Biggest Losers

Having deferred their destiny with an improbable three-game winning streak, the 2024 Chicago White Sox succumbed to the inevitable last night, falling  4-1 to the Detroit Tigers and becoming, officially, the worst team in modern baseball history. With their 121st loss, they have broken the record held by the 1962 New York Mets, of 120 losses. The 1962 Mets, though, had a good excuse for losing 120 games—they were an expansion team. The 2024 White Sox represent a storied franchise that has existed for more than a century. They are located in the third-largest U.S. city, have a middle-of-the-pack payroll and were a playoff team full of young, supposedly rising talent as recently as 2021. There is no precedent for a franchise—in baseball, or in any major sport—that has fallen this far, this fast. Several times over the past three years it appeared that they had reached proverbial rock bottom, only to discover that the rocks were merely decoration on top of a sinkhole. In recent weeks, many national commentators have proclaimed that no season could be worse than this one, but this only proves that they are not White Sox fans. Only we truly know what it is like for that sempiternal sports nostrum, “There’s always next year,” to sound less like a promise than a threat.

I have rooted for the White Sox my entire life, as my father did before me. It was an ambiguous gift he gave me, and he sometimes apologized for having given it. We both used to feel physically ill when the White Sox would lose games; to outsiders we looked, as a family friend once put it, like we had “gone underwater.” For most of my father’s life they had been losers—and not “lovable” ones like our hated crosstown rivals, the Chicago Cubs—though during my teen years the team was often competitive, even if their best season was interrupted by the strike in 1994, and others culminated in emotionally wrenching playoff defeats. Then, in 2005, improbably, they stormed through the playoffs en route to their first World Series win since 1917. My father and I were there, in Houston, when it happened, and I remember promising to myself not to take things so hard after that. We had won a championship while we were both still alive, and that was enough. It was just sports. It would be a relief, in fact, to start focusing on more important things.

Like many sports fans before me—like my father, probably—I found that there were no more important things. Or, rather, that there were many more important things, but only in theory. My dad died of cancer in 2017, just a little too late, as he put it while his condition deteriorated, to have avoided witnessing the Cubs win their first World Series in over a century. (The line typically elicited laughter; only he and I realized how little of a joke it was.) Maybe it was seeing all my friends from growing up, who were Cubs fans, gloat, but by then I was once again taking things very hard. That was also the year that the White Sox, having for several seasons been “mired in mediocrity”—in the words of their then-general manager—began what is known in sports as a “rebuild.” The first step in this protracted process is trading your current stars for young players who promise to help your team win in the future. Over the next few years, the idea is that these players will “develop,” and then mature together as a cohort. If all goes well, the next step after that is a prolonged period where your team is positioned to compete for championships.

I got behind the plan—reasoning, naïvely, that nothing was worse than mediocrity. But the rebuild, after seeming like a success for the first few years, was fated to become a spectacular, almost macabre disaster, culminating in back-to-back hundred-loss seasons and now the worst record in baseball history, right in the middle of what we had been told was going to be the team’s “championship window.” What went wrong? This is now the subject of feverish national analysis, every word of which I read as if it were holy text, containing descriptions of events that, while seeming straightforward, are really opaque gestures toward some elusive spiritual truth. Sclerotic leadership, outdated philosophies, corruption, an unusually bad cluster of injuries—all of these surely played a part in what happened, and taken together it is not hard to see how they were decisive. Yet if one part of me is absorbed by this hermeneutic exercise, probing for clues to the deep causes of decline and fall, another part of me—the part that remains a fan in the child’s sense—is magnetized toward simpler, and more spiteful, explanations.

Above all, I cannot help blaming the individual players—the ones who, having gotten our hopes up with their seemingly boundless promise, failed again and again, day after day, in ways both predictable and utterly innovative, right in front of our eyes. Earlier this month Yoán Moncada, the switch-hitting Cuban infielder who was once the symbol of the rebuild’s early excitement, and whose box scores I checked assiduously from the moment the Sox acquired him in 2016, returned from his latest injury, which he suffered while running to first base in the eleventh game of the season. Having reportedly drawn out his recovery as long as possible, he is now such a nullity that he has not started a game since his return, despite being paid $25 million by a team boasting not one league average position player. Some think the organization has told the manager to bench him out of spite, a directive I would approve of if it were true. I tell myself that it is ridiculous to feel betrayed by a person I have never met, someone who dresses up every night to play a kid’s game. But this lecture is inefficacious. I feel hatred for Moncada. I will be angry with him and the other supposed “core” players from this era for the rest of my life.

If you ask what the use of this anger is—or if you ask, as many have, why I don’t stop rooting for such a worthless, embarrassing team—well, you are inhabiting a logical space of reasons that has nothing to do with what I am talking about. My dad would have understood, and I’ve thought about him a lot this year. He would have suffered, of course, but he had a dark sense of humor, and some part of him would have enjoyed rehashing the worst of it with me over the phone each night. As the articles have rolled in from the New York Times, The Athletic and ESPN.com, I can almost hear him saying that at least the team is finally getting some national attention. Alas, I do not have him to talk to anymore, which means I have had to seek for others, mostly online, to share in my morbid fascination. Thankfully the internet is a wonderful place to indulge this particular sickness. On White Sox Twitter, and White Sox Reddit, and on the podcasts and articles that orbit around the reliably excellent White Sox blog, Sox Machine—perhaps the only baseball blog of which it can plausibly be said that the writers would immediately do a better job running the organization than the people drawing paychecks from it—I’ve found a community as irrationally dedicated to following this no-good, historically miserable team, as I am. I can’t wait to do it again with them next year.

It’s not quite the same as being able to share it with family, though. Two years ago, my first child entered the world late in a White Sox season that was, if not as world-historically bad as this one, still very bad. I live in New York now, and I had the thought, after she was born, that it was within my power to spare her from being a White Sox fan, and perhaps that it would be the humane thing to do. Then, on the many nights when she couldn’t sleep, I found myself climbing the stairs to our living room and rocking her in the glow of the television as the Sox fell yet again, lamely, to one of the West Coast teams—in my memory they are always playing in the Oakland Coliseum, where the foul territory stretches into eternity—and whispering to her that one day, if she were lucky, she would love and despise and feel as much pointless bitterness toward something out there in the world as I did about these incorrigible losers.