ICYMI, Mark Whicker: "Bleak Sox" on pace to finish with worst record in major-league history
Former Chicago White Sox outfielder Eloy Jiménez won’t be around to see the White Sox challenge the MLB record for most losses in a season. He was traded to the Baltimore Orioles on Tuesday. Photo: USA Today
Originally posted July 31, 2024
By Mark Whicker
Canadian Baseball Network
The most fascinating matchup in baseball is, unfortunately, a board game. And, since the cards and dice can’t be measured for motivation, it isn’t even that.
If the 1919 White Sox played the 2024 White Sox, who would win?
This series would have it all. Call it Eight Men Out vs. Thirty-Nine-And-A-Half Games Out. The Black Sox against the Bleak Sox. And it would have the potential for legitimate mayhem that only Chicago can provide.
The 1919 team lost that World Series to the Cincinnati Reds because its most influential players were trying to. Imagine the frustration, and the collateral damage, if they ran up against a club so bad that it couldn’t lose for winning.
Eddie Cicotte’s lollipops would still mystify a ‘24 Sox lineup that is hitting .218 with 332 runs in 110 games. Chick Gandil’s weak grounders might still find a hole in a current Sox defence that is second in the A.L. in errors (66) and a runaway last in most defensive runs saved calculations.
Harold Rothstein’s goon squad would not tolerate such inefficiency at losing time. Unfortunately, fictitious suspense is the only kind that exists at whatever they’re calling the White Sox ballpark these days.
The Sox lost their 16th consecutive game on Tuesday night. They have lost 83 games and won 27. To avoid equaling the 1962 Mets, whose ineptitude is the kind against which all others are measured but who also were an expansion team, Chicago will have to win 14 of its remaining 52 games. (The Mets only played 160 games.) That would be a .269 pace and would represent a hot streak, since the Sox are currently at .245.
Speaking of .245, no Sox player of 200 at-bats or more has a batting average that high. Tommy Pham was over that particular line, but he left in a trade-deadline diaspora that also sent shortstop Paul DeJong, reliever Michael Kopech, starter Erick Fedde, outfielder Eloy Jiménez and reliever Tanner Bates to kinder shores. DeJong, in fact, could be in for some playoff fun with Kansas City. Same with Fedde and Pham in St. Louis. None of the departed White Sox looked back, presumably, the same way you don’t want to catch your dog’s plaintive eye when you’re out the door for vacation. It’s too fraught. Meanwhile, the Players Association is changing the technical language for White Sox players from “service time” to “time served.” This is the second time in 2024 that the Sox have suffered through the longest losing streak in franchise history. Their bullpen has blown 28 saves. It has taken the loss in 11 of Chicago’s past 24 games, and the club is 8-23 in 1-run games. It has a 1.49 WHIP and has walked 210 batters, by far an MLB high. Nothing corrodes a clubhouse like a blown lead, particularly when so many other things need to work to create a silhouette for victory.
Shipping Kopech to the Dodgers is at least a tourniquet, if not a cure. It was pure folly to expect Kopech to close in the first place. He has had legendary stuff since he was drafted by the Red Sox out of Longview, Tex. back in….let’s see….10 years ago? Kopech has a career walk rate of 4.7 every nine innings. A starter can overcome that. A reliever might as well go out there with a hatchet and a Dalmatian.
The White Sox got Kopech and infielder Yoan Moncada, one of the most lionized minor league players in decades, from Boston for legitimate ace Chris Sale. That’s the same Sale who finished off the 2018 World Series for Boston. That was also part of the White Sox teardown of six years ago. The definition of a “rebuild” is that there was something solid that existed at that place. Otherwise, it would just be a “build.” In this case the house was condemned, and whether Ken Williams or Rick Hahn or current general manager Chris Getz deserves the blame is a little moot at this point. It takes a village to, well, destroy a village.
And yet some of the moves made sense. The White Sox got a lot out of slugger Jose Abreu, who was the MVP in 2020, and then let him walk to Houston at his precise expiration date. They got Dylan Cease from the Cubs, and they drafted Carlos Rodon, and they picked up Fedde from a career revival in South Korea. Lucas Giolito has done little since the White Sox let him go. Liam Hendricks had 75 saves in two years and was eighth in the Cy Young voting in 2021. Then he came down with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
They got three All-Star seasons and a batting title out of shortstop Tim Anderson and got rid of him, as it turned out, only a year too late. They still have outfielder Luis Robert, who hit 38 home runs in 2023 but has shown up for only 55 uninspired games this year.
They drafted lefty Garrett Crochet, from the U. of Tennessee, in 2020. This is his first year as a starter, and he leads the league in strikeout rate and has a 6-8 record which, on this team, is like making the cut at the Masters while you’re carrying your own bag. Crochet has had Tommy John surgery and might have been the ideal trade-deadline prize, but he said he would demand a long-term extension to pitch in the postseason from any team that acquired him. That removed the Sox’s leverage, but if he’s this good he should be their No. 1 keeper. But then the White Sox have had long, barren stretches before. They did win the World Series in 2005 and surely became the last team ever to throw three consecutive complete games in a playoff series (ALCS vs. the Angels) but that was their first championship since 1917, two years before the scandal. The literati never has given the White Sox a therapy hug as it always did to the Cubs and Red Sox, maybe because they were always the workingman’s team on the shunned side of town. They have drawn 2 million fans only once since 2011.
It does not help that 88-year-old Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner since 1981, is trying to get a new stadium. Who knows if it will work again? Kansas City said no to the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium renovation hopes, and now the Chiefs are eyeing a move across the border to Kansas. These are the Chiefs, a team that has won the past two Super Bowls and has one of the best quarterbacks of all-time, and they can’t raid the civic cookie jar. That doesn’t bode well for the White Sox, as they threaten to remove Casey Stengel, Ed Kranepool and Choo Choo Coleman from baseball folklore.
The one consolation for Sox fans is that the Cubs’ comparative misery might be deeper, considering their hopes were higher and that they are paying $8 million this year for manager Craig Counsell. That will not help the Sox find a way out of their own wilderness, a dismal swamp that isn’t entertaining enough for Hollywood. At least the Black Sox could get the job done.