White Sox Woes

Baseball is a game of failure.

This isn’t a bad thing. It’s an entrenched facet of a game in which the defense is always stacked against hitters and winning streaks are fleeting at best. A baseball superstar with a .300 batting average is still only getting a hit three times out of ten. Award-winning pitchers usually allow somewhere around one baserunner per inning and at least a couple runs per game. The challenges to mounting any sort of offense at all, let alone one that wins games consistently, are woven into the game’s very essence. It’s part of what makes baseball compelling. 

Even so, this year’s Chicago White Sox have failed far more often than not. More than just about anybody, in fact: their record of 27-82 after Monday’s loss ranks dead last in Major League Baseball (MLB). The 15-game losing streak they entered after that loss tied for the longest in club history, and may have already been extended by the time this issue hits newsstands. A few weeks ago, they became the first team to ever lose 70 games before the All-Star Break, and are now one of four teams with multiple losing streaks of 14+ games in one year. Not only are they on pace to obliterate the White Sox team record of 106 losses set in 1970, they’re on a worse pace than the fabled 1962 New York Mets, whose all-time high of 120 losses in a season remains the stuff of legend. All told, it’s almost indisputably the competitive nadir for a franchise whose history dates back to 1901.   

But the White Sox reached the playoffs as recently as 2021. How have they fallen so far and so quickly? On the surface, their struggles appear primarily a product of the team’s offensive woes. Like the win-loss record, they’ve been nearly historic so far this year: a .218 batting average and .278 on-base percentage rank among the lowest ever recorded. Their current rate of 3.1 runs scored per game would be the lowest of any team since 1972—the end of an era in which overall offense was so scarce that the pitching mound was lowered and Designated Hitter created in an effort to boost scoring. The Sox have scored no more than one run in a whopping 31 games (28%) and were shut out a record eight times in the course of a painful 3-22 start. 

Lack of offensive firepower has been the defining characteristic of a rocky debut for Chris Getz as general manager. Getz was promoted last August after the dismissal of longtime executives Ken Williams and Rick Hahn. A former player, the 40-year-old was drafted by the White Sox in 2005 and played seven years in the major leagues, including two in Chicago. He joined the team’s front office in 2016. 

The hire was criticized at the time due to Getz’s lack of high-level experience beyond his rapid ascent through the White Sox organization. The team’s decision to not conduct an external candidate search, an unusual move, was also criticized.

Getz’s offseason goal of bolstering the team’s speed and defense has been largely unfulfilled. Beyond a struggling offense, the statistics suggest their defense has also been among the game’s poorest. Many of the club’s recent additions have struggled mightily: Naperville native Nicky Lopez is popular with fans, but his .237 batting average and zero home runs leave much to be desired. Catcher Martín Maldonado is known as a positive clubhouse presence but was a whopping 91% worse than the average hitter before he was released in early July. 

Despite high hopes, young players like Braden Shewmake, Dominic Fletcher, and Nick Nastrini failed to keep their heads above water in the majors and have since been demoted to the minor leagues. No offseason acquisition has been better than 5% below average, with most falling well lower. 

Not all of the Sox’ woes can be blamed on front-office maneuvers. Injuries plagued the team’s starting lineup from the season’s outset. Lineup mainstays Luis Robert Jr., Eloy Jiménez, and Yoán Moncada have played together in just 130 of 327 possible games, a recurring theme in recent years. And even when healthy, Jiménez, the team’s third-highest-paid player by salary, has played at a level that, according to modern stats like Wins Above Replacement, is no better than a generic minor leaguer. Moncada, the team’s highest-paid player this year, hasn’t appeared in a game since April 9th due to injury.

Before the 2023 season, outfielder Andrew Benintendi signed a five-year, $75 million free agent contract, the largest in the team’s history. Today, he’s one of the least productive hitters in the major leagues. In all, 16 hitters have taken at least 50 at-bats for the Sox this year. Only Robert Jr. has resembled a capable big leaguer by most measures.

There have been scattered bright spots. Despite the offense’s ineptitude, the team’s starting pitching has been among the best in the game in recent months.First-time All-Star Garrett Crochet emerged to lead the league with 160 strikeouts in his first year as a starting pitcher. Equally unlikely has been the success of Erick Fedde, who has a career-best 3.11 ERA just a year after he was pushed out of the Majors and went to the Korean Baseball Organization for a job. Some young players have lived up to expectations, with prospects Drew Thorpe (six quality starts in nine games) and Jonathan Cannon (4.43 ERA) looking like possible mainstays in the starting rotation.

Unfortunately for the team’s current prospects, they’ll be without some of those players for the rest of the season. On Monday, Fedde was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals alongside outfielder Tommy Pham in exchange for two minor leaguers and Los Angeles Dodgers utility player Miguel Vargas. White Sox reliever Michael Kopech, once one of the game’s most promising pitchers, was sent to the Dodgers in the deal.

