Baseball in Chicago is done for 2024.
Games will be played in October but not here.
Dust off our battle cry: ‘‘Wait till next year!’’
Enjoy the hot-stove league, folks. Because what you saw with our two teams this season was a travesty and a dullness of deep proportions with no clear end in sight.
The White Sox and Cubs combined to lose 200 games in 2024. Think of that. It never had happened in our city before. Not in 124 years of modern baseball.
Of course, the Sox lost more games — 121 — than any team. Their march was so dumb and relentless that you watched in slack-jawed awe, like watching a colony of leaf-cutter ants slowly demolish a pine sapling.
The Cubs had their own kind of dumb march. A team with high expectations teased us with a tickle brush from the start. They hit 17-9 after Shota Imanaga beat the Red Sox on April 26 in Boston. Three days later, Mark Leiter Jr. earned a victory against the Mets, and the Cubs surged into first place in the National League Central by a half-game.
And that was it. They’d fool around, even tying for first again May 8, before the descent began. The Cubs finished with a middling 83-79 record, 10 games behind the small-market Brewers in the division and six games out of a wild-card spot.
The sad ending already had been cemented by the time beloved Kyle ‘‘The Professor’’ Hendricks pitched what likely was his last game for the Cubs on Saturday, throwing 7⅓ scoreless innings against the Reds. The crowd at Wrigley Field gave the quiet man a standing ovation as he walked off, and he saluted them all with a doffed cap and a brief curtain call.
But when an emotional point in your season is also a major downbeat, well, hey, wait till next year. And, as always, it’s the Cubs. They drew an astounding 2.9 million fans even in this season of October-free ball.
One curious element of the Cubs’ demise was the high-bidding acquisition of former Brewers manager Craig Counsell last winter — a man brought in to take the Cubs to the top — and how little that mattered. The steal of Counsell was called ‘‘stunning’’ and ‘‘shocking’’ in Milwaukee, and it ticked off a lot of Brewers fans.
But even with his $8 million-a-year contract — by far the highest ever for a manager — Counsell did nothing better than the low-paid man he replaced, David Ross. Ross had an identical 83-79 record in 2023. The Brewers replaced Counsell with old bench coach Pat Murphy and won the division. It makes you wonder what a manager is for. Or whether he matters.
With the Sox, you wonder about everything. Manager Pedro Grifol was replaced by Grady Sizemore in August, and it mattered nil. Yet there was that weird flurry at the end, with the Sox winning eight of their last 14 games, including five of their last six. It was like a lopped-off head talking from the basket after the guillotine. Too little, too late.
How can anyone explain things such as the Sox’ 3-22 start or their 21-game losing streak from July 10 to Aug. 6? Teams win games just from weird bounces and foes’ stupidity. But not our Sox.
Of course, it starts at the top. If the fish rots from the head down, chairman Jerry Reinsdorf is stinking away. He said that the season was ‘‘embarrassing’’ and a ‘‘failure,’’ that it started with him and that ‘‘there are no excuses.’’ No argument here. In the last two seasons, the Sox have lost 222 games. Most kids never will lose that many games in all the sports they play in their lifetimes.
What happened to that recently ascending pitching staff of Dylan Cease, Lance Lynn, Lucas Giolito, Carlos Rodon, Liam Hendriks, Dallas Keuchel, Michael Kopech? Faded, traded, gone, failed. And injuries. Yoan Moncada, Eloy Jimenez, Mike Clevinger, Luis Robert Jr. — hurt, always hurt.
Maybe a good symbol for the Sox’ plummet is former shortstop Tim Anderson. The cocky Anderson was the American League batting champ in 2019 but was among the worst hitters in baseball before the Marlins, with whom he signed last winter after leaving the Sox, parted ways with him in July. The KO punch a year ago from Guardians infielder Jose Ramirez to Anderson’s jaw during an on-field fracas seemed to demolish Anderson’s swagger and the Sox’ dreams.
Anderson might have been the Sox’ symbolic albatross of doom, but a raven croaking, ‘‘Nevermore,’’ might be Chicago’s baseball legacy.