When the history books are written, there will be all manner of different ways to describe the historic putridness of the 2024 Chicago White Sox. The unprecedented loss total will be one. The incomprehensibly bad performance of the team’s position players will be another. The three separate losing streaks of 21, 14, and 12 games. There will be ample time for all of it. The White Sox lost their 121st game on Friday night, the most in a modern era that dates to 1901. They are also the worst team of that span by win percentage, sitting at 39-121 with two games left to play. After a scrappy home sweep of the Los Angeles Angels allowed them to avoid a 121st loss at home, the dam finally broke in a 4-1 road defeat to the playoff-bound Detroit Tigers.
But maybe the most modern barometer of the White Sox catastrophe of 2024 is the media environment around the team. The club’s rights-holding TV broadcasters have been at its throat all season. And as Chicago approached their milestone loss, the White Sox’ own social media stopped bothering to tweet out the team’s results (or they did until a late, unexpected winning streak). Their efforts turned out to be the only vaguely successful thing about the entire season: “FINAL: can be found on the MLB app,” one postgame post on X read. Another had this zinger: “FINAL: the number of runs we scored was not greater than the number of runs they scored”. Soon, there was only this:
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) September 22, 2024
After Friday’s record-breaking loss, there was only this much bleaker but funny note:
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) September 28, 2024
That will be the legacy of these White Sox: that of a team so bad that the people paid to put lipstick on this pig couldn’t even pretend anymore. It is hard to imagine their bosses were even mad about it. If owner Jerry Reinsdorf couldn’t care enough to field a team better than this, then what could possibly offend him? The “sell the team” chants that erupt at home games don’t seem to affect him. It’s a minor wonder that the organization remembered to fire manager Pedro Grifol after he started 28-99.
The South Siders have become a league-wide curiosity this year, just three seasons after they made the postseason with one of the younger rosters in baseball. Lots of ballclubs have had precipitous declines, and every year, a nice chunk of Major League Baseball is not actively attempting to contend. But the sport has never seen anything like the 2024 Sox, and hopefully, it never will again. This team is what happens when a disgracefully bad front office intersects with old-fashioned bad luck. Even clubs that make every effort to be among baseball’s worst during a rebuild will struggle to be as awful as these Sox.
Not every part of the 2024 White Sox is dismal. The club’s pitching staff is bad, certainly, but not even an outlier for this year, let alone history. The White Sox’ 4.71 earned run average through Friday was 28th of the 30 teams, as was their 4.57 fielding-independent pitching mark. They got 146 innings out of starter Garrett Crochet, who struck out nearly 13 hitters per nine innings and was one of the most effective pitchers in the league. A few other White Sox arms were rather decent in supporting roles.
You might imagine, then, that the White Sox’ position players have been bad on a level that would be difficult to put into context. You would be correct. The White Sox have exactly one hitter who has reached one win above replacement going by the calculations at FanGraphs. That player is shortstop Paul DeJong, who has not been with the White Sox since late July, when the team traded him to the Kansas City Royals. Only one qualified hitter on the White Sox has been league-average at the plate, going by the league-adjusted “runs created” stat. That player, outfielder Tommy Pham, was also traded in July. The team’s best player, outfielder Luis Robert Jr, has been unusually bad – when he hasn’t been injured.
Put together, White Sox hitters have been worth negative-seven wins above replacement. They have been about five times worse than the next-worst group of position players on any team in the 21st century, thanks to a combination of that bad hitting and horrible defense. To watch the White Sox is to watch a parade of poorly played balls, bad throws, and head-scratching mistakes in the field. Not that it’s a surprise they can’t find the right players: according to The Athletic, the 88-year-old Reinsdorf isn’t sold on analytics, an integral part of modern baseball. Whereas most successful clubs have hordes of number crunchers staffing their analytics department, the White Sox don’t have one at all.
Then there are the regular bad breaks. The White Sox are ultra-bad, but close games have broken against them to a ridiculous extent. They are 4-10 in extra innings, which begin with a freebie runner placed on second base for each team. They are an improbable 13-29 in one-run games, worst in baseball by miles. Their Pythagorean record, a projection of how they “should” perform, says they ought to have won eight more games than they have. Indeed, the White Sox can take away a silver lining from this season: They really weren’t that far away from only being a 110-loss team out of 162 games.
But for now, as has been the case for weeks, the only White Sox employees worth watching will be those running the social accounts.
