"No loss is good," said Chicago White Sox interim manager Grady Sizemore, a statement which, rather than defusing the potency of Sunday's milestone loss, merely diffuses it across a season: If no loss is good, then each loss is bad, which means 120 losses are a death march unseen in the days of widespread color TV. That's 120 days of feeling bad at the ballpark; 120 unsatisfied nights, wishing for a better tomorrow that rarely comes. Thirty-six chances for the South Side to stand up, weighed against 120 blunt remonstrances to remain seated.
The 43-119 Detroit Tigers of 2003 are now in the rearview mirror, still notable for possessing the last 20-game loser in Mike Maroth but no longer for owning the AL's worst record of the modern era. The 40-120-1 New York Mets of 1962 are next up. One of the first expansion teams, before MLB had balanced its expansion rules to avoid putting out true stinkers, those Mets were wretched but charmingly pitiable, like an Instagram chihuahua. They made their own manager ask, "Can't anybody here play this game?" They were and are baseball's touchstone for terrible. And they were a better team than the 2024 Chicago White Sox.
The White Sox are now 36-120, a number that frankly looks fake juxtaposed against its nearest agate-page neighbors. You don't achieve that in an afternoon. It's a sustained effort of all-around badness, and loss No. 120 felt much like many of its forerunners: futility at the plate paired with an inability to keep opponents quiet late. Not a single member of the White Sox bullpen on opening day is still on the roster, and it took three relievers to get through the fateful eighth, where Chicago squandered a 2-1 lead: double, double, wild pitch, sac fly, homer. 4-2, Padres. It was all unspectacular and felt preordained. Just another loss. Yet another loss.
By this point in the campaign, a loss doesn't hurt. The losing does. "I guess when you lose 120 it's easier to brush it off, but it sucks to go through it," outfielder Andrew Benintendi said. Every member of the clubhouse appears to be Going Through It; those who can find the humor in this farce seem to be coping the best. "You walk that fine line of being on the edge of losing your mind—always on that razor's edge," said pitcher Davis Martin.
Last week, The Athletic went deep on the White Sox, and if you were looking for a skeleton key to unlock the secrets of their suck, you may have come away disappointed. The team is bad because the franchise is bad, and the franchise is bad in all the same ways all bad franchises are bad, mutatis mutandis: an owner who is checked out on the things that matter and hands on for the things he can ruin; substandard coaching and analytics departments ("Minor league pitchers with high walk totals were told things like 'work on your command,' with no other specifics"); a broad and pervading organizational shabbiness, symbolized by the oldest and worst charter plane in MLB. If the story is illuminating, it is in highlighting how deep the rot runs, and how unfixable it appears to be short of replacing Jerry Reinsdorf, which will not happen as long as the 88-year-old is still kicking.
And so the White Sox chug away toward ignominy, their season highlight a three-game win streak a week ago that briefly made them look like they might avoid the bad kind of history, before they immediately followed it up with five straight losses as a reminder that, no, they really are this bad—expansion Mets bad, Cleveland Spiders bad, as adept at losing games as any team that ever took the field. There is no such thing as mercy in baseball, only the mercy-killing that is the offseason. This White Sox season has been a wonder to witness. It sounds like it hasn't been very much fun to achieve.
