It could be worse for the Chicago White Sox, the worst baseball team in more than a century. No, really. It could be 1899. Jerry Reinsdorf, the stubborn, nearly nonagenarian owner of the White Sox, could be Frank Robison, the owner of the Cleveland Spiders, which was one of the better teams in baseball until Robison ruined it on purpose. Robison had been unhappy that Cleveland’s strict blue laws forbade the Spiders from playing home games on Sunday, the day of the most lucrative draw, so he bought the St. Louis Browns at a sheriff’s sale. Then he moved all the Browns’ worst players to the Spiders, and all the Spiders’ best players—including Cy Young, the winningest pitcher in history—to the team in St. Louis, which he renamed the Perfectos. (The Perfectos were reborn, shortly after, as the St. Louis Cardinals.) The Spiders hit twelve home runs in 1899—as a team—and had a run differential of minus-seven-hundred-and-twenty-three. They finished the 1899 season with a record of 20–134. Then they were dissolved.
Or the White Sox could still be managed by Tony La Russa, who had been hired by Reinsdorf in 2021 it seems in order to right the wrong of firing him in 1986, although Reinsdorf has denied that. La Russa, who was seventy-six years old at the time of his return, managed the team as if it were still the eighties. The Sox actually made the playoffs in 2021, before swiftly losing to the Houston Astros; they had some talent, and were considered a serious Major League Baseball team. But already the rot was setting in. La Russa left, midseason, in 2022, to deal with a slew of health problems. When the Athletic asked the team’s former vice-president Kenny Williams about La Russa’s tenure, Williams said, “I don’t yet have a way to talk about that period of time because it takes me to a bad place, and it will take me from the person I aspire to be.”
It could still be early in the 2023 season, when the culture in the White Sox clubhouse was so toxic that, according to ESPN, some veteran players initially refused to attend a press conference that the team held to welcome back a player who was returning from cancer treatment. After one reliever was traded to the Yankees, he gave an interview describing the situation as “Shit rolls downhill.” The most memorable moment from the 2023 season, during which the team lost a hundred and one games, was probably when Tim Anderson, one of the game’s most compelling characters, who was mired in an epic slump, was coldcocked in a brawl between the Sox and the Cleveland Guardians.
Or it could be this past spring, when the team’s most talented players went down, one by one, with injuries and the manager Pedro Grifol called his own players, in public, “fucking flat.” The front office fielded a squad of, more or less, minor-leaguers—with the knowledge that, owing to rules to discourage tanking by big-market teams, the most compensation it could get for the putrid play was the tenth pick in the draft. In mid-September, as the White Sox approached the modern-day record for most losses in a single season—a hundred and twenty games, set by the New York Mets in 1962—the team’s general manager Chris Getz said, “If you would have told me we were going to end up flirting with the record, I would have been a little surprised. . . . Now, if you would have told me prior to the year that we would have ended up with over a hundred losses, a hundred and five, a hundred and ten, I wouldn’t have been as surprised. But this is the cards that we’ve been dealt at this point.” Never mind that Getz’s job was to do some of the dealing. Imagine beginning the season with the thought that you might lose a hundred and ten games.
Granted, it’s been a very bad time. Ugly. Embarrassing. Depressing. At least La Russa brought the team to the playoffs. This season, the team lost, and then lost more. Grifol was fired in August, along with much of the coaching staff. Grady Sizemore, a former player, was appointed as interim manager, even though he’d never even coached a full season. The previous year, he’d been earning fifteen dollars an hour as an intern for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Sizemore had two things in his favor: he wore a mullet, and the players liked him.
In any case, they lost by blowouts and by bad bounces, by fluke bloopers and basic mistakes. They blew one game on a baserunning blunder, and another when an outfielder failed to even try to throw out a runner headed home. During one matchup in early September, against the Baltimore Orioles, the Sox’s third baseman crashed into the left fielder, trying to track a shallow fly ball. “Oh, my goodness, the White Sox have just gone full White Sox,” the announcer bemoaned. The Orioles won that game, 9–0. The losses mounted, piled up, heaped upon the players, buried them in derision and loud scorn.
Amid the long losing streak, national media descended on the clubhouse. “Disaster tourism,” the White Sox reporter James Fegan called it. There were pre-postmortems: What had gone wrong? How did the players handle the scrutiny, the infamy, the shame? Consensuses formed. A lot of different things have to go wrong to be this bad, though Reinsdorf’s meddling and dated views on baseball probably played the biggest part. (For years, the team outsourced some of its analytics, for starters, though the team’s old, small plane came to seem more emblematic of its owner’s cheapness—its seats were mostly coach.) There are teams with stubborn owners, and teams that get injured a lot, and teams that are poorly constructed, and teams that have a few stretches of bad luck. But, since 1899, no team has lost more than a hundred and twenty games.
The stranger thing still was that the reporters covering loserdom emerged to report that everyone seemed . . . O.K. “Shockingly well adjusted,” as ESPN’s Jeff Passan put it. They seemed to like one another. They still liked their coach a lot. Sizemore has described his job as akin to parenting, requiring patience, humility, and faith that the effort matters more than the results.
The White Sox tied the Mets’ record with six games still left to go. Many fans said they welcomed it; ignominy to hang around Reinsdorf’s neck. After games, the boos would coalesce into chants of “Sell the team!” When the Sox rallied to score three runs in the eighth inning against the Los Angeles Angels, in Chicago, on Tuesday, narrowly avoiding their hundred and twenty-first loss, some fans, who had bought tickets to witness history, made their disappointment loud. It was the team’s first comeback of the season; up to that point, they were 0–94 when trailing after seven innings.
During the second game of the series against the Angels, Andrew Benintendi hit a game-winning single in the tenth. His teammates dumped the cooler on him in celebration. The jeers and chants were audible. Then came the third game: an emphatic 7–0 win. The fans gave the White Sox starter Chris Flexen a standing ovation when he left the mound, after striking out seven in six and one-third innings. They stood again when the Sox were a strike away from the win, and cheered as the last Angels batter grounded out, and the players on the field gathered and hugged. Baseball is a game of accretion, in which no single game matters all that much. Every team wins, every team loses. That is the game’s great gift, and also, lately, in this attention-fractured economy, its great challenge. But that win had the feeling of an event.
In 1962, in this magazine, the writer—and Baseball Hall of Famer—Roger Angell reflected on the appeal of the hapless New York Mets, who were a sensation even as they lost so much:
The White Sox have never been lovable—not even the most lovable team in their own city. For the past couple of seasons, they’ve just seemed like losers. Lately, though, they’ve been giving the label a good name—off the field, if not always, or often, or almost ever, on it. The team has been overhauling its entire infrastructure, according to a more modern model. But the decision of who should be the coach remains. During a media session, Getz said that Sizemore, the interim, would be in the running for the managerial job during the off-season, even though his record as a manager is a dismal 12–32. If they do go with Sizemore, it could be a bad decision—another sentimental pick, in keeping with the team’s insularity. Or it could be inspired. Sizemore, for his part, gushed about the team. “I’ve had the best relationship with these guys,” he said. “They’ve kind of given me a new life and a new love for the game. Just the way they responded since I’ve been in this position is one of the best feelings I’ve had.”
For everyone else, it’s been a long run of the worst. On Friday night, the team lost to the Detroit Tigers, 4–1, thanks to a typical cluster of errors and wild pitches, to claim the record for most losses outright. It could be worse, really; the season ends tonight. ♦
