A day after the White Sox tied the major league modern record (since 1901) with their 120th loss of the season in San Diego, and a day before they’d try to avoid losing, by some minor miracle, a record-breaking 121st back at Guaranteed Rate Field, it happened to be the three-year anniversary of the night they clinched their last division title.
Only three years to get from there to here.
Anyone else remember that celebration in Cleveland? There actually wasn’t much of one.
It was a hell of a good time, though, that ballgame. Tim Anderson homered leading off the game. Luis Robert, Eloy Jimenez and then Anderson again went deep in a six-run second inning. The Sox were on easy street — but looking dangerous, tantalizingly so — as they pulled on division crowns for the first time since 2008 and eyed a second straight trip to the playoffs.
“We understand this is just a start,” Anderson would say in a happy clubhouse.
But after Liam Hendriks blew away Myles Straw to end the game, there were no theatrics. Hendricks and catcher Yasmani Grandal shared routine congratulations. Jose Abreu and Yoan Moncada walked slowly toward each other from their corner-infield spots and bumped gloves. Middle infielders Anderson and Cesar Hernandez did much the same as the outfielders trotted in, in no hurry.
Manager Tony La Russa, pleased enough, perhaps even feeling a bit vindicated, said, “Winning never gets old. It just gets better.”
But that was the end of the line for those Sox, wasn’t it? Right then and there.
And now here we are, witnessing the worst kind of baseball history — an unimaginably bad team finding unimaginable lows as utter hopelessness surrounds and suffocates a franchise in tatters and a fan base that has been roundly, and repeatedly, betrayed.
An owner without a conscience. A general manager without credentials. Another search for a skipper with a clue soon to be underway in earnest. A roster with no chance. And, lately, the national media examining the ruins with a sort of detached wonder.
These are your Sox, people. Gaze upon them if you can stand it. Behold their record-breaking ways with ironic humor if it helps. Find perverse enjoyment in their towering pile of losses, even, unless you prefer to do the only thing that really makes sense and simply not care at all.
There are no rules when it comes to feeling things about a big-league club that doesn’t take itself — or its fans — seriously.
So many things have gone catastrophically wrong on the way to 36-120, 45 games out of next-to-last place and a run differential of minus-320, too many things to list them in any definitive order. We gain next to nothing by even trying, but we’re here so we might as well flip through them like snapshots kept hidden in the darkest recesses of the basement.
La Russa’s strange, shocking return courtesy of Jerry Reinsdorf. Dallas Keuchel’s fall out of use. Grandal’s rapid decline after signing the biggest free-agent deal in Sox history. Andrew Benintendi’s even bigger deal — still not that big by league-wide standards, only by the Sox’s — despite his modest ability. Joe Kelly’s bomb-out. The signing of Mike Clevinger, the Sox’ homework not having been completed. Anderson’s ruination. Moncada’s and Jimenez’s unavailability. Lance Lynn’s career-worst season. So many other things attributable to Reinsdorf, Kenny Williams, Rick Hahn, Pedro Grifol. And Chris Getz, in over his head?
Look, I’m just riffing here.
We can go back and relitigate the hiring of La Russa rather than A.J. Hinch, and — wow — what Hinch, a manager the Sox presumably could have had given their talented roster, has done with the 2024 Tigers. What Hinch has done with that team, one of baseball’s best in August and September, has been absolute magic. Announcer Jason Benetti is up in Detroit, too, salt in the wound to fans who watched the Sox on TV, an inexplicable banishment with Reinsdorf’s paws all over it.
It’s always something with the Sox, isn’t it? This is even more awful than the 2016 mess starring Drake LaRoche, Chris Sale and Williams amid a season gone off the rails, isn’t it? It’s worse than the misery of 2011, Ozzie Guillen’s last season as manager, isn’t it? Or maybe not. Maybe it’s all the same.
Reinsdorf wants a new ballpark. His team is the worst ever. His timing is hilarious.
These are your Sox, people. You don’t deserve them.