Infamy, your name is White Sox. We’re past the point of shame here
It was another day and another loss for the Chicago White Sox, but Sunday’s loss had something extra special about it.
Sunday’s loss, a routine 13-7 defeat to the Minnesota Twins, marked their 20th in a row — a nice round number to give this franchise the national stage it deserves. No team had lost 20 in a row since the 1988 Baltimore Orioles, who lost 21 straight.
In Chicago, we’re used to the White Sox losing. It’s kind of their thing. But 20 in a row? We’re past the point of embarrassment.
In Chicago, we’ve been focused on the Sox being on track to break the Mets’ modern record of 120 straight losses set in 1962, but now we’re at the point where they could break the Philadelphia Phillies’ record of 23 straight losses set in 1961.
Shame on you, your name is White Sox.
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Host Chuck Garfien listed some famous offensive statistics on NBC Sports Chicago’s beloved, painfully honest post-game show on Sunday.
“Twentieth loss in a row, 40 games down, 1-12 to Minnesota,” he said. “I can go on about this all day, 1-12 to Kansas City …”
Then Frank Thomas interrupted him. Thomas is of course the best player in the history of the franchise and a semi-regular co-host on the show. As a hitter, Thomas was a stickler for detail. On this show, too, he wanted it to be accurate.
“Sixty games under .500,” he said. “Under. Sixty games.”
Then Garfien realized his mistake. With the loss, the White Sox fell to 27-87. Talk about a Big Hurt.
“Sixty games,” he said. “I said it was 40 games under .500.”
With a little theatrical violence, he threw his pile of papers onto the carpet.
“They’re 60 games under .500!” Garfien shouted, before slumping back into his chair.
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Then Ozzie Guillen, Garfien’s regular co-host and the manager of the team that won the World Series, came up with a statistic I recently came up with: If you take away the Sox’ two-game losing streak, a record for any franchise, they still have the worst record in baseball.
Look, it’s one thing to be the worst team in baseball in a single season. Someone’s got to do it. But add a 14-game losing streak and a 20-game losing streak (and counting), and it makes them a contender for the worst baseball team in modern history. A laughing stock for the ages.
The ’62 Mets were an expansion team with a certain sense of whimsy. They had the great Marv Throneberry and Casey Stengel. Jimmy Breslin’s book, “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” was a classic, and seven years later the Amazin’ Mets were world champions.
But the White Sox have been around since 1901. Their franchise record for losses is 106, which should be surpassed by Labor Day. It’s a long way from the rebuilding that should bring multiple championship parades to Chicago.
Two years after the Sox won 93 games and the AL Central, they hit what we thought was rock bottom. That was last year, when they lost 101 games and Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf made the move none of us saw coming by firing his longtime front office duo of Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn. Reinsdorf promised a quick turnaround behind new general manager Chris Getz. No one believed Jerry then, because why should they? He doesn’t trust the fans anymore, not after all these years.
For some reason—okay, money—the team kept manager Pedro Grifol, whose current managerial record is 88-188. But he’s been a dead manager walking all season, and once the transfer deadline passed, the focus quickly turned to his job status. It almost seems cruel that Getz and Reinsdorf haven’t fired Grifol yet. Maybe they’re waiting for him to win a game so he can leave on a high.
“That means Pedro is 100 games under .500 since he got the job,” Guillen said. “Hoo, hoo boy.”
Ozzie is currently having an existential crisis on the Postgame Show photo.twitter.com/5eCUlirBgI
— White Sox Conversation (@NBCSWhiteSox) August 4, 2024
Guillen, who led the Sox to their 2005 World Series victory, said he has been seeing a psychologist because he has been angrier and sadder than usual lately. The reason?
“I don’t think I was a bad manager, but they chose Pedro over me,” Guillen said with a laugh on the show.
After Tony La Russa stepped down in 2022 due to health issues, Guillen was given a symbolic interview for the vacant job, the one he gave away in 2011. Guillen had wanted this job back for years, but the previous Williams-Hahn regime didn’t want him back and they weren’t going to hire him two years ago. I agreed with them, but only because the organization needs to move forward, not backward.
Guillen added: “I swear to God, when Rick Hahn called me and said I didn’t have the job, he said, ‘We found the next Ozzie Guillen.'”
While Hahn tried to compliment Grifol, Guillen, who went 678-617 (.524) in eight seasons, certainly doesn’t appreciate the comparison now. But I’ll bet he enjoys how bad the Sox are without him.
Many fans want Guillen to replace Grifol immediately if and when the team fires him, but why would he want that headache? If I were one of the coaches on Grifol’s staff, I wouldn’t want to take the job either. You don’t want to have to answer questions about this team twice a day, this season.
Now, in what may have been his final days on the job, Grifol took the time to do what many failed coaches and managers do in a Reinsdorf regime: lick the boss.
“I’ve said this before and I’m going to say it again,” Grifol said, according to the Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune. “This is being taken out of context and somehow it’s being turned around and …
People have funny definitions of what makes someone a winner, especially when they work for a perpetual loser.
The Bulls have been below .500 since their true all-time winner, Michael Jordan, retired in 1998. The Sox have made the postseason just seven times in Reinsdorf’s 44 years as owner. The 2005 playoffs were the only time they won a series, and 2020 and 2021 are the only years they’ve reached the playoffs in consecutive seasons.
But Grifol speaks to an audience of one, even as he is left out in the cold.
If the Sox are blown out in Oakland this week, they could break the Phillies’ ’61 record at home against the Cubs on Friday. The mood will be somewhere between mournful and riotous.
I can’t imagine Grifol being on the top step for that one. How can you do that to him? How can you insult the intelligence of the fans by keeping him?
It is a terrible situation for everyone, but not just for Grifol. He is certainly guilty of making the bad situation worse.
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While he focuses on rebuilding the farm system, Getz attempted to add some defense to the flailing fielding unit last year to make the major-league product more palatable, but he failed in a very public way. The team’s perennially injured core hitters were surprisingly injured again early in the season (Yoán Moncada has played in just 11 games and is in the team’s top 10 in bWAR), and the season fell off the rails with a 3-22 start. The starting pitching has been solid, at least, and Getz and his staff have bolstered the organization’s pitching outlook.
That’s all part of the benefit of losing: It gives a front office the opportunity to improve an organization, sometimes quite quickly. That was the plan after the 2016 season, and it worked until it didn’t. But Getz’s moves were widely panned at his first trade deadline, and new baseball rules limit the Sox to the 10th pick in next year’s draft.
Money is going to be an issue. The Sox are suffering another downturn in attendance, and their TV coverage, once a highlight for the team, is now considered the worst in baseball. The team’s deal with NBC Sports Chicago is expiring, and a new RSN (in partnership with the Bulls and Blackhawks) is set to debut this fall.
It’s going to be a long road back to respectability. At least there are the pre- and post-game TV shows, which were as unwaveringly honest and critical as ever on Sunday. Those shows, the Campfire Milkshake and the minors pitching are the only things the organization has left.
The White Sox are losing and losing and losing, and they’ve practiced so much that they might just be the best ever.
(Photo of Nicky Lopez reacting to Sunday’s loss: David Berding/Getty Images)
