It has been accepted for months that the 2024 White Sox are the worst team in franchise history, but now it’s official.
On the first day of September, the White Sox lost 2-0 to the New York Mets and set a new franchise record for losses in a season with 107.
The 1970 White Sox went 56-106, setting the mark with a loss on the last day of the season, Oct. 1, 1970. The 2024 team is much more efficient at losing.
Now that the local goal has been met, there’s still 24 games left in the season for the Sox (31-107) to really make history.
Because it is the Mets, of course, Chicago is really chasing this season. The 1962 Mets, an expansion team, lost 120 games, the modern record for losses in a season. Through June, the Sox were bad, but the ’62 Mets’ legendary mark still seemed like a stretch.
Then Chicago went 7-44 in July and August and now only needs 14 losses this month to break that record. They haven’t lost fewer than 19 games in a month so far this season.
Garrett Crochet struck out the first seven hitters he faced, but the Sox, who have scored the fewest runs in baseball at 420, only managed two hits.
“Were on this set to talk about winning games and I’ve only done it 31 times this year,” White Sox postgame show host Chuck Garfien said Sunday. “And I haven’t done it in what seems like forever.”
“I think the last time they won, I wasn’t here,” Garfien’s partner Ozzie Guillen, who managed the team to the World Series title in 2005, said.
That would’ve been Aug. 21 when they won in San Francisco to finish an unusually successful 2-4 road trip.
Sunday’s loss capped off a 0-10 homestand, another first in franchise history. Their previous longest winless homestand was seven games and it happened this May.
Their current 10-game losing streak is only their third-longest of the season. They lost 21 in a row from July 10 to Aug. 5 and 14 in a row from May 22 to June 6. They are the first team to accomplish that feat since the 1965 Mets, which went 50-112-2.
Chicago has only won six series all season but has now been swept 22 times.
When will the team set the all-time record? It could be soon.
They hit the road next with stops in Baltimore and Boston. The Sox are 13-53 on the road and have only one road series all year, back on May 3-5 when they took two of three in St. Louis.
Chicago came into the season with expectations of losing 100 games for the second season in a row. The new general manager, Chris Getz, was already prepared for a rough season when he traded the team’s ace Dylan Cease at the end of spring training.
The team responded to these low expectations by starting 3-22. The race to futility was on. Manager Pedro Grifol was mercifully fired on Aug. 8. The Sox are 3-17 under interim manager Grady Sizemore.
In 2023, they went 61-101, a 20-game drop from the previous year. It was such a bad season chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, who is known for loyalty to his front offices in the Chicago Bulls and White Sox, fired his longtime top two in the baseball operations department, Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn after the trade deadline in July.
Despite the team’s failures after a rebuild attempt went awry, the firings were shocking in Chicago. What happened next was not.
Getz, who was in charge of a lagging farm system, was promoted to take their place on July 31. In a dispiriting press conference that day, Reinsdorf admitted he did not do a search for a new GM.
“The conclusion I came to is what we owe our fans and ourselves is not to waste any time,” Reinsdorf said. “We want to get better as fast as we possibly can. If I went outside, it would have taken anybody at least a year to evaluate the organization. I could have brought Branch Rickey back. It would have taken him a year to evaluate the organization.”
Exactly a year later, the Sox tied the franchise record for losses.
In the modern age of tanking, a bad season can be looked at as a victory of sorts because it helps a front office build for the future. But Getz was criticized for the return on his trades at the deadline and because of new anti-tanking rules, the Sox can’t pick higher than 10th in next year’s amateur draft.
They picked fifth this year and got Arkansas pitcher Hagen Smith. The organization’s young pitchers are the only positive thing going on right now. But the major-league product has the franchise hurtling toward historical infamy.
“At the end of the day, this is embarrassing,” Guillen said on the postgame show.
“This is insane,” Garfien said.
Required reading
(Photo: Quinn Harris / Getty Images)
