The 2024 MLB season isn't likely to produce any all-time great teams. The bar for entry to that club is at least 100 wins, and not one team is on that kind of pace. But an all-time bad team? The Chicago White Sox have that covered.
In the interests of full disclosure, I wrote the bulk of this column before the White Sox beat the Oakland Athletics 5-1 on Tuesday night. One win wasn't going to save them, after all, whereas a loss would further solidify them in infamy. As luck would have it, the White Sox did indeed earn the W, but the 21-game losing streak that preceded it lives on in spirit.
The anatomy of the White Sox's streak is all entrails and gizzards. They tied for the longest skid in American League history, trailing only the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies' 23 straight losses for the MLB record. They were outscored 136 to 49, an average of 4.
1 runs per game. Lest anyone forget, these White Sox were 40 games under .500 when this skid began.
They could have been kicked out of MLB even then—if only...
but more on that later—and it would have been no great loss. At 28-88, the White Sox are on pace for 123 losses. At best, they are one of the worst teams in Major League Baseball history.
At worst, they are the worst. The 2024 White Sox Are Uniquely Terrible Granted, the White Sox's .241 winning percentage is "only" the 10th-worst in MLB history dating back to 1876.
And even if they do lose 123 games, the all-time record will still belong to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who lost 134. But how relevant should baseball's ancient history be under the circumstances? The Spiders went defunct after 1899, and it wasn't until 1901 that the American League and National League joined forces to form MLB as we know it. In this span, the 2024 White Sox's winning percentage becomes the second -worst ever after the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics.
There's also the matter of the relativity of the White Sox's badness, which is where " standard score " can help. It's a statistic that captures how far from the average a specific data point in a set is. The lower or higher the score, the more of an outlier the point is.
Using winning percentage, here are the teams with the worst standard scores in MLB history: So, there you go. In the annals of all-time MLB losers, the 2024 White Sox are a singularly pathetic outlier. An utterly non-competitive team in a sea of competitiveness.
Their entire roster is worth 2.0 WAR , a mark otherwise reached by 97 different hitters and 52 different pitchers across MLB. They're threatening to become the first team in 43 years to score fewer than 3.
1 runs per game. They're also second-last to the Colorado Rockies in runs allowed, and at least they have Coors Field to blame. This is no blueprint for success, and least of all when the team in question is incapable of pulling victory from the jaws of defeat: White Sox fall to 0-16 since the All-Star break and have been swept in 6 straight series.
They are 0-65 when behind after 7 innings and 0-71 when behind after 8. If ever there was a perfect storm of baseball badness, this is it. And looking back, maybe the only surprising thing is how little time this storm needed to brew.
There Was Hope Not Too Long Ago. Now There's Not. Nobody could have predicted the White Sox would be this bad in 2024, least of all anyone who was beholden to them going into the 2022 season.
They went into that year off back-to-back playoff berths, including their first AL Central title in 13 years in 2021. FanGraphs gave them a 5.3 percent chance of winning the 2022 World Series, and they even went second in an MLB.
com draft of Fall Classic contenders. "What happened?" is a question without a straightforward answer. But it's not hard to imagine alternate histories, including one in which White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf didn't bypass his front office in bringing Tony La Russa out of retirement to manage in 2020.
Even getting his club to the playoffs in 2021 wasn't without incident , and he didn't exactly steer a steady (or frankly, sensical ) ship as the White Sox slipped to 81-81 in 2022. In all, his tenure was about as big of a flop as any rational person might have predicted. Again, this wasn't the front office's fault.
But it certainly wasn't blameless for the club's broader culture issues , and it paid the price when Reinsdorf fired longtime execs Ken Williams and Rick Hahn the following August. Then there's the alternate history in which an ultra-talented roster doesn't fall apart. Between MVP José Abreu, batting champion Tim Anderson and Yoán Moncada, Eloy Jiménez, Luis Robert Jr.
and Yasmani Grandal, the makings were there for an elite lineup in 2022. And even with Carlos Rodón gone to San Francisco, the rotation still had Lucas Giolito, Dylan Cease, Lance Lynn and Cy Young Award winner Dallas Keuchel. Yet out of all those guys, only Cease had a career year in 2022.
And of the ones who were still left, only Robert had a career year in 2023. Even as the White Sox's payroll has gone south like their winning percentage, the bright side should be that trades of Cease, Giolito, Lynn, Jiménez, Erick Fedde, Michael Kopech, Tommy Pham and Paul DeJong have elevated the club's farm system. And they have.
..sort of.
Per B/R's Joel Reuter , the White Sox came out of the draft with the No. 7 system in MLB. But first-year GM Chris Getz's trade-deadline haul has been widely panned, with B/R's Kerry Miller only finding it in his heart to give his work a "solid F+.
" It's doubtful that the White Sox are going to come together more quickly than it took them to fall apart. And while it's too soon for Getz to be on the hot seat, Pedro Grifol sure seems like a dead man walking as the club's manager. Most managers just can't disrespect and clash with their players and expect to keep their jobs.
Especially not ones whose .318 winning percentage is the third-worst of any manager ever after only Doc Prothro and John McCloskey. None of This Looks Good for MLB Though competitive balance has technically gotten better in 2024, the White Sox are emblematic of a problem that's hanging around like Jim Belushi in that old Saturday Night Live sketch.
Along with the Rockies and Miami Marlins, they're one of three teams on pace to lose 100 games this year. That would make this the sixth straight full season with at least three 100-game losers . There was only one such season in the previous 20 years.
It must be tough to be a White Sox fan 😭 @NBCSWhiteSox pic.twitter.com/r4V5v1x8jw The collective bargaining agreement that went into effect in 2022 ostensibly has anti-tanking measures, including an NBA-style draft lottery that notably limits revenue-sharing recipients (such as the White Sox) to lottery picks in just two straight seasons.
Even then, though, there was dissension in the player ranks. "If you look at the breakdown of payrolls, that bottom half compared to the top, you're not seeing all teams compete," Giolito, then still with Chicago, told ESPN's Jesse Rogers . "I would have liked to see a little more impacting behavior type of thing when it comes to the tanking.
" And this was Michael Lorenzen: "I'm held accountable to be the best I can be. Otherwise, I'm sent down or released. There should be something for teams, too.
" To be clear, nothing can stop onrushes of injury, ineffectiveness and bad transactions, the likes of which have doomed the White Sox. However, there should indeed be guardrails meant to insulate teams from this much futility. An EPL-style system of promotion and relegation would be the ultimate system of accountability.
Under such a system, teams as bad as the White Sox would be at risk of getting booted out of MLB until they prove themselves worthy again. Wouldn't that be something? But since things that are never going to happen are, well, never going to happen, it's best to keep the brainstorming within the realm of possibility. Specifically, where spending is concerned.
There probably aren't carrots that could get tight-fisted owners to spend more, but sticks that might do the job include a reverse luxury tax (i.e., a soft payroll floor) and tax penalties based on how many games a team loses.
All this and more should be on the table when it comes time for MLB and the MLB Players Association to renegotiate the CBA in 2026. A recipe for a contentious process if there ever was one, but that's where the 2024 White Sox could actually prove useful: As a warning of how bad it can get. Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference , FanGraphs and Baseball Savant .
.
