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How the White Sox went from first in the AL Central to worst of all time in 3 short years

28 September 2024Last Update :
How the White Sox went from first in the AL Central to worst of all time in 3 short years

The White Sox have done it. They are the worst team in modern baseball history with two games to spare after Friday’s 4-1 loss to the Tigers in Detroit. Coming on the heels of a franchise-altering, 101-loss season in 2023, no one could have imagined challenging the 1962 Mets’ record in 2024. Not even the GM Chris Getz, who just figured the Sox would be run-of-the-mill terrible.

“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 before Loss No. 113 on Sept. 9. “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.”

That didn’t go over well with the fans. But Getz tried to compare the Sox’s situation to the 2003 Detroit Tigers that lost 119 games. Three years later, they were in the World Series.

“I also know that the future’s looking bright and it’s going to make it just that much sweeter once we get there,” Getz said.

Where did it all start to go wrong for the 2024 White Sox?

In 1981, a Chicago-based real estate investor and attorney named Jerry Reinsdorf led a group to buy the White Sox for …

OK, we don’t have to go back quite that far. But did you read Ken Rosenthal and Britt Ghiroli’s feature on Reinsdorf’s influence on the team’s losing culture?

While the Sox’s record under Reinsdorf’s reign was already less-than-stellar, the franchise really started cratering in 2013.

By 2016, GM Rick Hahn was able to convince Reinsdorf to go through with a full-scale rebuild. It went well until it didn’t.

Hahn signed Luis Robert Jr. out of Cuba and made three shrewd trades early, acquiring prospects Yoán Moncada, Michael Kopech, Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez, Eloy Jiménez and Dylan Cease and earning the coveted Sports Person of the Year award from The Athletic Chicago.

By the 2020 season, the White Sox were back in the playoffs for the first time since 2008, and after Reinsdorf dragged Tony La Russa out of retirement, they won the AL Central in 2021 before fizzling out against Houston in the postseason.

In 2022, things really went awry. In his second year out of retirement, La Russa was fighting a heart condition and cancer throughout the season. Miguel Cairo took over for him at the end of the season, and the Sox had to rally to finish 81-81, 11 games back in the Central. The mood was dim and you could start to see the seams in the rebuild. From injury issues to defensive shortcomings to free-agent failures to the young players’ stalled development, the team’s window was closing fast.

Hahn’s big offseason moves before 2023 were hiring Royals bench coach Pedro Grifol to replace La Russa and signing former Royals outfielder Andrew Benintendi to the biggest free-agent contract in club history (a relatively paltry $75 million over five years). And this is where the window shut.

The 2023 White Sox started out 8-21 and Hahn was a seller at the trade deadline. Not long after, Reinsdorf fired both Kenny Williams and Hahn, a shocking move considering Williams had been his head baseball executive since the end of the 2000 season and the brains behind the 2005 World Series title.

After surprising everyone with his deliberate action, Reinsdorf reverted back to familiar ways, eschewing a search for a new GM and promoting former Sox player Chris Getz from his role as farm director.

“The conclusion I came to is what we owe our fans and ourselves is not to waste any time,” Reinsdorf said last August at Getz’s introductory news conference. “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.”

He added: “It’s the worst year I’ve ever suffered through. It was a horrible experience. I feel awful. I know how our fans feel. We’re going to put this behind us and go forward and get better. But this has really been a nightmare.”

Reinsdorf has been mostly silent since that day but he released a statement recently about the team’s current nightmare:

“Everyone in this organization is extremely unhappy with the results of this season, that goes without saying,” Reinsdorf said in the statement. “This year has been very painful for all, especially our fans. We did not arrive here overnight, and solutions won’t happen overnight either.”

Rickey, who died in 1965, also could’ve put together the worst team in baseball.

What was the low point this year?

Where do you begin?

Was it the 3-22 start? The nine-day span in which the team’s supposed top three hitters — Moncada, Jiménez and Robert — all injured themselves running to or around first base? Was it the 21-game losing streak that tied the American League record for consecutive losses? The two other double-digit loss streaks? The 7-44 record in July and August? The time they lost a game for runner’s interference during an infield fly rule? Almost every night for six months, there has been a new low.

In all honesty, the nadir was probably on Sept. 3 when Jiménez, the erstwhile hot prospect traded to the Orioles at the deadline, hit a shallow pop fly and two White Sox players collided while three runs scored.

“Oh my goodness,” Orioles broadcaster Kevin Brown said. “The White Sox have just gone full White Sox.”

Or what about the time Tommy Pham got thrown out at the plate and their TV play-by-play guy thought he was at Wrestlemania?