Crochet is expected by many to be dealt this offseason after rumors of a midseason deal failed to materialize earlier this week. The aforementioned Jiménez, however, saw his tenure with the Sox end on Tuesday, when the team announced his trade to the Baltimore Orioles in exchange for a pair of low-minors players. But how is all of this being received outside the stadium?

Fans on the South Side can be vindictive. MLB saw a massive attendance spike in 2023, while Guaranteed Rate Field suffered an equally massive drop in ticket sales. Just a year after the stadium reached two million fans in attendance for the first time since 2011, the White Sox were one of just four teams to draw fewer fans in 2023 than 2022, with their drop of nearly 340,000 more than twice as large as that of the runner-up. Thus far in 2024, only the Miami Marlins and Oakland Athletics have drawn fewer fans than the Sox. Overall, around 7,000 fewer fans are showing up to each game than were a year and a half ago.

But team records and attendance aren’t always correlated. The last-place Cubs aren’t having much trouble regularly filling Wrigley. The New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals finished second and fourth in overall attendance last year despite both suffering through their worst win-loss records of the 21st century. 

Sox fans are less forgiving. Losing may have been the norm for over a decade, but the depths of this pit are becoming more than even some of the team’s most dedicated fans can handle.

“In 2016, I probably went to something crazy, like 40 home games,” said Bridgeport resident Sean Qualls. “So I sat through a lot of not-great baseball, waiting through that rebuild.” 

The rebuild Qualls is referring to is the period between 2017 and 2019, when the team traded away its established stars in hopes of building a better club for the future. While it did result in postseason appearances in 2020 and 2021, the Sox failed to advance beyond the first round in either year. After years of struggles, it wasn’t the payoff that fans had hoped for, making the current crash particularly painful.

The team indicated last year that their aim is to be competitive in short order, but Qualls senses a bleaker mood than in years past. “There is a completely different feel to it this time,” he said. “It feels like what’s [happening] in Oakland…where they’re trying to be as bad as possible so they can end matters and fold the company.” 

The Oakland Athletics and their ownership have come under fire in recent years, with some accusing them of sabotaging the team as a pretext for their recently announced, but still up-in-the-air, departure for Las Vegas. Similarly, rumors of the White Sox’ relocation have periodically popped up for decades. They most recently surfaced last August, when owner Jerry Reinsdorf hinted that a successor may look to move the team without a new publicly funded ballpark. 

Janice Scurio is another fan whose distance from the team has grown larger than ever. “This year feels different,” she told the Weekly. “I don’t know if it’s exhaustion or repetition. I don’t think I would say I’m done, per se, but I’m very close to being there.” 

Scurio, a Southwest Side native who’s written about the White Sox and MLB for numerous websites and publications, cites a lack of investment from the team in its fans. Like Qualls, she gets the feeling the team simply “doesn’t care what the fans think.” 

She also says the record-setting losing is only one part of the fanbase’s increasing alienation. She noted rising ticket prices and the absence of SoxFest, the longtime team-run fan festival that hasn’t been held since 2020. 

She also called the team’s decision to resign pitcher Mike Clevinger “a slap in the face,” a sentiment echoed by many fans and media members. Clevinger was alleged in 2023 to have physically abused previous partners, as well as his infant child. MLB declined to discipline the 33-year-old following an investigation, though he agreed to undergo counseling for anger management and drug abuse. 

“You see a lot of poorly made decisions and the same mistakes being made over and over again,” Scurio said. “We’re definitely seeing those results on the field.”

She isn’t alone in citing organizational dysfunction as a factor in the team’s issues. As a symptom, experts note a consistent team-wide failure to get the most from their best talent. “There seems to be a fundamental inability to put players in a position to get the most out of their skills,” sports analyst Esteban Rivera wrote to the Weekly. “When you can’t get guaranteed production out of your most talented players, you’re doomed.”

With a poor foundation in the minor leagues and an unwillingness to spend money on highly-coveted free agents, Rivera said that the current collection of Sox players was, for all intents and purposes, set up for failure. “When you’ve constructed your roster to be made up of mostly guys whose best outcome is an average season, your odds of putting together any extended stretch of winning baseball are abysmally slim.”

The team did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. 

There is a brighter future on the South Side, if only by virtue of what may be a powerful dead-cat bounce. Just how bright it will be remains the burning question of seasons to come. The Sox’ pursuit of all-time ignominy this season seems certain to come down to the wire. Only time will tell whether there will be a long-term payoff—or how many fans will remain invested enough to see it.

Malachi Hayes is a Bridgeport-based writer and South Side native.