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July started out so promising for White Sox fans. The team was merely bad instead of historically, meaningfully bad. in the prior month. Between June 3 and July 7 — the period of time in between check-ins on the club round these parts — the South Side club went 11-21, no small thing for a team that, in the two months prior, had managed all of 15 combined victories. That pace was a 106-loss pace, which knocked them from “in line to finish with the worst-ever record in modern baseball” to “merely the third-worst team in modern baseball.” You take whatever dub you can when they aren’t regularly showing up, you know?
The rest of July was a course correction. July 8 was the last time that I looked in on the White Sox, and, coincidentally, is right before the wheels came off again. The White Sox are in the midst of a 17-game losing streak, the longest such streak in franchise history — a history that dates back to 1901. They won on July 5, then lost their next three, then won the first game of a doubleheader, and have dropped the 17 games since that W. Which is a long way of saying that, since bringing their record to 26-66 and a .282 winning percentage, they’ve fallen to 27-84, for a .243 mark.
They had been outscored by 164 runs; their run differential, just 19 games later, now stands at -229, after scoring 46 runs and allowing 111 in this stretch. That’s 2.29 runs scored per game, and 5.84. The pitching had been keeping the White Sox… well, afloat is overstating it. But it was obviously the stronger part of the team in a relative sense. When it failed to do that, well, you see the result. They’ve never been able to score this year, and not being able to score while also not being able to keep opponents from scoring is how you lose 17 straight.
As you can see from those figures, too, it’s not like they lost a bunch of nail biters where a ball here or there in the other direction would have changed matters. They’ve lost by an average of 3.72 runs per game in the 18 losses during this time frame, and that’s with a few of them actually being one-run losses. They mostly got thrashed, and it shows in their record and run differential.
That record, by the way, has them once again on pace for 122 losses, which is where they were before June’s relatively admirable performance. The 1962 Mets, the worst season by any team in modern baseball, finished with 120 defeats. The White Sox, in the span of all of 19 games, increased their projected loss total from 116 to 122. Simply incredible work.
They’ve given up the most runs in the league, non-Rockies division, and scored the fewest, with the Sox somehow scraping together 53 fewer runs than Miami Marlins. Once Miami scores another six of them, the White Sox will be the one team left to reach 400 runs scored on the season. Which is, for those who haven’t checked their calendar lately, two-thirds of the way complete. The White Sox have to face the Twins, Yankees, Astros, Orioles, Red Sox, Guardians, and Padres before this season ends, as well, so it’s not as if things are about to get easier for them. They better win those games against the A’s while they can. If they can.
I’m not even going to get into who’s at fault here with the usual level of detail. If you’ve been following along, you know the answer. Jerry Reinsdorf is a cheap owner who is the single largest impediment to his team’s success. The front offices are often a joke not up to the task, sure, but he’s the one staffing them and essentially giving these guys lifetime appointments because they’re polite enough to say, “Yes, sir” and stay employed rather than try to argue that hey, maybe spending a little more on free agents and investing more in the farm system could pay off for us.
The 2024 White Sox are the result of cronyism and cheapness, both of which were ramped up on the heels of a 100-loss 2023. The 2024 White Sox could have been avoided. Now it seems that they’re inevitable to the point that their decent-enough for a horrible team June has boomeranged right back and hit them in the face, causing them to end up where they were all along. Which is to say, curled up on the floor, bleeding out, with everyone laughing at them.
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I wanted to make a note regarding a post here from earlier this week, where I described MLB having a “gag order” on interested buyers from the Bay Area on the A’s. There were multiple responses from people with handles like “@LasVegasAsFan” — no, I’m not being hyperbolic, there really was one that was literally that with some numbers and a paid blue checkmark on Twitter — who pointed out that MLB bars any potential owner from talking about wanting to buy a specific team when that team isn’t for sale. They used former Marlins executive and current media attention hog David Samson as a source for this, given his familiarity with the ins and outs of this whole world, and while I don’t deny that’s the case, there’s something different at play here which merits mentioning.
The A’s are leaving Oakland not because Las Vegas gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse that any club would be silly to turn down. The A’s are leaving Oakland because the claim, coming from the team, is that Oakland cannot support Major League Baseball in the way it needs to be supported. A potential owner in the Bay Area with more money than John Fisher even after you add up mommy and daddy’s money and credit it to him saying that they’re interested in a very specific thing — saving baseball in Oakland and proving it can thrive there by putting their money where their mouth is — is much different than some rando getting annoyed at Hal Steinbrenner maybe letting Juan Soto walk and then going on the radio to announce that they’ll buy the Yankees if only someone would let him. The Yankees and A’s aren’t for sale, but only one of them is leaving their hometown. There’s a real difference there that makes what’s a pretty standard procedure more insidious, because the A’s situation is not standard.
Anyway, you don’t need to listen to someone who is so obviously a shill for ownership. And you can ignore accounts like @LasVegasAsFan while you’re at it, too. But it was worth pointing out that there’s a real difference here in what’s going on than the usual, so there you go.
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