It’s been two months now since the Chicago White Sox stopped trying to outrun history. Players and coaches struggle to point to a date—the losses long ago started to run together—but it came around the lowest point in a season without highs.
Interim manager Grady Sizemore, elevated in early August to replace the fired Pedro Grifol, surveyed the room and made a decision. The team was barreling toward the single-season loss record of 120 games, set by the impossibly inept 1962 New York Mets. That group was an expansion team in its first season. This one was three years removed from winning the division. Sizemore could manage each game like the postseason, stealing outs from his starters and overusing his top relievers, fighting to lose only 119 games in 2024, or he could start thinking about 2025.
“Whether you lose 100 or 110, it doesn’t matter,” he says. (Evidently 121 does not even merit mention.) “You’re not going to the playoffs. At this point, we can’t focus on the record. It’s: How do we get better for next year? Who are the core guys that are coming back? How do we make them better? How do they fit into a winning team? How do we develop that team that we have in there right now into a productive, winning team next year, a competitive team that can play .500 baseball?”
In the meantime, history did come for them. On Friday, they lost their 121st game. All week they had insisted it would be just another loss, and indeed it was: The starter—this time lefty Garrett Crochet—pitched well, as they often have. The bullpen—this time lefties Jared Shuster and Fraser Ellard—gave up a couple of runs, as they often have. And the offense managed virtually nothing, as they often have. They lost 4–1 to the Detroit Tigers, their league-leading 46th time scoring fewer than two runs.
OCTOBER BASEBALL HERE WE COME! #RepDetroit pic.twitter.com/dDGCCjoLPl
— Bally Sports Detroit (@BallySportsDET) September 28, 2024
The players and coaches say they still expect to win every night. A player who was with the White Sox earlier this season disputes this: “They’re going in hoping to win,” he says, “But expecting to lose.”
They have had plenty of practice. They lost 22 of their first 25 games, tied for the worst start to a season in the wild-card era. Then it got worse. They lost 14 straight, then 21 straight, then 12 straight. They have staged one single successful comeback after the sixth inning all year. They are 0–102 when trailing after eight. They have held a lead in 95 games this season; they have lost 56 of those. According to FanGraphs, they have held a 0.0% chance of making the playoffs since April 7. They are 43 1/2 games back in the division … of fourth place.
All in all, it’s been the most stomach-turning summer in Chicago since Dave Matthews’s bus drove over the Kinzie Street Bridge.
“When you lose 21 in a row, it’s kind of like, ‘What the f---?” says Crochet. “You kind of get to the turning point of, like: All right, now it’s like, how do you win? You do the [little] things. You get guys over. And I feel like we’ve done a better job than that as of late.” He grins and adds, “The record might [suggest] otherwise.”
It’s the worst year in history. They might as well get something out of it.
Individually, that is. Incredibly, without major additions that the team is unlikely to make given that it has reportedly decided to cut payroll next year from its current $130 million—No. 20 in the league—the White Sox are probably more likely to challenge the loss record again in 2025 than they are to make the playoffs.
The front office slashed $58 million in payroll from a team that lost 101 games last season, then all but announced to those who remained that they were giving up, trading ace Dylan Cease—still two years from free agency—to the San Diego Padres on the eve of the season. “It’s like, Oh, they don’t care,” says a former White Sox player, one of the more than a dozen people Sports Illustrated canvassed for this story. “They expect us to be bad.”
Getz admitted as much to reporters earlier this month. “If you would have told me we would end up flirting with the record, I would have been a little surprised,” he said. “Now if you would have told me prior to the year we would have ended up with over 100 losses—105, 110—I would not have been as surprised.” The White Sox were built to be bad. But they also got unlucky: Center fielder Luis Robert Jr., a 2023 All-Star, missed two months with a right hip flexor strain. DH Eloy Jiménez, a ’20 Silver Slugger, lost two months to a series of injuries. Infielder Yoán Moncada, once the No. 2 prospect in baseball, has played only 12 games this year after straining an adductor muscle in April.
Robert is the only player who will be back next year; the White Sox traded Jiménez to the Baltimore Orioles at the deadline for a pitching prospect, and they have acknowledged they will not pick up Moncada’s $25 million option. As all four of their divisional opponents fight for the playoffs, the White Sox will continue to shed. They will likely trade Crochet—easily their best player—this winter as he reaches salary arbitration for the first time. (They wanted to trade him at the deadline, but a year and a half removed from Tommy John surgery, he said that he would decline to pitch in the postseason without a contract extension, and he remained in Chicago.)
