Sometimes the eye test is all you need. The Chicago White Sox pass the eye test. They are about as bad at baseball as professional baseball players can ever be.
This would be self-evident even if you didn’t have access to their season record, which includes one 14-game losing streak and one 21-game losing streak, a record that as of Saturday morning, sat at 28-90, which is a winning percentage of .237. That puts them solidly in the mix to challenge the 1962 Mets, whose 40-120 record yielded a winning percentage of a straight .
250 and had long been the gold standard — maybe make that a zinc standard — for baseball futility. You kind of have to hunt for White Sox games because it’s not like they’re the featured games on ESPN and Fox, although Yankees fans will have the pleasure of enjoying their slapstick this week when the Yankees go to Guaranteed Rate Field for three games against the ChiSox that should come with an NC-17 rating on YES telecasts. NC as in “non-competitive.
” How bad is it? It’s this bad: This week, the good people at Strat-O-Matic did a simulated best-of-seven series between the ’24 White Sox and the ’62 Mets — sort of an “Appall Classic,” instead of a Fall Classic. It came down to a Game 7, of course, because you really can’t lose ’em all, even two teams as efficient at losing as the ’24 Sox and the ’62 Mets. And in Game 7, Jay Hook went the distance and Sammy Taylor hit a fourth-inning grand slam and the Mets pulled out a 7-.