Everybody lost.
That’s the only way to describe the White Sox’s season from hell.
With the exception of pitcher Garrett Crochet, it was a season of abject failure, utter disappointment and, frankly, complete shame for everyone associated with the White Sox.
It was a season of losses. Lots of losses. They came almost every night and in almost every fashion. The most famous baseball cliche is that it’s a game of failure. But no one meant like this.
Officially, finally, the Sox have 121 losses now — the magic number, the new Major League Baseball record — after a 4-1 loss Friday night in Detroit.
After postponing the inevitable by sweeping the moribund Angels at home and depriving salty Sox fans of seeing the record get set with their own eyes, the Sox quickly ended the suspense on the road. Two Tigers outfielders collided to make the final out in an homage to their collision-prone guests.
“The catch is made and it’s official,” White Sox TV play-by-play broadcaster John Schriffen said. “That is loss 121, and the 2024 White Sox now have more losses than any team in modern baseball history.”
GO DEEPER
White Sox lose 121st game of season, most by any team in modern baseball history
Everybody lost, and we can start with the players, especially the ones who have been with the team all year through thin and thinner. They did the actual losing night after night, under the overmatched Pedro Grifol and the substitute teacher Grady Sizemore. Their numbers were dreadful and their fundamentals were remedial. They’ll remember this season forever.
Gavin Sheets, the team’s second-round draft pick in 2017, made his big-league debut in 2021 when the Sox won 93 games and the division and were the toast of the town. Three years later, most of that team is elsewhere, but he remains.
“Obviously, it’s tough for everybody involved,” Sheets told me recently. “But I feel like it’s mainly on the players. At the end of the day, we’re the ones going out there doing it. We’ve been the ones put in the spotlight and it’s been hard.”
Gavin Sheets sums it up. pic.twitter.com/vOPR4dRPGp
— Daryl Van Schouwen (@CST_soxvan) September 28, 2024
Sheets’ father, Larry, was on the 1988 Orioles team that lost the first 21 games of the season. Gavin’s Sox team equaled that mark this summer, so father and son could commiserate with each other then. But that Baltimore team lost “only” 107 games. Larry Sheets doesn’t know what it feels like to lose 121 games.
“I mean, no one’s been through something like this,” Sheets said.
Well, the 1962 Mets. But they’re off the hook now. The 2003 Tigers lost 119 games, but they won their last two and avoided the ignominy of 120. The current Tigers team made a run for the ages and clinched their first playoff berth in 10 years Friday night. It was poetic justice that former White Sox broadcaster Jason Benetti, who has impeccable timing, was on the call for Detroit.
OCTOBER BASEBALL HERE WE COME! #RepDetroit pic.twitter.com/dDGCCjoLPl
— Bally Sports Detroit (@BallySportsDET) September 28, 2024
There have been plenty of awful baseball teams since 1962 — expansion teams, rebuilding teams and mismanaged teams. The Pittsburgh Pirates went two decades without fielding a .500 team. The most games they lost in a season in that span were 105.
The Sox started 3-22 and in July and August, they went a combined 7-44. Do the math and that’s how you get to 121 L’s.
“You keep saying in April it’s early, it’s early, things will turn around and you get to June or July and you’re like, man, this is the way it is right now, we’re not getting out of it,” Sheets said. “And then once the trade deadline hits, you get rid of a lot of really good players and then you just kind of see the writing on the wall.”
Yes, everybody lost.
White Sox GM Chris Getz, for instance, lost the benefit of the doubt. He traded the team’s ace, Dylan Cease, at the end of spring training and didn’t do much to try to build a winner in the offseason, but he wasn’t aiming to go into the record books either. The record is on him, for sure.
“I think if you would have told me we were going to end up flirting with the record I would have been a little surprised,” Getz said recently. “Now, if you would have told me prior to the year that we would have ended up with over 100 losses, 105, 110, I wouldn’t have been as surprised. But this is the cards that we’ve been dealt at this point. You try to make the best of it, and I think it’s an opportunity to embrace the situation that we’re in.”
He told chairman Jerry Reinsdorf last summer that he was the guy to rebuild the Sox in a quick fashion, and he’s now the GM who put together the worst team in modern baseball history. Getz should have time to turn things around, but at first blush, he’s in a deep hole and he’ll need a bigger shovel. Getz’s role model is Dave Dombrowski, the acclaimed executive who took the Tigers to the World Series just three years after losing 119. He’d better start winning some trades.
