in Oakland to the A’s, it will be.
The Sox have already tied the American League record for most consecutive losses at 21. (They were attempting Tuesday night to avoid another loss, which would have them supplant the 1988 Baltimore Orioles for most defeats in a row).
There was no small amount of irony on offer Tuesday, given that the awful ’88 Orioles team broke their losing streak in Chicago at Comiskey Park against the White Sox. The Orioles went on to finish the 1988 campaign with a record of 54-107.
It’s reasonably safe to assume these White Sox won’t come within sniffing distance of that mark. They’d have to go 27-20 the rest of the way to do so. A team with a 14-game losing streak and a 21-and-counting losing streak to its “credit” almost surely won’t start playing the .574 baseball necessary to keep pace with that Baltimore squad.
No, these White Sox have bigger fish to fry. At their present .235 winning percentage, they’re on course to set the all-time Major League Baseball record for losses in a season. They would finish 38-124 at that clip. The 1962 New York Mets in their inaugural year ended the season 40-120. Manager Casey Stengel, already a baseball legend at that point with nothing to prove, famously remarked on his sad sack team, “Can’t anybody here play this game?, which columnist Jimmy Breslin used as the title of his book about that legendarily horrendous group.
Will anyone be writing any books about these White Sox? If only the legendary Tribune columnist Mike Royko were still with us, we’d love to see what he would produce, given his rants back in the day about the hapless Cubs of the 1970s. But those Cubs teams were the 1927 Yankees compared with the 2024 Sox. Even Royko might be at a loss for words on the 2024 White Sox.
Pedro Grifol, who was given his “big break” as a first-time MLB manager when he got the White Sox job at the beginning of last season, is no Casey Stengel. And his utterings aren’t nearly as entertaining. When he’s mercifully fired, which baseball writers assume will happen once the season ends if not earlier, he will wind up a trivia question years from now.
But this abomination can’t all be pinned on Grifol. It’s been a real team effort. After owner Jerry Reinsdorf fired longtime baseball execs Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn a year ago or so, he didn’t bother to look outside the organization for a replacement. He named Chris Getz, then assistant general manager, to succeed Hahn and Williams. At the time, Reinsdorf explained his lack of thoroughness by saying, “Speed is of the essence.” Getz knew the players and the team better than any outsider would, and would quicken the rebuilding time frame. Or so went Reinsdorf’s thinking.
Come to think of it, that’s a quote worth remembering. And we’re betting Sox fans, more of whom are showing up to games with signs “advising” Reinsdorf to “sell the team,” will indeed etch that one into their memory banks.
So where to from here for a team that still has a mind-boggling 47 games left to play and is giving the term “playing out the string” a bad name?
Baseball being a stats- and history-obsessed sport, there’s more than one way to assess futility. The 162-game season came into being a mere 60 years ago or so. So, for the many teams that played in the decades before, winning percentage is the marker. On that score, the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics are the standard-bearers. Their 36-117 mark produced a winning percentage of .235. Which just happens to be the Sox’s winning percentage as we write.
Many White Sox fans we know aren’t bothering to watch this team anymore, and for good reason. Watching baseball is supposed to be fun. But there’s a hard-core group “hate watching” this team and rooting for them to stand alone as the all-time worst in MLB’s rich history — by every metric possible.
Grifol and his players surely will do everything in their power not to give those hate-watchers what they want.
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