Worst-in-baseball White Sox are sick of losing: ‘We’ve got to see something change’

Welcome to Crosstown, where the only buzz is coming from the cicadas.

Sure, Wrigley Field will welcome tens of thousands of fans inside the Friendly Confines on Tuesday and Wednesday night. But the way the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Cubs are playing means those fans are probably more excited to see their rivals than the teams they’ve been watching stumble through the 2024 campaign.

Straits aren’t quite so dire for the North Siders, who are still flirting with second place in the NL Central despite being mired in a bad stretch, losers of nine of their last 11.

Things are grimmer on the South Side, where the whole season to this point has been a bad stretch.

“This is tough,” Nicky Lopez told CHGO late Friday night in Milwaukee. “This is brutal.”

The White Sox are losers of 11 straight and 15 of their last 16 games. They’re the worst team in baseball, with just 15 wins. They have the least productive lineup in the sport, dead last in most of the major offensive stat categories, a state hammered home on a nightly basis by the fact that multiple regulars are hitting below the Mendoza Line. And though Luis Robert Jr. is due back soon – perhaps for this Crosstown series – there’s still all those injuries. Andrew Benintendi, one of those sub-.200 hitters, is the latest to go down, landing on the IL on Sunday.

Up against a first-place Brewers team this past weekend, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise they were swept out of Wisconsin. But things just keep getting uglier, a miserable season falling to more miserable lows seemingly every night.

The Good Land was anything but good to these White Sox, whether Friday night’s death by a thousand paper cuts, the Brewers banging out 23 hits; Saturday afternoon’s fall-from-ahead loss, the bullpen coughing up another late lead; or Sunday afternoon’s near boxing match, with Tommy Pham thrown out at home, irked by a William Contreras celebration, restrained by his hitting coach and declaring after the game that he’s always “prepared to f— somebody up.”

The White Sox keep finding new ways to fail.

You think you, the fan, are sick of it?

“We want to win,” Lopez said. “We’re a close-knit group, but obviously, some stuff needs to change. It’s tough right now. We want to win. I wish I had an answer for you. It sucks right now. Everyone’s going through it.

“It’s not one thing you can really pinpoint. We’ve just got to bear down when there’s guys in scoring position, or doing the little things right, executing a pitch for a ground ball, guy on second and moving him over, stuff like that.

“We’ve got to keep grinding. But obviously we need to see that ‘W.’”

Even after the White Sox bounced back from their miserable 3-22 start, everyone watching knew they were entering a tough part of the schedule when they took off for a road trip through New York and Toronto a couple weeks back. Things have been woeful since, with just one win in 16 games against the Yankees, Blue Jays, Orioles and Brewers.

“We have to find a way to break this losing streak,” Pedro Grifol said after Friday’s game.

The “how” is of course the million-dollar question, and if the White Sox had answers, they wouldn’t have the hideous record they have. Grifol has preached consistency, and his players agree. But they’re simultaneously frustrated by the gigantic pile of losses next to their names.

“I say things have got to change, but it’s like, ‘What (has to change)?’ And I don’t have that answer, either,” Lopez said. “The only thing you can do is come back tomorrow ready to work, whatever it might be: hitting extra in the cages, going and getting ground balls, looking at pitchers’ splits, whatever it may be.

“When it’s going bad, obviously you want to see the other side of it so bad, so you’ll try anything. And that’s why I’m saying we’ve got to see something change.”

Frustrated fans unhappy with Grifol’s captaining of the ship would suggest a good place to start would be with firing the manager. That obviously wasn’t part of Lopez’s commentary, though there have been a few notable disagreements between players and staff in recent weeks. Grifol’s assessment that his team was “f—ing flat” in seven innings of no-hit ball by Orioles pitcher Kyle Bradish was met with differing opinions throughout the clubhouse. Third-base coach Eddie Rodriguez’s aggressive send of Pham on a shallow fly ball Sunday had Pham saying after the game:

“It wasn’t even f—ing close. It was a shallow fly ball to left field. You would expect the left fielder to throw the base runner out on that play.

“The situation of the game, you know, third-base coach sends you, you’ve got to go. I’m nailed out at home by a mile.”

But whether White Sox leadership decides that personnel changes are necessary or not, what needs to change the most is the result. And the schedule is going to give the White Sox no breaks, not even with the struggling Cubs this week in Wrigleyville. Whether they’re facing off against division leaders or not, every team the White Sox face is better than they are right now.

They still describe a strong bond in the clubhouse, a camaraderie among the players that seems to make for a lighter atmosphere — and maybe a greater resiliency — than in years past.

But those vibes have only been good for 15 wins through two months. It’s June now. And the White Sox are dying to bring an end to their latest skid.

“There’s not one person in this clubhouse that’s a loser,” Danny Mendick said Friday. “Losing sucks, there’s no two ways about it. Hopefully we can end this streak and start a new winning streak. That’s all we can hope for.”

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