The 2024 White Sox are the worst MLB team in modern baseball history, and things aren’t looking much better for 2025

We’ve known for a while now that the 2024 edition of the Chicago White Sox was going to be the worst team in modern baseball history.

What we don’t yet know is if they’ll be any better next year.

The law of averages says they’d have to be. After all, Friday night’s loss in Detroit clinched it: No team but these White Sox — unless we’re counting the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, one of two teams owned by the same guy and being used as a de facto farm squad for the other — has ever lost 121 times in a single campaign. History is against it happening again.

But looking at the context of where these rebuilding White Sox are — and after hearing from the general manager a few days before Loss No. 121 — it’s difficult to set much higher expectations for next season.

There’s a big difference between 100 losses and 120-plus, obviously, and Chris Getz even said in his previous media session that this level of losing has surprised someone (him) who wouldn’t have been quite as shocked by even 110 defeats, a number that would have still set a franchise record.

But such a comment revealed something else: that while no one could have ever anticipated this White Sox season being this bad, this was, albeit to a slightly lesser degree, supposed to happen.

“There certainly were some difficult decisions that we’ve had to make throughout the year. And those decisions, perhaps, did not help the 2024 season and they were more focused on the future of the organization,” Getz said Tuesday. “My hope is that we are not faced with those types of decisions too often in the future.

“Those decisions that we made, whether it be an Aaron Bummer trade or a Dylan Cease trade — obviously very talented players — the players that were acquired were not directly brought in to make us that much better in 2024. It was more ‘25 and beyond. It was to build our prospect capital, to eventually be more successful at the major league level.”

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If 110 losses wouldn’t have shocked the guy in charge of putting the roster together, then these White Sox were not built to win, plain and simple. And no one should have expected them to be. Though Getz and his fellow team employees avoided using the word “rebuild” like it would summon an evil spirit — the ghost of this organization’s very recent past, perhaps? — it was obvious that another rebuild was underway at 35th and Shields.

Getz’s offseason moves revamped a clubhouse in desperate need of a makeover, but they came with reducing payroll in mind, with an eye on the trade deadline and with the idea that things like defense and fundamentals could improve even if, you know, this lineup couldn’t produce any runs. Another year of hoping the likes of Eloy Jiménez, Yoán Moncada, Luis Robert Jr. and Andrew Vaughn could form a lineup as once dreamed almost instantly featured more injuries and underperformance.

And now? In the wake of the worst season in modern baseball history?

Who’s ready for a sequel?

Is any White Sox fan ready for a third consecutive 100-loss season?

“We’ve got tremendous appreciation for our fans, and they have shown how passionate they are about the White Sox, maybe more so this year than ever,” Getz said. “I know that they’re frustrated, they’re upset, they’re pissed. And we understand that.

“It’s our job to get us back on track so they can be once again proud to be a White Sox fan.”

But even if Conductor Getz puts the train on the track the way he wants, it would be asking a lot for it to pull into the station by next season. The coming offseason could look very similar to the previous one, setting up another year of waiting and wheel-spinning at the major league level.

Getz might not have been as convicted as he was when he set White Sox Twitter on fire with comments during a TV interview that the team won’t be doing much of anything in free agency. But he still forecasted a winter of few impactful additions and the same kinds of targets as his last spin on the roster-building machine.

“We haven’t determined the level of free agency that we’ll be working in. I can assure you that it won’t be the top of the market,” Getz said. “But there are going to be other opportunities to go out there and sign players to help us. You look back at the signings of an Erick Fedde and these other players that helped our major league club, but also we were able to trade these players and reinvest in the organization.

“There’s going to be those types of opportunities, as well.”

Yet again, social media ablaze.

But here’s the thing: Why is this surprising to anyone?

Upsetting, sure. What fan wants to watch another year of this? For all of Getz’s claims that his roster remake last offseason would improve the defense and create a new style of baseball after years of on-field mistakes, none of that materialized this season, with mistakes aplenty and the defense ranked as baseball’s worst. No one might have anticipated an offensive juggernaut, but the worst offense in half a century?

Getz can be rightfully questioned for failing to deliver even slight improvement within the parameters that he set. He hasn’t exactly wowed the way Rick Hahn did with his rebuild-launching trades in 2016 and 2017. And he doesn’t have the same collection of prospects, chiefly on the position-player side, to inspire hope in an exciting future.

But what he hasn’t done is stray from his plan.

