It was another day, another loss for the Chicago White Sox, but there was something special about Sunday’s loss.
Sunday’s loss was a 13-7 standard loss to the Minnesota Twins, marking their 20th straight loss. That’s a good number to give this franchise a national stage to be proud of. No team has lost 20 straight games since the 1988 Baltimore Orioles. The Baltimore Orioles have lost 21 straight.
In Chicago, the White Sox are used to losing. That’s their thing. But 20 straight losses? It’s past the point of embarrassment here.
In Chicago, we’ve been watching the Sox break the modern-day record of 120 consecutive losses set by the 1962 Mets, but now they’re on track to surpass the Philadelphia Phillies’ record of 23 consecutive losses set in 1961.
Disgrace, your name is White Sox.
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On Sunday’s broadcast of NBC Sports Chicago’s beloved, painfully honest postgame show, host Chuck Garfin dished out a familiar, insulting statistic.
“20 losing streaks, 40 games later, 1-12 against Minnesota,” he said. “I could talk about that all day, 1-12 against Kansas City…”
That’s when Frank Thomas intercepted him. Thomas is, of course, the greatest player in franchise history and a semi-regular co-host of the show. As a hitter, Thomas was a stickler for detail. On this show, he wanted it to be accurate.
“Sixty games under .500,” he said. “Sixty games under.”
That’s when Gapien realized his mistake. The loss dropped the White Sox to 27-87. Talk about a big hurt.
“Sixty games,” he said. “I said they were 40 games below .500.”
He flung the wad of paper onto the carpet with some theatrical flair.
“They were 60 games below .500!” Gaffien shouted, sitting back in his chair.
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Then Gapien’s daily host and the team’s World Series-winning manager, Ozzie Guillen, pulled out a statistic I’d just come up with: Even if you take away the Sox’s franchise-record two-game losing streak, they still have the worst record in baseball.
Look, being the worst team in baseball for a season is one thing. Someone has to do it, after all. But add in 14-game losing streaks and 20-game losing streaks (and counting), and they’re a candidate for the worst team in modern baseball history. A timeless joke.
The ’62 Mets were somewhat of an expansion team. They had the amazing Marv Throneberry and Casey Stengel. Jimmy Breslin’s book “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” was a classic, and seven years later, the amazing Mets were world champions.
But the White Sox have been around since 1901. Their franchise losing record stands at 106, which will be broken before Labor Day. It’s a far cry from the rebuild that was expected to bring several championship parades to Chicago.
Two years after the Sox won 93 games and won the AL Central, they hit what we thought was rock bottom. It was the previous year when they lost 101 games, and Sox president Jerry Reinsdorf made a move none of us expected, firing longtime front office duo Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn. Reinsdorf promised a quick turnaround behind new general manager Chris Getz. No one believed Jerry at the time. Why? He lost the trust of the fans. Even now, all these years later.
For some reason — well, money — the team kept Pedro Grifol, who is currently 88-188. But he has been a dead coach all season, and after the trade deadline, the focus quickly shifted to his position. It seems cruel that Getz and Reinsdorf haven’t fired Grifol yet. Maybe they’re waiting for him to win a game so he can go out with a good performance.
“That means we’re 100 games below .500 since Pedro took over,” Guillen said. “Whoa, whoa, kid.”
Ozzy is having an existential crisis right now on the post-game show. pic.twitter.com/5eCUlirBgI
— White Sox Talk (@NBCSWhiteSox) August 4, 2024
Guillen, who led the Sox to a World Series title in 2005, said he recently felt more angry and sad than usual and had to see a psychologist. Why?
“I don’t think I was that bad of a coach, but they picked Pedro before me,” Guillen said, laughing on the show.
After Tony La Russa resigned in 2022 due to health issues, Guillen was given a brief interview for the vacancy he had given up in 2011. Guillen had wanted to return to the job for years, but the previous regime of Williams and Hahn did not want him back and had no intention of hiring him two years ago. I agreed with them, but because the organization needs to move forward, not backward.
“When Rick Hahn called and told me I couldn’t do it, I said, ‘We found the next Ozzy Guillen,’” Guillen added.
When Hahn tried to praise Grifol, Guillen, who went 678-617 (.524) in eight seasons, doesn’t like the comparison now. But he’s sure he’d be happy to see how bad the Sox are without him.
Many fans want Guillen to replace Grifol immediately if the team fires him, but why would he want that headache? If I were one of Grifol’s staff members, I wouldn’t want to take that job either. I wouldn’t want to answer questions about this team, this season, twice a day.
Now, as his last day in office approaches, Grifol has spent his time doing what so many failed coaches and managers do under Reinsdorf: flattering their bosses.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” Grifol said, according to the Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune. “It gets taken out of context and flipped over and over again, depending on how people want to perceive it. Jerry’s a winner. You know? He’s an absolute winner. He’s a competitor. No, he’s not satisfied. Who’s satisfied?”
People have funny definitions of what makes someone a winner, especially when they’re always working under losers.
The Bulls have fallen below . 500 since Michael Jordan retired in 1998. The Sox have made the postseason just seven times in Reinsdorf’s 44 years of ownership. The 2005 playoffs were the only time they won a series, and 2020 and 2021 were the only years they made the playoffs in back-to-back seasons.
But Grifol speaks to only one audience member while floating in the air.
If the Sox get swept in Oakland this week, they can break the Phillies record of ’61 at home against the Cubs on Friday. The atmosphere will be somewhere between a funeral and a riot.
I can’t imagine Grifol being the best at it. How could you do that to him? How could you insult the intelligence of your fans by keeping him around?
This is a terrible situation for anyone, but it’s not just Grifol’s problem. Of course, he’s responsible for making a bad situation worse.
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While focusing on building the farm system, Getz tried to make the major league product more acceptable by adding some defense to last year’s sloppy defense, but he failed very publicly. The perennially injured core hitters surprisingly got hurt again early in the season (Yoán Moncada played in just 11 games and finished in the team’s top 10 in bWAR), and the season went off the rails with a 3-22 start. At least the starting pitching was solid, and Getz and his staff bolstered the organization’s pitching prospects.
That’s all part of the upside of losing. It gives the front office a runway to improve the organization, sometimes quite quickly. That was the plan after the 2016 season, and it worked, but it didn’t. But Getz’s move at the first trade deadline was widely criticized, and new baseball rules limit the Sox to the 10th pick in next year’s draft.
Money will be an issue. The Sox are suffering another attendance decline, and the TV broadcast that used to be the team’s highlight is now considered the worst in baseball. The team’s contract with NBC Sports Chicago is ending, and a new RSN (partnered with the Bulls and Blackhawks) is set to debut this fall.
The road back to respectability will be long. At least there are pregame and postgame shows on TV that are consistently honest and critical, like Sunday’s. That show, Campfire Milkshake, and minor league pitching are the only advantages the organization has.
The White Sox have been losing, losing, losing, and yet they’ve been practicing so much that they might just be the best ever.
(Photo of Nikki Lopez reacting to Sunday’s loss: David Berding/Getty Images)
