White Sox set to slide into major league infamy

Baseball is a game of numbers, and alongside a million statistics, records form a major pillar of the game. The ones to chase are obvious — home runs, strikeouts, stolen bases, etc. — but then there are a few to avoid.

Aside from "longest World Series drought" (76 years, still currently held by Cleveland), the Chicago White Sox are on the verge of posting arguably the worst of the lot.

On Sunday, the Sox tied the post-1900 Major League Baseball record of 120 losses in a single season, held by the 1962 New York Mets, when the San Diego Padres beat the hapless Southsiders 4-2, following a three-run rally in the eighth inning that was capped by a towering home run off the bat of Fernando Tatis Jr.

That crushing defeat came just 24 hours after the Sox tied the American League record of 119 regular season losses posted by the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who were no doubt celebrating the passing of the baton to one of their bitterest rivals.

Soon, though, the Mets might also be breaking out the champagne.

As the deflated Sox players headed to a somber clubhouse and quietly packed for their flight home, they were left pondering a season of a last gasp defeats, something veteran outfielder Andrew Benintendi acknowledged.

"Yeah we joke about it all the time. It never seems like we get blown out, and then the seventh, eighth and ninth come around and we're facing their seven-eight-nine-inning guys every night, which is big. It's hard to score runs off the back ends of the bullpen," he said.

"It seems like we have been here a lot of times and it just hasn't panned out.

"I guess when you lose 120 it's easier to brush it off, but it (stinks) to go through it, but that's where we're at."

With one more loss in their final six games, the 2024 White Sox will become the ignominious holders of the modern-day record outright. It's unlikely they will be able to sidestep the tag, as they were set to start a three-game home stand against the Los Angeles Angels on Tuesday and will end their season with three at Detroit, which is still in the hunt for an AL wild-card spot.

In the face of the unwanted records piling up on his watch, interim manager Grady Sizemore could only be pragmatic. "No loss is good," he said, adding: "It's not something that we're focused on. I think everyone outside this clubhouse is more obsessed with it than us. The way we spin is to put this one behind us and get ready for the series back home."

Asked how his players were digesting it, Sizemore said: "We all know the situation. We know where we are at. We have a job to do and they are still playing for something. They have handled it like professionals and we will be back out there on Tuesday ready to go and give it our best."

Catcher Korey Lee offered to sum up the mood in the locker room: "I think if you ask all 50 or so guys (who have been on the roster this season) we are not going to be happy about it. If you're happy about it, I don't know what you are doing here.

"I think it's obviously hard, but at the same time everyone is coming in here every day and giving their best."

While there will surely be jokes, criticism and a fair few overzealous jabs taken online — even the club's social media admin on X has taken to posting chaotic memes and sarcastic barbs instead of the final scores — there will surely be questions over the mental toll all of this will take on the players.

Lee, however, says that despite the abysmal run of results, the team has stuck together and has each other's backs. "Honestly, what I look forward to every day when I come in here is having the guy right next to me, and knowing he is going to care for me, inside and out, on the field and off the field.

"That is all you can ask for. It's good family around us. Obviously there is a lot of bad, but you have to take the good out of every day. And the good is coming in here with this group of guys and doing the thing we all love to do."

In the spirit of finding the positives, even though this season's stats will hang like a millstone around the neck of Southsiders for, one would suspect, quite some time, it's worth noting that at 20-134, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders still hold the all-time major league record for losses.

That means, should the Sox lose again this season, they would not be the absolute worst team ever in baseball.

Just the worst of the last 124 years.

mccarthy@chinadaily.com.cn