And the cavalry is not coming: In an attempt to reduce tanking, the new collective-bargaining agreement prohibits large-market teams from entering the draft lottery in consecutive years, meaning that the White Sox will pick 10th in next year’s draft.
While they wait, the current White Sox endure one insult after another. “With the White Sox, you can guarantee that it’s gonna be on the lower end, whether it’s the food, the travel, whatever,” says another former White Sox player. The team plane—an Airbus A320 with only eight first class seats, so most everyone rides in coach—merits special scorn.
While other teams invest in proprietary data systems, says another former White Sox player, Chicago distributes general scouting reports made up mostly of opponents’ heat maps that disregard different pitch profiles. “Just because he's a lefty doesn’t mean that this hitter is going to swing and miss at a sinker down and away,” he says. “[A teammate’s] sinker’s got 20 inches [of run] and is breaking down. Mine's only breaking horizontally.” He notes that he is describing an organizational problem, not complaining about the staff: “With the resources [pitching coach Ethan] Katz has,” he says, “he does a really good job.”
And that’s the real problem, say people who were and are around the White Sox: the resources (or lack thereof) offered by 88-year-old billionaire real estate tycoon Jerry Reinsdorf, who bought the team in 1981. He oversaw their World Series win in 2005, but his recent tenure has included such feats as pushing out popular broadcaster Jason Benetti, hiring manager Tony La Russa over his executives’ objections and violating the CBA by declaring last August with a laugh, “Look, we’re not going to be in the [Shohei] Ohtani race, I’ll tell you that right now.” (The White Sox’ hitters this year as a group have been worth –6.7 wins above replacement. Ohtani has been worth 8.4.)
In a thorough takedown of Reinsdorf’s ownership last week, The Athletic quoted a former employee as saying, “You got a baseball fan owner who thinks he knows everything, and maybe he did in 1992, but the amount of info has skyrocketed in the last 30 years and he’s put his middle finger up at that.”
Reinsdorf rarely addresses the media or, through them, fans. (When Sizemore—a 10-year big leaguer, three-time All-Star and 42-year-old father of three—does interviews, a public-relations staffer sits in.) But players noticed the owner’s comments at a panel last May: “Sports is a business of failure, but the fact that you finish second or third or fourth, it doesn’t mean you had a bad year.”
This has been a bad year. Even Reinsdorf acknowledged as much earlier this month, releasing his first statement since firing vice president Kenny Williams and general manager Rick Hahn last August and replacing them with Getz.
"Everyone in this organization is extremely unhappy with the results of this season, that goes without saying," Reinsdorf’s statement read in part. "This year has been very painful for all, especially our fans. We did not arrive here overnight, and solutions won’t happen overnight either."
La Russa, who stayed on as a special advisor after retiring following a tumultuous two seasons as manager, says the White Sox have a plan, but he declines to share it. Getz said he would not be available for an interview before press time but told reporters on Tuesday that the White Sox would not shop at the top of the free agent market this offseason. That leaves them largely with the young players who have populated the roster this season. Seven of the 28 men currently on the roster made their major league debuts this year; another 10 were still rookie-eligible.
“They could do a coup if they wanted and completely overrun us,” muses Crochet, who himself has all of three years in the big leagues.
Righty Chris Flexen, who has pitched in parts of seven seasons, laughs. “I’d like to see them try!”
They notice Drew Thorpe, a 23-year-old rookie acquired in the Cease deal, across the room. “Don’t even f------ think about it, Drew!” Crochet says.
Because of the team’s youth and the personalities of the few veterans—left fielder Andrew Benintendi, the team’s highest-paid player, admits he’s more of a lead-by-example type—it is sometimes hard to identify whose job it is to rally the troops or to address a problem. “You don’t just want to hear the manager talk,” says one former White Sox player. “You want to hear guys around you.” But even the most stirring pep talk would likely not have made much difference, he acknowledges: “It’s not about words. It’s about actions.”