Or the time they got robbed of a rare home win by this Travis Jankowski catch at the wall?

You could go on and on.

What was the high point?

A reporter asked Getz this question recently and the 41-year-old GM said, “I’d say my favorite memory is making the decision to have Garrett Crochet be a starter this year, and then naming him the opening-day starter.” When your favorite memory of a season is naming the opening-day starter, that says a lot. Also, the White Sox lost that game, 1-0.

What was the deal with that milkshake?

The Campfire Milkshake was a rare hit for the organization, selling out every game.

What are some funny bad statistics to encapsulate this season?

There are so many! I feel like Jayson Stark gets dizzy with joy when he looks at the granular details of the White Sox season.

Going into their last two games of the season, the Sox are 12-50 since the All-Star break.

A longtime Sox executive brought up a not-so-fun fact the other day at the ballpark: The team never, ever comes back late in the game. That wasn’t an exaggeration at the time. Since we talked, they did come back one time.

After 160 games, the Sox are 0-79 when trailing after six innings, 1-95 after seven and 0-103 after eight. They had their first (and so far only) late comeback win of the season against the Angels on Tuesday night.

On the flip side, the bullpen has 36 blown saves.

The White Sox have been swept in a series 24 times. Conversely, they have won nine series and just three since the end of June.

They eclipsed the previous franchise record for losses (106) on Sept. 1!

After Friday’s loss in Detroit, they are 8-42 in the AL Central, the division in which they are the biggest market.

The Sox can’t hit. They’re last in almost every major offensive category, including runs, home runs, batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, wRC+.

Pitching-wise, the Sox have had some highs (Crochet, Erick Fedde) and a lot of lows.

For instance, the White Sox have had 17 starting pitchers this year. Michael Soroka is one of nine who have failed to record a win. He leads that subset with 10 losses, but that group is 0-30 overall.

Getz tried to reconfigure his roster to improve a wretched defense from 2023 but the Sox are second-to-last in Baseball Savant’s Outs Above Average stat at -43, four spots lower than last year when their OAA was -17.  You don’t need to be fluid in analytics. The eye test works too.

Not surprisingly, the Sox finished with their worst attendance total since 1999. But at least some fans still went to games.

It’s going to get better though, right? Won’t the Sox have a high draft pick next year? Didn’t they get a bunch of highly touted prospects back in trades like other rebuilding teams?

Three rapid-fire questions! Let’s answer them in order.

1. I guess it can’t get worse. However, we said that last year.

2. Starting in 2023, the sport changed the draft to a lottery system. The Cleveland Guardians drafted No. 1 despite the fact they were tied for the ninth-worst record in the 2023 season. Furthermore, there’s a new rule that big-market teams that don’t receive competitive balance money can’t draft in the lottery in consecutive years. The Sox drafted fifth this year, so they can’t pick higher than No. 10 next year. It was really bad timing to be the worst team in baseball history.

3. Depends on who you ask. Getz has been widely panned in the industry for the return in his big in-season trade this year when he traded Pham, Fedde and Kopech to St. Louis and the Dodgers in a three-way deal. In return he got two 19-year-old prospects and big leaguer Miguel Vargas from the Dodgers. Vargas, a former top prospect, has fit in well with his new team. Through his first 40 games with the Sox, he’s compiled a .156/.250/.266 slash line while playing substandard defense at third base. Getz did get starting pitcher Drew Thorpe in the spring’s Cease trade, and though he showed some promise before undergoing surgery on his right forearm, he’s far from being a replacement for Cease.

So what’s next?

Well, the Sox have to hire a manager and basically a new coaching staff. Next year, Getz has little salary committed aside from Benintendi’s sunk cost of $17 million, Robert’s $15 million and whatever Crochet gets in arbitration. That is, if Robert and Crochet are still on the team.

My guess is Robert is on the team unless Getz gets a surprisingly good offer of prospects. I’d expect Crochet to be one of the top players on the trade market this winter.

Neither were traded during the summer, Robert because he’s having a down year and Crochet because he let it be known he didn’t want to pitch in the playoffs without a contract extension because he’s well past his innings high in his first year as a starter. That declaration cooled his market, though there was interest from contending teams.

So while Getz has rebuilt the pitching depth in the minors — Noah Schultz and Hagen Smith are top prospects — the hitters down on the farm are unimpressive and there isn’t much to look forward to at the major-league level.

But hey, at least the White Sox’s winter fan festival, “SoxFest,” is returning for the first time since 2020. The team is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the 2005 team and the 125th anniversary of the franchise. In 20 years, will they invite the 2024 team back to remember the bad ol’ days?

(Photo: Matt Marton / USA Today)

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