Last baseball season (2023), we had legitimate worries the Oakland Athletics would be historically garbage; it didn’t turn out that way, and this year, the A’s have improved so much that the perception of the team as “tanking” certainly should have flown by the wayside with all the misinformed fans and misguided mediots out there. Instead, it’s the 2024 Chicago White Sox that are on the cusp becoming one of the worst teams ever.

The Pale Hose are 33-111 right now with 18 games to play. Chicago is just 6-40 since the All-Star break. Three times this season, the White Sox have lost at least 20 games in a single month (April, July, August). They’ve had so many long losing streaks? There is no point in listing them here. The ChiSox are “on pace” to win just 37 games, which would set a new modern-day low win total for a 162-game season, among others.

There seems to be little press coverage of this, however, in terms of “fan protests” or “owner criticisms” and whatever have plagued the A’s simply because the Oakland situation hasn’t worked out financially—just as the ABA, the NHL, the NFL (twice), and the NBA previously pulled out of the city on the other side of the Bay. But we digress: why hasn’t the national media focused on the Chicago situation more thoroughly? Money?!

Probably. There seems to be little profit in reporting “sad” facts, like how the mediots don’t post much about Caitlin Clark averaging 2.5 more turnovers per game than any other player before her in WNBA history. Maybe those aren’t sad facts? They’re just facts no one wants to hear—or facts that no one is interested in learning/remembering. Yet this is news nonetheless, and this is why the mediots should be covering it, stat.

Remember, the White Sox won 93 games and the AL Central Division as recently as 2021. Then amid a change in managerial leadership due to health concerns, the team posted an 81-81 record in 2022. Since then, though, it’s been a nightmare: only 61 victories in 2023 and now this debacle. We think about the recent piece we authored on the 2008 Detroit Lions, the first team to go winless in an 16-game NFL year.

Let’s start with a look at that 2022 team: its four best players are no longer with the team, and among the top dozen players in value based on WAR, only one player remains on the MLB roster (outfielder Luis Robert, Jr.). Eleven others have been released or traded, including the top fouer (SP Dylan Cease, DH José Abreu, SP Johnny Cueto, and SP Michael Kopech). Let’s look at those 11 players and what happened:

  • Cease: traded March 2024 to San Diego for four prospects
  • Abreu: non-tendered free agent after 2022 ahead of age-36 season
  • Cueto: non-tendered free agent after 2022 ahead of age-37 season
  • Kopech: traded July 24 to Los Angeles Dodgers in multiteam, multiplayer deal
  • SS Elvis Andrus: non-tendered free agent after 2023 ahead of age-35 season
  • OF Eloy Jiménez: traded July 2024 to Baltimore for one prospect
  • RP Liam Hendriks: attempting to recover from cancer this year at age 35 with Boston
  • P Reynaldo López: traded July 2023 to Los Angeles (AL) in multiplayer deal at age 29
  • UTL Josh Harrison: non-tendered free agent after 2023 ahead of age-35 season
  • SS Tim Anderson: team buyout of contract after 2023 ahead of age-31 season
  • C Seby Zavala: waived in September 2023 during age-29 season

So, Abreu, Cueto, Andrus, and Harrison were all players in decline, and it was wise for the Chicago front office to go separate ways. We have no issue with those transactions at all as the team recognized it needed to get younger and invest money elsewhere. The Hendriks situation is just bad luck, of course, and he received a generous buyout from the White Sox in his attempt to make it back to the majors in 2024.

The Cease and Kopech deals happened because both are due to hit arbitration in 2025, and that was going to cost a lot of money to a team that wasn’t going to compete, anyway, with all these other changes. It was a cost cutter, for sure, and only time will tell on the prospect haul. The Jiménez deal was just a salary dump, as he had been in decline since his fantastic rookie season (2019), and the team was over him sucking cash.

Zavala? Who cares?! The real question there is this: why was that guy the 12th-most valuable player on the 2022 team with just 1.0 WAR? Yet the head scratchers are the López and Anderson decisions: the former has posted 4.9 WAR this year in Atlanta while making just $4M still, and the latter was a mostly productive All Star in 2022, despite perhaps being a bit of a drama queen and headache for the team. Why boot him?

In general, what we see here is a team that got old fast, after consecutive playoff appearances in 2020 and 2021—the team’s first Octobers since 2008, and the front office just decided to bite the bullet and cut bait on most of its assets to rebuild. Of course, no one expects to be this bad when they rebuild, for as we all know even the worst teams generally win 33.3 percent of the time. The White Sox have just really underperformed.

They’re minus-7 PPP right now, thanks to two managers, the first of which went 28-89 before being canned. We can’t really blame the interim guy for much, despite his 5-22 mark; he has little to work with right now. But basically, this team should have won 40 games already, and then it would be “favored” to surpass the 2003 Detroit Tigers (43 wins) as the worst team ever in the 162-game era. But alas, that is not the case. Ouch.

The ChiSox are 9-27 in one-run games, 10-35 in blowout games, and 11-32 in interleague play (overlap aplenty here, of course). They’re also 3-8 in extra innings, so no matter which was you slice it, the team is bad. Chicago has just 18 home victories, too, in addition to 15 road wins. The front office knew a rebuild was in order, but the choice for managing that rebuild failed (Pedro Grifol, who managed the team in 2023).

Yeah, we have no idea who he is, either, and he’s gone now, anyway. But a lot of the blame can fall on him, in addition to the current players: in comparison to 2022, the 12th-best value guy on this team in 2024 is someone named Jacob Amaya (0.2 WAR)—an infielder who has played just eight games for the team since being claimed off waivers from Houston in late August. Let that sink in for a minute or four, as well, please.

As for the one remaining player from the 2022 team still in the top echelon for value on the South Side? Robert, Jr. has a .669 OPS in 85 games this year at age 26, and he is making $12.5M this season. He is also owed $15M next year, so perhaps a lot of team balked at taking on his full contract in a trade this past summer. Plus, he was a legit All Star in 2023, so the team could expect him to bounce back next year.

The team has two SPs who have each taken the mound at least 27 times: Chris Flexen (2-14) and Garrett Crochet (6-11). Chicago has now lost 20 consecutive Flexen starts, even if he didn’t get the loss personally, but Crochet was the team’s lone All Star and is just 25 years old. Since they didn’t trade him this year despite many inquiries, we see the White Sox acting in good faith to rebuild this team the right way. That’s good.

But yeah, it’s been an ugly year for the Pale Hose no matter which way you dice it, and it will be interesting to see if they can reach 40 victories. Odds are it’s not going to happen: probability based on Pythagorean projection, for which the team is already at minus-7 this year, is between 36 and 43 victories. In the end, it just matters how the cookies crumble for interim Manager Grady Sizemore, who deserves better than this.