Jerry Reinsdorf weighs in as White Sox steam toward worst modern MLB season

With 15 games left in the worst Chicago White Sox season ever — and what will almost surely be the worst season in modern major league history — the chairman has spoken.

Well, Jerry Reinsdorf didn’t so much speak as he released a statement on a campaign that has reached unfathomable levels of losing. The White Sox are 33-114, with five series to play and just seven losses away from setting a new modern MLB record for single-season defeats.

“Everyone in this organization is extremely unhappy with the results of this season, that goes without saying,” the statement, released after the White Sox were swept by the Guardians on Wednesday, read. “This year has been very painful for all, especially our fans. We did not arrive here overnight, and solutions won’t happen overnight either. Going back to last year, we have made difficult decisions and changes to begin building a foundation for future success.

“What has impressed me is how our players and staff have continued to work and bring a professional attitude to the ballpark each day despite a historically difficult season. No one is happy with the results, but I commend the continued effort.

“I expect to have more to say at the end of the season.”

As the modern record — currently held by the 1962 Mets, an expansion franchise that lost 120 times in its first year of existence — approaches, the White Sox are again about to become national news, as they were last month, when they matched an AL record by dropping 21 straight contests. Days later, they fired manager Pedro Grifol.

Then, as will be the case when the record is almost surely broken in the next couple weeks, the White Sox’ ineptitude was nothing new, even if the national spotlight will be. Those of us who have been watching this team all season know a listless offense, defensive mistakes and late-game blow ups by the bullpen have been yearlong features. When the White Sox went 3-22 in their first 25 games of the campaign, we knew the possibility for all-time levels of bad was there.

But now the national types are descending on the South Side, and Reinsdorf’s statement came in response to media requests, according to the team.

[MORE SOX: Trading Garrett Crochet, finding a new manager and more decisions facing Chris Getz, White Sox]

Even in written form and only seven sentences long, us local folks know this is newsworthy because of its rarity. Reinsdorf almost exclusively lets his baseball boss do the talking when it comes to the state of the on-field product. That means Chris Getz now, just like it meant Rick Hahn before him and Kenny Williams before Hahn. In my seven years as a full-time beat writer covering the White Sox, the chairman has only done one media session that wasn’t about someone getting elected to the Hall of Fame: last summer, when he promoted Getz to succeed the fired Hahn and Williams.

And so the newsiest bit of Reinsdorf’s commentary Wednesday was that there could be more coming after the season ends.

We’ll have to wait to see exactly what form Reinsdorf’s “more to say” takes come October. But what seems certain is that much of the fan base would rather not hear it. Reaction to Reinsdorf’s statement on social media was, unsurprisingly, not kind to an owner who has been pegged by many as the No. 1 reason for the club’s worst-ever state.

Especially irksome seemed to be Reinsdorf’s compliments given to this year’s players, who, despite fan instance that a win-loss record is a reflection of how hard a team tries, have indeed continued to show up and put in the work and approach each day with a good attitude. For all of Getz’s goals that he failed to achieve with his roster redo last winter — improving the defense, focusing on fundamentals, creating a team capable of playing a better brand of baseball — the group he assembled has achieved on the cultural level, and the clubhouse has been strong all year long, far better equipped to handle the losing and daily disappointment than the underachieving White Sox teams of recent seasons.

But understandably, few fans care much about that.

Still, the attitude in the clubhouse is one of a team showing up to win each day, however unlikely their previous five and a half months of performance should make that seem.

“We’re competitors,” Davis Martin said after Wednesday’s game. “I don’t give a shit about our record right now. I’m pissed. Everybody’s pissed. … That feeling isn’t gone. These are all competitors in here, and it doesn’t matter if we’re playing ping pong, video games on our phone, we want to beat the crap out of each other. And the same thing goes on out there (in the games). There’s no lack of effort. There’s no lack of competition.”

But whether that mindset the chairman deemed worthy of public praise is a true building block for the future or merely a silver lining in an otherwise miserable season, plenty of fans see no reason for any positivity. And watching this team on a daily basis does little to produce an argument that any is deserved.

Getz might have assembled a group of good guys in the clubhouse, but the general manager, ultimately, has to wear that he assembled a group incapable of playing  anything close to resembling good baseball, despite that being perhaps the top goal of the season, at least at the major league level.