Who knows if it will be successful? But the 2024 team was supposed to be bad, a time-killing endeavor while the future developed in the minor leagues and Getz addressed organization-wide issues that involve what are now much-discussed changes behind the scenes. And in a rebuild, things are rarely pretty in Year 2, either.

The grand total of Hahn’s free-agent work in between the first and second years of his rebuilding project, between the 2017 (95 losses) and 2018 (100 losses) seasons, was Welington Castillo and Miguel González.

Why expect anything different this offseason from Getz as he plays his own waiting game for his planned future to arrive?

It’s understandable that fans would want the worst season ever to spark something dramatic, inspire some need for change that makes for a drastically different season a year from now. But we have long known that decreasing payroll would be a goal and that contending for an AL Central title would be one heck of a long shot.

“We’re clearly in a rebuild,” Getz is comfortable saying now. “When you’ve got this many losses, one thing it does provide is clarity and direction on where you do need to go as an organization.

“Where we stand right now, it’s very clear that we’ve got some work to do, and the pathway out of that is to be healthy underneath the organization. And that’s what we’re determined to do. We’re not going to take shortcuts. It might take some time for us to reap the rewards at the major league level. We’ll go into this offseason and do what’s best for the long-term health.

“We’re going to do everything that we can to improve this major league club, but we’re certainly not going to be short sighted.”

Jerry Reinsdorf, a baseball-history buff, is surely as bummed out as anyone after watching his White Sox set a new standard for awfulness in the sport he loves. Reinsdorf’s assessment of the 101-loss 2023 season was “embarrassing,” “disgusting,” “a nightmare” and “absolutely the worst season I’ve ever been through.” How could he possibly come up with a way to describe this one?

But unless some unforeseen yank of the steering wheel comes in the next few weeks, diverting Getz off course, it seems Reinsdorf is committed to Getz’s path forward, described as receptive to the front office’s pitched changes and long-term plan.

“It’s been very difficult for him. He feels the pain of the fans,” Getz said of the chairman. “He’s not proud of the state of our major league club. Now with that being said, he’s been a tremendous support to me in the front office. He’s listening. He’s asking questions. And we’re providing a plan for us to get out of this.

“He shows up every day, and I love the conversations I have with him. More than anything, he’s been tremendously supportive.”

Again, no one should be happy. You don’t even have to be as supportive as Reinsdorf supposedly is. But surprised?

Come on, now, you know better than that.

Rebuilds are no fun to sit through, and while there are some notable success stories — the Astros, the Cubs, we’ll see what happens with the Orioles — they also are far from guaranteed to work. But they are pretty straightforward: Entire seasons, plural, are sacrificed with the idea of increasing the likelihood of a champion down the road, even if new rules mean the White Sox won’t get anything close to a No. 1 draft choice out of all this losing.

This is the sacrifice part, and the White Sox have done a bang-up job of that, losing in a way no one has lost before.

As for the rest? More waiting. More sacrifice. And nothing but the hopeful words of the man in charge to argue that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

“My confidence remains,” Getz said. “I do feel like we’re on the right track. I know it hasn’t shown on the major league level, but I’m very confident that it will.”

When? Great question.

This seems to be a slow-moving project as Getz focuses on behind-the-scenes stuff, what he referred to Tuesday as “underneath the organization.” And that complete lack of a public timeline, though far from unreasonable, has provided ample fodder for those who want to throw Reinsdorf’s decision to promote Getz in the first place back at him.

But while everyone cites Reinsdorf’s insistence that anyone from outside the organization — his interview process didn’t leave the building — would have taken even more time to turn the White Sox around, the more apt Reinsdorf quote from that afternoon to dig up is this one:

“We’re not going to take the guys that we have now and clean out and start over again,” Reinsdorf said last summer. “We’re definitely not going to do that.”

And yet, that’s exactly what Getz has done.

The White Sox will, so says the advancement of time, make progress toward their goal. They’ll hire a new manager in the coming weeks. They might ship Garrett Crochet off somewhere this winter for more prospects. The likes of Colson Montgomery, Edgar Quero and all those pitchers will continue to make their way through the farm system and toward the big leagues, where they can take the jobs of the types of free agents and trade acquisitions Getz brought in last winter and looks to bring in again this winter.

But will the progress be enough? Will this team stop making mistakes? Will it figure out how to score runs? Will it escape the kind of losing that rewrites the record books?

Or will next year simply be a rerun of this year?

Surely they can’t be this bad again.

Right?

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