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Monday is Labor Day, and given that this is a labor-focused newsletter, it feels wrong to sign myself up to cover any stories then. So, instead, let’s do our monthly check-in on the White Sox and their horrific 2024 season now, the final weekday of August.
Last we looked in, the White Sox were in the midst of a franchise-worst losing streak that would soon end, but not until after they had tied the historical AL worst mark of 21 in a row. They were 27-84, “good” for a win percentage of .243, and had been outscored by -229 on the season. Things have somehow gotten worse than they were then, which seems impossible. But that’s our 2024 White Sox, baby.
It’s August 30. Just so we’re crystal clear on what that means, it means it is not only not September yet, but that we’ve got two games of August baseball left to us on top of that. The White Sox have already lost 104 games on the season, thanks to going all of 4 and 20 between the morning of August 2 and now. Four wins, 20 losses. The 2023 White Sox also lost over 100 games, but it took them almost the entirety of the season to get there, as they dropped number 100 (of 101) on September 30, the second-to-last day of the regular season.
The ‘24 White Sox went all of 3-22 in July, thanks to the bulk of their record-tying losing streak existing in that month, but if they drop their last two games in August, the difference between last month and this one will be a single W, as they’ll have finished at 4-22. They would also tie their worst-ever loss total, set by the 1970 White Sox, before they even enter the final month of the regular season.
They’ve now been outscored by 283 runs on the season, which is an eye-popping figure on its own, but let’s context it up just to make all of this even worse. The American League West has the most teams with a negative run differential in it this year, with three: the Rangers, Athletics, and Angels. If you combine their runs scored and runs allowed together to gas up that negative run differential into something horrible and twisted, it still doesn’t quite come close to the natural horror that is the 2024 White Sox. The Rangers (-43), Athletics (-77), and Angels (-125) have been outscored by a combined 243 runs, which, to save you some math, is 40 runs less than what the White Sox have been outscored by.
That’s the very disappointing defending champions, a team that has been actively trying to destroy itself for years now, and the Angels, who need no introduction. And yet, with their powers combined, they remain no match for the White Sox.
The White Sox are 45.5 games back of the first-place Guardians in the AL Central, and that’s with Cleveland struggling to stay afloat for months now: the Guardians are all of 38-39 since June began, and were themselves outscored over each of the last two months, and over those three months in aggregate. The White Sox are 37 games back of the fourth-place Tigers in the Central; the next-largest gaps between last and fourth in any division are the Rockies (30.5 back) and Marlins (30 back). The White Sox are further behind the next-closest team to them in their division than the next two worst teams are behind their division leaders. The White Sox are 42 games back of a Wild Card spot; the second-largest distance between a team and a potential Wild Card berth is the Marlins, at 24 games.
All of this is a long way of saying that the White Sox now find themselves all of 19 losses away from breaking the single-season loss record that’s held by the 1962 expansion Mets. They dropped 22 games in July, and have already lost 20 in an incomplete August. They have 27 games to go, and they need to go 9-18 from here on out to simply tie the Mets, 10-17 if they want to avoid the record entirely and settle for “second-most losses of the modern era.” An 8-19 record from here on out is a .296 win percentage; 9-18 is .333, and 10-17 is .370. Granted, this is a small sample of games and all that, as you can see by the wild swings in percentage with just single-figure changes, but I’m showing you those numbers for illustrative purposes. The White Sox win percentage on the season is currently .230, and over July and August, it’s .142. They have seven wins against forty-two losses since July began. Do you know how difficult picking up nine wins in a month is going to be for a team that, if they somehow win their next two after this piece publishes, will have managed all of nine wins in two months?
Maybe the White Sox do pull it together and avoid the record that seems so very much to be theirs, like the 2003 Tigers did by going, in a fun coincidence, 9-18 over the season’s final month to help them finish at “just” 119 defeats. Nine was their second-most wins in a month, a feat they managed twice. The White Sox have also won nine games in a month twice in 2024, but it’s not their second-most victories. They haven’t managed double-digits in a month of 2024 yet. September isn’t looking too good on that front, either.
I had two features published at Baseball Prospectus this week. The first was free to read with a basic subscription — meaning, just an email login, no money or payment information required — and is on both Paul Skenes and the way media talks about and frames “losing” a year of service time due to new rules in the current collective bargaining agreement. Which is to say, they do it in a way that does not service the reader, nor explain what’s actually happening, and it sets norms that are difficult to shake.
The second is about the National Women’s Soccer League abolishing the draft, and how it’s something we should hope more leagues do, and why. And, of course, why MLB won’t, because all of the things the NWSL Players Association noted as bugs in the draft, they see as features worth exploiting again and again, and expanding upon if possible, too. This one is behind the paywall, but if you’ve got a subscription, by all means.
Note: At publication time, Baseball Prospectus is having some technical issues, but once it’s back up and running again, be sure to check out those pieces if you haven’t already.
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