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.
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, 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.
