The White Sox Are Collapsing Toward Immortality

The 2024 season started absolutely terribly for the White Sox. After 25 games, the team’s record stood at 3-22, thanks in large part to an anemic offense that barely scored two runs per game. At the time – the Sox were 3-21 when I wrote the piece – I posed the question of whether the White Sox had a real shot at losing 120 games. I concluded that it was possible, with ZiPS projecting an 8.1% chance that Chicago would lose 120 games, better odds than even the Oakland A’s during their brutal 2023 season. That appeared to be the end of the story, at least until July.

After the awful start, things got slightly sunnier for the Sox for awhile. They swept the Tampa Bay Rays, a team expected to be a contender, and over the next not-so-nice 69 games, they went 24-45. While a .348 winning percentage isn’t in the same zip code as competence, that’s a 56-win pace, a level of lousiness that is fairly commonplace for the worst teams in the league, not the stuff of legend. But as the trade deadline approached, things again turned grim.

The White Sox won the first game of a doubleheader against the Twins on July 10, improving their record to 27-67. That date, almost a month ago, was the last time the White Sox won a game. The team’s 21 straight losses ties them with the 1988 Orioles for the second-most consecutive losses in modern baseball history (since 1901), just two losses behind the biggest loser, the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies. In some sense, the current one might be the most impressive losing streak, simply because the differences between the best and worst teams in baseball has shrunk over the years, making streaks like this more challenging to achieve.

And no, the White Sox haven’t been unlucky. Using a modified Pythagorean winning percentage (I use 1.83 for the exponent rather than two, as it’s been slightly more accurate historically), the White Sox have been the fourth-worst team since 1901.

If the season ended today, the White Sox would have the worst modified Pythagorean win percentage in more than 80 years, since the Philadelphia Phils in 1942. No, that’s not a typo; the Phillies officially shortened their team name for a season in 1942, apparently because they decided they didn’t want to have the same name as the line of cigars.

Problem is, the season doesn’t end today, so the Sox haven’t closed the deal yet. Regression toward the mean is a real thing, and one of the primary reasons why people overrate teams when things are going very well, and vice-versa. At the end of the day, a .235 winning percentage or the .272 in modified Pythag are likely – though not guaranteed – to go up over the remaining games. Projections represent a more stable description of a team’s ability, as well as one that’s generally more predictive of the future, and even with the diminished post-deadline roster, ZiPS sees the White Sox as “only” a .355 team, a 58-104 pace that represents merely a ho-hum level of awfulness.

But it’s also likely that given more games, these other terrible teams likely would have played better ball as well, for similar reasons. (Remember, Major League Baseball didn’t implement the current 162-game schedule until 1961.) While ZiPS projections date back to 2005, I have a quick little estimator for a team’s underlying ability that correlates fairly well with projections; it’s a mix of actual record, a team’s “wRC Pythagorean” — which uses wRC rather than runs score and allowed — and a model of regression toward .500. So I calculated the worst teams by this method and compared them to Chicago’s .356 estimate.

Whew, the White Sox once again fall to satisfyingly hurlicious levels as the worst team since the 1952 Pirates. And the thing is that for the Sox, a .355 record is lousy enough that they stand an excellent chance at losing 120 games anyway with the number of losses they already have banked. With 47 games to play, a .355 record would net them only 16.7 wins, leaving them at just under a 44-118 record, tantalizingly close to the 1962 Mets standard. And since we know that projections aren’t perfect, or at least maybe reality isn’t, that gives the White Sox ample room to continue to underperform and take the grand prize. Luckily, ZiPS can take care of that estimate.

Even with things projected not to go quite as badly, ZiPS gives the White Sox a slightly better than one-in-three chance (34%) to lose 120 games. And it could get even worse, with a 1% projected shot of finishing with a 35-127 record (or worse). That is championship brutality right there. The amusing thing is that this probability could’ve been even higher, but the White Sox didn’t trade Garrett Crochet or Luis Robert Jr. at the deadline, leaving the team encumbered with an additional 2-3 wins. If I remove Crochet and Robert Jr. in favor of their likely sub-replacement replacements, ZiPS projects the Pale Hose to have a 66% chance of losing at least 120 games!

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it a silver lining, but hope remains even for the most woeful teams in baseball. The last team to make a serious late run at 120 losses, the 2003 Tigers, improved quickly in the following seasons and made it to the World Series just three years later. Those 1952 Pirates were in the middle of a full rebuild helmed by legendary general manager Branch Rickey, hired in ’51, and though health problems forced him to step down in ’55, the organization assembled many of the key players who were on the World Series-winning team in ’60. And let’s not forget that seven years after losing 120 games, the Mets won the 1969 World Series. White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf isn’t one to embrace change, but a disaster of epic proportions could, in theory, be the one thing that would prompt him to overhaul the organization. I wouldn’t say I’m terribly optimistic about this actually happening, but with an improved farm system – we now rank Chicago’s farm as the third best in baseball – and maybe a better front office assembled, the Sox could turn things around.

Whether the White Sox have a brighter future is something we’ll have to wait to find out. For now, enjoy these Sox as they reach new levels of ineptitude, because they may be the worst major league team you’ll ever see.