It was supposed to happen on Tuesday. Loss no. 121, the record-setter, the final stamp of disapproval on this year’s Chicago White Sox. It couldn’t have gotten worse after a 3-22 start, but it didn’t get much better. The White Sox tied the modern-era record for losses in a season with a week to spare, which gave plenty of notice to prepare the latest round of postmortem analysis for the worst team in major league history.
ESPN’s entry, by Buster Olney and Jesse Rogers, noted that the White Sox had the opportunity to lose their record-setting 121st game on Dog Day at Guaranteed Rate Field, sponsored by Tito’s Handmade Vodka. (Drink responsibly.) I had the same joke in my column, which was originally supposed to run Wednesday morning. Rule no. 1 of sportswriting: Don’t look a gift metaphor in the mouth.
We almost got our literal Dog Days framing device at the first opportunity. The White Sox had buried themselves up to their necks in sand below the high water mark on Tuesday night, but a dropped popup by Jack López tossed the game back to Chicago. That led to an inexplicable sweep of a nearly-as-dogwater Angels team before the Tigers finally put the White Sox out of their misery on Friday. Here’s the last out:
Even at the end, Parker Meadows and Wenceel Pérez ran into each other and nearly connived to drop the ball, as López had three nights earlier.
Turns out that losing 121 games in a season takes some doing.
When I was in high school, the Detroit Tigers put together the worst baseball team I’d ever seen. Once a week I’d come home to find the new Sports Weekly on the kitchen counter, and alongside breathless coverage of the up-and-coming Marlins and the dominant Yankees, I’d read about whether Alan Trammell would yank poor 20-year-old Jeremy Bonderman from the rotation before he lost his 20th game. The Tigers’ top pitching prospect had already been run ragged in futile support of this voyage of the damned, but losing 20 games might be a career-crushing blow to his morale.
No such consideration was given to left-hander Mike Maroth, who was saddled with 21 losses that season. He was, and remains, the only pitcher to lose 20 games in a season since 1980, and the only one to do so in fewer than 200 innings since World War II.
I could not conceive of a worse baseball team than the 2003 Tigers, but I was assured that one had existed, back in the olden days. My dad was a Mets fan in the 1960s, and whatever historical gaps he left were filled to overflowing by a memorable segment in Ken Burns’ Baseball. Marv Throneberry, Harry Chiti, the Yo La Tengo story… the usually charitable Burns treated the 1962 Mets, who went 40-120, with a gleeful, almost voyeuristic incredulity. “Get a load of this,” Burns seemed to imply, as he zoomed in on a black-and-white photo of Choo-Choo Coleman or some other unfortunate visibly sapping the life force from Casey Stengel.
In a lifetime of watching some truly abject baseball, the 1962 Mets were the untouchable standard. I knew this because the worst baseball team I’d ever had the misfortune of perceiving personally, those 2003 Tigers, were jolted back into sudden and uncharacteristic competence when they approached that asymptote.
One game into their second-to-last series of the season, the Tigers were 38-118, having lost 10 games in a row and 16 of their previous 17. The 1962 Mets seemed safe. But then, something incredible happened: Detroit won five games out of six to close the season, two by walk-off, two others courtesy of the previously snakebit Maroth. They finished one loss short of the modern record, at 43-119, because forces mysterious and powerful had cracked them out of tickling that incomprehensible standard of futility.
And for the next 20 seasons, nobody else got that close. Not while it became common for multiple teams to lose 100 games every year. Not in the depths of the Process Astros’ tank or the Orioles’ lost half-decade. Not in an era marked by the split between franchises with the resources and ambition to win, and franchises with owners interested in nothing more than collecting a paycheck for showing up to lose.
