DETROIT — After the Chicago White Sox swept the Los Angeles Angels to prolong their march toward the most losses in MLB history another day, team owner Jerry Reinsdorf left his suite and squeezed into a packed media elevator.
This was, perhaps, the closest thing the White Sox have had to a prideful moment all season. Some of their own fans still booed their pyrrhic victories. Others chanted barbed words directed toward the owner: Sell the team.
“You saved your best for last, Jerry,” a reporter quipped inside the elevator.
Reinsdorf responded: “I understand what you mean, but I wish we saved our best for first.”
Now, after Friday’s 4-1 loss to the Tigers, the White Sox have officially lost more games in a single season than any other team in modern baseball history.
For 62 years, that record felt untouchable. The 1962 New York Mets lost 120 games. Only the 2003 Tigers, who lost 119 games, ever truly got close. Then along came the White Sox, who have lost 121 games, with two more chances to make their new record even harder to touch.
“I never thought that this would be broken while I was still around,” said 86-year-old Craig Anderson, a member of those 1962 Mets. “For the Mets fans, it’s off your shoulders. Now, we’re not the worst in the world.”
The title of worst in the world now belongs on the South Side of Chicago, where the specter of failure has loomed all season. Pick any stat you want. The White Sox are probably at or near the bottom of the league. As The Athletic’s Jayson Stark noted, the White Sox have used 29 position players this season. An astonishing 17 of those players have been worth negative wins above replacement. Three more are at 0.0. Six are at 0.2 or lower.
The first resounding signs of baseball despair came after a 3-22 start in April. The idea of a special kind of failure then gained traction during a 14-game losing streak. The White Sox then outdid themselves with a catastrophic 21-game skid, in which they only narrowly avoided setting the record for the longest losing streak in modern baseball history. After their most recent downturn— a 12-game skid — the White Sox besting the Mets for worst ever became a matter of when, not if.
The allure of witnessing that wretched history brought a massive throng of media to Guaranteed Rate Field before the team’s final home series against the Angels. There were 10 television stations, with lights and microphones zeroed in on general manager Chris Getz, along with a throng of reporters from outlets both in Chicago and from across the country.
Getz used his forum to apologize to the fans.
“They don’t deserve this,” he said.
White Sox general manager Chris Getz speaks to an outsized media contingent on Tuesday. (Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
Getz, like manager Grady Sizemore, tried to frame the team’s struggles in a positive light. He pushed the idea that forward steps were taken this year and building blocks were put into place. Getz insisted the White Sox are on the right trajectory and even said ownership will “potentially” invest more in the organizational infrastructure.
Sizemore took over for dismissed manager Pedro Grifol midseason and has said he is interested in staying in the manager position on a permanent basis. He wore the same lucky shirt for each game against the Angels, sweated through the garment on a hot day but refused to change.
“In such a year where I’m sure everyone will look at a lot of the negative in a loss of a year, I’ve had a lot of fun,” Sizemore said. “I’ve had a lot of joy just being on the field with these guys and working with them, getting to know them and learning from them and learning from the staff. I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything.”
Such positivity is a hard sell, surely, for the fans who have watched this team blow leads, boot balls and fail to overcome a ninth-inning deficit even once all season. The White Sox did record their first eighth-inning comeback on Tuesday night, climbing back for a 3-2 win that elicited those boos from the home fans who had paid to see history.
The push against inevitability finally ended Friday. Flamethrower Garrett Crochet held the red-hot Tigers at bay for four innings. But by the fifth, the White Sox trailed 2-0 thanks to all-too-familiar self-inflicted wounds. Relief pitcher Jared Shuster walked a batter, surrendered a base hit, then walked another. Shuster then threw a wild pitch that just as easily could have been scored a passed ball on catcher Korey Lee. The Tigers scored their first run on the wild pitch, then added a second via a sacrifice fly. Chicago scored on a Zach DeLoach home run, but the team’s second error and third wild pitch of the evening contributed to the Tigers’ two-run seventh inning.
In the opposite clubhouse, the Tigers celebrated clinching their first postseason appearance in a decade. As the Tigers, Royals and Guardians have bolstered the strength of the AL Central, the White Sox have only helped to pad their records.
For the players, the season has been disheartening and shocking. There are holdovers from the club that won the American League Central by 13 games just three years ago. Now members of this White Sox team will shoulder the burden of 121 losses and counting into an uncertain future.
After so many games this season, Luis Robert Jr., the best position player on this team, would sit at his locker stall, fully dressed, stewing in silence in attempt to decompress.
“I see myself as one of the faces of this team,” Robert said. “And when the faces of this team aren’t producing or are struggling, in a rough season like this, that’s on us, that’s on me.”
Players such as Gavin Sheets tried to truck through the hard days with hopeful reminders of what better times were like.
“I certainly wasn’t expecting to be in this position,” Sheets said. “As players, that falls on us. At the end of the day, wins and losses are how we do on the field. It’s sad to be in this position right now. Hopefully it’s the last time we’re in this position.”
Sometime in the summer, disappointment turned to numbness.
“I guess when you lose 120, it’s kind of easier to brush off,” Andrew Benintendi said earlier in the week. “It sucks to go through it — no one wants to do it. But that’s where we’re at.”
Now with two games remaining, the White Sox may still tighten their grip on what could become an unbreakable record for futility.
The lone silver lining?
This long, exhausting, embarrassing season is almost over.
(Top photo: Justin Casterline / Getty Images)