To a man, the former White Sox players noticed when they joined their new teams—all contenders—a level of professionalism Chicago lacked, mostly because the young players didn’t know any better. “This isn’t a work ethic issue,” says shortstop Nicky Lopez, who spent four and a half years with the Kansas City Royals and made the playoffs with Atlanta last year, pointing to the extra defensive drills and batting practice the team continues to do even as winter nears. It’s more that the rookies are still learning what it takes.
“They’re letting guys develop in the major leagues,” says outfielder Tommy Pham, whom the White Sox traded to the St. Louis Cardinals as part of a three-team deal at the deadline; the Royals claimed him off waivers a month later. “Ten years ago, when I got called up, it wasn’t like that. We weren’t given the ability to develop in the big leagues. You had to come up here and produce or you got sent back down. You developed in the minors. Now they’re letting guys develop in the big leagues. So what do you expect?” He adds, “There’s Brandon Belt sitting at home right now. There’s a lot of guys that don’t have jobs that could probably pitch. I feel like Amir Garrett could pitch in the bullpen for the White Sox. Teams aren’t going out and signing guys no more. The game has changed.”
In other words: This is a minor league team. Of course it’s getting crushed by major league teams.
So the White Sox do what minor league teams do: They celebrate small wins. One of the most rousing speeches delivered this year came after Sizemore’s first game as manager, when the lineup put together a series of productive at bats against the Chicago Cubs and the bullpen largely shut out the opposition. “He was very emphatic,” Crochet remembers. “‘That’s the kind of baseball that we need to play!’” They left the ballpark that night feeling almost fired up enough to forget that they’d lost 7–6.
“It’s tough doing that, because this is the big leagues,” says Lopez. “It’s not a developmental league. But it’s one of those things, when you do have some young guys, you don’t want them to get discouraged.”
And this is the biggest concern moving forward: At least some of these young players need to develop. But can you develop when you’re losing all the time?
“You definitely don’t want guys to learn how to fail in the big leagues,” says Crochet. “As far as true development, I don’t know.”
“If you don’t win, you feel like a loser,” says one of the former White Sox players. “There’s no way not to feel like a loser in that scenario.”
Baseball IQ is learned, says another former White Sox player, and it’s hard to learn it surrounded by so much pressure. “It’s an attention to detail throughout the game, a focus, a presence, versus if you're thinking about, Oh my God, we’re about to lose eight straight or We just lost 21 in a row, we need to win tonight—those things aren’t helpful.”
Another of the former White Sox players points to Michael Kopech, traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in part of the Pham deal. Kopech, the third pick in the 2014 draft, had a 4.38 ERA in parts of five seasons in Chicago, first as a starter and then as a reliever. As the Dodgers’ closer, he has a 1.29 ERA. “It’s cool to see, but it’s also eye-opening,” says his former teammate. “Like, this is obtainable.”
The hitters have been awful this year—one opponent says the scouting report is one word long: Attack—but it’s watching the pitchers dominate elsewhere that is hardest. As the Houston Astros began to pull out of their teardown a decade ago, they focused on building up the bullpen, because they believed there was nothing more devastating for a young team than to take a lead into the late innings and watch it slip away. These White Sox traded away or did not resign their five most reliable relievers from 2023.
“Do you know what that does to the offense?” says Pham. “Think about it. If you’re up in the seventh inning, you don't have to face [Minnesota Twins eighth-inning guy Griffin] Jax or [closer Jhoan] Durán. You don't have to face [Cleveland Guardians closer Emmanuel] Clase. The Twins came back [eight] times against us when I was there. So when they took the lead in the seventh, what does that do now? Now I’m like, Damn, I gotta face Jax. Now I gotta face Durán. You’re always gonna face the leverage guys. So now, when you’re oh for three or one for three, you’re like, Damn, now you finish the day 1-for-4 or 0-for-4 because you’re facing guys that don’t really get hit.”
And when the team isn’t succeeding, players have to search for success elsewhere. “You essentially kind of have to play for yourself and be selfish,” says one of the former White Sox players. “And that’s off-putting and unenjoyable in the long run. It’s much more fun to be a part of something that you’re giving yourself to, and you want to live up to it.”
This White Sox team has indeed been part of something: history. And for all the talk about the future, the date they are most looking forward to is Monday, Sept. 30, when there will finally be no more games to lose.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How the White Sox' Ineptitude Resulted in an Historic MLB Low With Loss No. 121.