Now let’s get to the owner “who thinks he knows everything.” No one has lost more than him.
Reinsdorf, in his ninth decade on Earth, lost whatever respect he had left as a major market owner. As always, you can pin many of the problems facing this organization on his decades of leadership. So how can the White Sox really get better when he has his fingerprints all over the scene of the crime? It’s a question we’ve been asking for a long time.
Free, daily sports updates direct to your inbox.
Free, daily sports updates direct to your inbox.
Sign Up
Who else lost?
The White Sox organization lost money and credibility. The fans booed the team for winning Tuesday. The team finished with its second-lowest attendance total since the stadium opened in 1991 because the fans — those devoted, perpetually let-down Sox backers — lost their love of their favorite team.
“I certainly want to acknowledge the record that we’re up against right now,” Getz said before Tuesday’s game. “It’s really important to do a heartfelt thanks to our fans that have been with us through this very difficult, painful season. They don’t deserve this.”
“We’re more relieved it’s finally over,” said the Sox superfan Pat Ramos, aka “BeefLoaf” of the fan club Section 108. “It’s not euphoria or anything. It’s been a death march. As much as we love baseball, it’s finally going to be over.”
About an hour before Wednesday night’s game, I walked over to Grandstand Sports, the family-owned memorabilia store on 35th Street. Grandstand is a dream destination for Sox fans, with every kind of hat, jersey, shirt and knick-knack you could imagine. An hour before the game, there was also no one there.
Stephanie Ganal, who, with her husband, owns the store that her father founded, said emptiness has been the norm this year.
“This is worse than (the) COVID (season),” she said. “People don’t understand.”
To make money selling White Sox merchandise, you need to have fans who want to be associated with the team. And nowadays, you have to order from the manufacturers a year in advance. So the store is packed to the gills and no one is buying. She’s worried about the future of the store.
The only good news for Grandstand is they also stitch the names and numbers on the jerseys for the actual players. The team set a franchise record with 63 players this season. At least that kept them busy.
For months, we’ve pretty much known that the Sox, who set a new franchise record for losses on Sept. 1, would break the modern-day record for futility, like you know the season will eventually change and autumn will replace summer. But just because you know it’s coming doesn’t mean it hasn’t been painful.
“It hurts,” said former White Sox manager and current postgame show host Ozzie Guillen. “It hurts to see this s—. … It hurts my feelings.”
We’re used to rebuilds in Chicago. A teardown worked on the North Side. It started to work on the South Side before things fell apart.
After winning 93 games and the division in 2021, the Sox backslid to .500 the next year and in 2023, they lost 101 games. That resulted in Reinsdorf’s housecleaning as he fired president Kenny Williams and GM Rick Hahn. They have to carry some blame for how this franchise imploded.
“We’re going to put this behind us and we’re going to go forward and get better,” Reinsdorf said last year. “But this has really been a nightmare.”
The nightmare just kept getting worse. I was curious about when Getz knew that the record would be in reach.
“I would say we knew at some point in July, knowing that we were nearing the trade deadline and the roster was going to be changing,” he told me recently. “And usually players that you’re trading off of their major-league club at the trade deadline are impact, positive producers for your club. So I knew that when we were already struggling, let alone moving on from players that were producing, that we were going to have a tough time getting enough wins to clearly avoid it. And obviously the struggles continued.”
They never stopped.
On Tuesday, Getz talked up the steps forward the organization has taken behind the scenes. Getz’s front office acquired young pitching, he has beefed up the team’s development infrastructure. He claims to have an idea of what he’s looking for in a manager. While the team is locked out of the top nine spots in next year’s draft order thanks to a new anti-tanking rule that is poorly timed for him, Getz said he’s not crying about it.
The future, he says from the abyss, is bright.
But with respect to that optimism, Getz was asked if he was embarrassed by this season. He should be.
“Is it an embarrassment? We’re not proud of this,” he said. “No one wants to be associated with it. But we’re certainly up for the challenge (of rebuilding).”
But embarrassment is the wrong word.
“Last year was embarrassing,” a White Sox executive said to me before a recent game. “This is humiliating.”
(Photo of Jared Shuster reacting after giving up two runs in the fifth inning: Nic Antaya / Getty Images)