None of those teams plumbed the special depths of ineptitude the way the 1962 Mets had. As if 120 losses were some inviolable cosmological barrier that made the 2003 Tigers finish hot. To some extent, the same thing happened to Chicago this year; the White Sox were 33-115 at one point, which is a pace fit to blow away the Mets’ old record. Since then, they’ve swept not one but two opponents, and ended the season with a .500 record in their last 14 games. In fact, the White Sox finished the season on a run of five wins out of six, which is their best six-game run since the first week of June 2023. Things are better now than they’ve been in a season and a half. Grady Sizemore for Manager of the Year.
By ending the season with that spasm of competency, the White Sox spared themselves from taking the modern record for worst winning percentage in a season, in addition to the record for most losses. It’s a shallow consolation, and not a sign of better days to come. Like Nimrod’s Tower of Babel, this was a work of engineering created to overpower the metaphysical. This isn’t a tank job or a vestige of an absentee owner. The White Sox, God help them, came by this record honestly.
The record-tying loss was the last game in a weekend series sweep at the hands of the Padres, a team that’s picked Chicago over in the trade market like a vulture dismantling a deer carcass. Not that the White Sox ought to be particularly kicking themselves for trading away Fernando Tatis Jr. and Dylan Cease — this season is not a disgrace born merely of one or two mistakes.
This team is the magnum opus of Jerry Reinsdorf, an owner who, even in his pomp, struggled to field a competitive team. Reinsdorf’s 43-season tenure has seen a single World Series title, in 2005. In the other 42 seasons put together, the White Sox have won a total of six postseason games. The 1919 Black Sox won half that many playoff games in a single week. And they were trying to lose.
If there’s a consolation to be found, it is that responsibility for this debacle has floated immediately to the top of the pile, to Reinsdorf. Now 88 years old, he’s taken personal responsibility for building this team, and has done so in an era when building a winning ballclub is a more complicated task than it’s ever been.
Not five years ago, this was a playoff team with a stellar pitching staff and a promising young homegrown position player core. The era of good feeling was brought to a screeching halt by Reinsdorf’s handpicked managerial candidate, Tony La Russa. The current roster was constructed by his handpicked GM, Chris Getz. Reinsdorf even had a hand in driving off Jason Benetti, one of the best and most popular announcers in the sport, because Benetti didn’t have the right tone. Reinsdorf likes his guys, and loyalty would be an admirable quality under different circumstances. Instead, it’s become insular and backward-thinking, to the point of producing this grotesquerie.
These 121 losses are the downstream effect of an owner who’s been too naïve to realize he was in over his head, too arrogant to ask for help, and too cheap to afford it even if he wanted it.
In this moment, I think back to the 1962 Mets and how they were constructed. They were built from nothing, in an era when nobody had any idea how to set up an expansion team for success. Major League Baseball had only expanded for the first time the season before when the American League went to 10 teams; the Mets and the Houston Colt .45s were the first new members of the National League in the 20th Century.
General manager George Weiss made the fateful but understandable mistake of looking backwards to fill out his roster. It was just four seasons earlier that New York had lost not one but two venerable and highly successful clubs: the Dodgers and Giants. The Mets were explicitly meant to fill that void; they adopted the Giants’ old ballpark, as well as branding that represented a fusion of their predecessors’ colors: Dodger blue and Giants orange.
For a manager, they signed up Stengel, who’d played for the Giants and Dodgers, and later managed the Dodgers and — more notably — the Yankees, with whom he won seven World Series and 10 AL pennants in 12 seasons. They signed no fewer than four members of the Dodgers team that won the World Series in 1955: Gil Hodges, Don Zimmer, Roger Craig, and Clem Labine. (Duke Snider joined the team a year later.)
Not that they were particularly discerning about which aging veterans to bring on: Gene Woodling and Richie Ashburn, who would’ve made an incredible 1-2 punch at the top of the order in, say, 1953, both ended their careers with the 1962 Mets.
The point is this: The Mets started from a clean sheet of paper, with no road map, no farm system, and decided to try their luck with a roster that only would’ve been competitive if Stengel had had access to a time machine.
The White Sox started with a team that made the playoffs two years in a row. And in four years, they ended up worse.
