CHICAGO — In their quixotic journey to prove themselves as the worst team in franchise history, if not Major League Baseball history, the 2024 White Sox passed an important milestone Thursday when they lost a club-record 14th consecutive game.
At 15-48, the White Sox are well on their way to eclipsing the season loss mark set by the 1970 club, which went 56-106. After starting the season with 22 losses in their first 25 games, who could’ve thought this season would get even more embarrassing?
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The White Sox broke a franchise mark that stood for just two months shy of a century. And the South Siders did it in style, losing 14-2 to the Boston Red Sox while getting outhit 24-4. The bullpen had blown leads in five straight games, including a pair of 7-6 losses to the Cubs this week. Starting pitcher Jake Woodford got knocked around early while Red Sox starter Tanner Houck, who came in with a 1.85 ERA, didn’t give up a hit until the sixth inning.
GO DEEPER
White Sox lose franchise-record 14th straight game
If chairman Jerry Reinsdorf thought the 101-loss season in 2023 was “the worst year I’ve ever suffered through,” what is he thinking now? Reinsdorf promoted Chris Getz to GM because he said, “We want to get better as fast as we possibly can.” Getz isn’t a dumb guy and knew that a quick fix was impossible and focused on adding to the minor-league system that he was previously in charge of. But even he didn’t think the season would go off the rails like this. The Sox have been outscored by 152 runs through 63 games.
The players are wearing these losses pretty hard. But the silver lining, as infielder Danny Mendick — who pitched the ninth — said, is, hey, at least they’re still employed. (For now.)
“The good thing we get to do is play major-league baseball,” he said. “And you got to always put that in perspective.”
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A positive mindset is healthy when you’re dealing with a depressing situation like this one.
As the game began, John Schriffen, the team’s consistently viral TV play-by-play man, predicted the 13-game losing streak would come to an end Thursday. Two pitches later, Boston’s leadoff hitter, Jarren Duran, hit a home run and away we went.
— Shane Riordan (@shane_riordan) June 7, 2024
South Side, sit down. Have a good cry while you’re at it.
In 30 years, 100,000 people will say they were at Sox Park to witness history being made, but instead, it was an announced crowd of 15,568, with many of them cheering for the Red Sox. Former White Sox All-Stars Liam Hendriks and Lucas Giolito, who are rehabbing their elbows with Boston, were here too.
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From what Hendriks has heard from his old friends, at least the White Sox are winning in the clubhouse.
“So far, it’s like the vibes in there are great,” he said before the game. “Unfortunately the wins aren’t exactly coming as expected, but it’s a better clubhouse to be around than it was last year. That’s the first step.”
The next step: win more than 24 percent of your games. The step after that, I suppose, is profit.
Since the on-field action for the White Sox is so hard to watch, maybe we could get Schriffen to save his breathless calls for games of ping-pong in the clubhouse.
“Tommy Pham isn’t going to take that serve from Gavin Sheets! He doesn’t care how many L’s he has!”
To be fair to Schriffen, I thought the Sox might win Thursday too, but only because, to quote a different baseball broadcaster named John, “That’s baseball.”
The Sox faced a great pitcher in Houck with a lineup that included rookie Zach DeLoach hitting leadoff (he collected his first hit, an RBI double) and stolen base specialist Duke Ellis making his first big-league start batting ninth and playing center field. So, sure, this would be the game they’d win, I said half-jokingly before the game.
Conventional wisdom won out. The Sox reached a new low.
At least the home fans got to cheer when they saw Hendriks and Giolito on the video board during a second-inning tribute. They both seemed happy to be back as visitors.
Welcome back, Lucas and Liam 🖤🤍 pic.twitter.com/y1ou9PuMVz
— White Sox Talk (@NBCSWhiteSox) June 7, 2024
“I mean, it’s tough,” Giolito said. “Part of me is always going to root for the team, just because I was here for so long. So, you know, it’s tough to see the record and everything like that, but at the same time, it’s a process of — I don’t know if they’re labeling it a rebuild, I don’t know what they’re saying — it’s just that kind of situation you have to go through, that low period, to start to chisel away and figure things out.”
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As Giolito noted, he had already been through a rebuild here. It wasn’t that long ago that the South Side was rising up. But the good times were fleeting and the dark days are here again.
“That’s the one regret or thing that I think back on our time is we went through that period and then we have that window where we could have really done something special,” he said. “We just didn’t capitalize on it. So it’s always something I’m going to look back on and be like, damn, I wish we could have done that.”
Will anyone on this current White Sox team ever get to experience the relative highs of a division title and a playoff appearance, as Giolito and Hendriks did in 2021?
It’s hard to imagine right now. The Sox are the worst team in baseball by a significant margin, and they might be the worst team in Chicago baseball history, which is saying a lot considering the history of the two teams in town. They aren’t just getting overmatched by good pitchers. Getz tried to rebuild the team around defense and they’re probably the worst defensive team in baseball. They don’t do anything particularly well, except set records for futility.
“You gotta believe you’re going to turn it around,” Mendick said. “That’s kind of what our belief is.”
The clubhouse was dead silent after the game. Reporters mustered a few quiet questions to a handful of players. Manager Pedro Grifol, who waxed philosophically about his love of one-run games before the loss, spoke for about a minute and a half because the media simply didn’t have a lot of questions for him. Everyone saw the game. Everyone has watched this season.
The only newsworthy part of the interview was that Grifol is still employed. For how long, who knows?
“Today’s over,” shortstop Paul DeJong said. “We can flush it and prepare to win tomorrow. That’s all we can really do, control what we can do in the moment.”
But if the Sox had the power to control their moments, they wouldn’t be what they are: quite possibly the worst major-league team we’ve ever seen in Chicago.
(Photo of Boston’s Jarren Duran crossing the plate after hitting a leadoff home run in the first inning: Kamil Krzaczynski / USA Today)