These White Sox aren’t just the worst offensive team in the sport, they’re the worst offensive team the sport has seen in a half century. These White Sox are not just baseball’s worst offensive team, they are also baseball’s worst defensive team. These White Sox are not just going to set the modern major league record for losses in a season, they could come shockingly close to — though mathematically they cannot match — the most losses any baseball team has ever had: the 133 games the Cleveland Spiders dropped in 1899.

The White Sox, though Getz spent the offseason avoiding the word, were obviously rebuilding last winter when his moves did little but keep payroll low and bring in potential midseason trade candidates. Ugly seasons should be no surprise when a team is in such a mode, and White Sox fans need cast their minds back only to the 100-loss campaign of 2018 for a recent reminder. At the major league level, the thinking goes, wheels spin while the future develops in the minor leagues, paying off in big ways years down the road.

The Astros lost 416 games in a four-year span on the way to becoming a perennial fixture in the ALCS and a two-time World Series champion. The Orioles lost at least 108 times — with a low-water mark of 115 — in three straight 162-game seasons (a stretch interrupted by the COVID-shortened 2020 year) and now claim one of baseball’s most envied collections of young talent. Getz, a Detroit-area native, has brought up the current AL-record-holding 2003 Tigers, who lost 119 times only to play in the World Series three years later.

Those are the success stories and what Getz and his remodeled front office hope will come to the South Side. But the first full season of that project has been gruesome, with the GM failing to deliver on attempts to bring more aesthetically pleasing play to the major league team and inspiring little long-term confidence in fans who can’t see the future as clearly as they could when Hahn started a similar project less than a decade ago.

“If you would have told me we were going to end up flirting with the record, I would have been a little surprised. Now if you would have told me prior to the year that we would have ended up with over 100 losses, 105, 110, I wouldn’t have been as surprised,” Getz said Monday. “But this is the cards that we’ve been dealt at this point. You try to make the best of it, and I think it’s an opportunity to embrace the situation that we’re in.

“I view it as kind of the frustrating part of the story, but I also know that the future’s looking bright and it’s going to make it just that much sweeter once we get there.”

The nonchalant allowance that 110 losses — which in and of itself would have been a new franchise low — was not entirely unexpected isn’t likely to be taught in any public relations classes, especially while the team is trying to do what it can to goose ticket sales for 2025, with prices reduced by an average of 10 percent. But it seems getting folks out to the ballpark for anything other than a nice day in the sun will be a tall task if the offseason goes as expected and yields another team that could lose in the triple digits.

Payroll is expected to come down again. The team’s two best players, Garrett Crochet and Luis Robert Jr., are anticipated to be the subject of winter-long trade rumors and could both be gone by Opening Day, even if Robert’s struggles this season make him seem more of a candidate to depart at next summer’s deadline. And while there will be a new manager steering the ship, how much improvement can be expected from what could be a similar cast of characters?

Any trade could change the landscape, but while the White Sox can boast a sizable group of promising young pitchers, it’s hard for many to cobble together a “lineup of the future” out of the position-player group in the minor leagues. Time will tell whether Miguel Vargas, Jeral Pérez or Alexander Albertus will contribute to the next contending White Sox team — a lot of time, as the latter two were acquired as teenagers — but at the moment, few are excited by Getz’s work in dealing away top trade chips Erick Fedde and Michael Kopech this past deadline, leading to doubt about how organization-changing any deals involving Crochet or Robert will be this winter.

With other organizational gears seeming to grind somewhat slowly — Grifol stayed on nearly a year after Getz was promoted, and relatively big changes to the team’s international operation and pro-scouting department didn’t come till more than a year later — it’s worth wondering exactly how long this project will take, and with no specific timeline being mentioned by Getz or any other member of the White Sox brain trust, the skepticism grows that next year (or the next) will be dramatically different than the all-time bad that fans have had to sit through in 2024.

Reinsdorf surely isn’t happy about any of that. But he already made the big changes last summer, when he ended the decades-long stay of Williams and Hahn atop the baseball department. So without another such seismic move to make, what will he do in the wake of the worst White Sox season ever?

We’ll have to wait for “more to say.”