Folks, it’s finally over.
The worst season in franchise history — by one measure, the worst season in baseball history — has come to a merciful conclusion for the Chicago White Sox, closing with a win over the playoff-bound Tigers on Sunday afternoon in Detroit.
Of course, even if you hung in there till the very end, at least you had the option to turn this record-settingly awful campaign off.
The guys taking the field every day didn’t have that option. They had to keep showing up to the ballpark and keep losing. And losing. And losing and losing and losing.
There’s no need to cry for them, as they’re paid handsomely to play baseball. But to have 121 bad days at the office is objectively no fun, regardless of your profession and how well you’re compensated.
“It’s been pretty tough,” Nicky Lopez said, putting it lightly in an interview with CHGO earlier this month.
Lopez has been here before, sort of. He was a part of a 103-loss Royals team during his rookie season in 2019, and he was, until a midseason trade to the Braves, part of the Royals team that ended up losing 106 games last year.
Of course, a record-setting 121 losses is a whole different level of losing. But speaking from experience, Lopez can confirm that this sucked.
“It’s about wins and losses. It’s about: How can we win ballgames?” Lopez said. “But once you start losing, the outside noise creeps in. People put a little bit of added pressure on each other and on themselves. You kind of go down that path not the way that you wanted to go.
“It’s hard to win in the big leagues. These losses that are so close, that we could have won, could have turned it, those hurt a lot.”
The White Sox fielded a recent barrage of questions about just how much this season hurt, with national media descending on the team as it moved toward the modern major league record for losses in a season.
But the truth is, they’ve been answering these questions all season long. The campaign started with a brutal 3-22 stretch and never dramatically improved. There were a pair of franchise-record losing streaks, including a 21-game skid that started just before the All-Star break, bled past the trade deadline and dragged into August, eventually ending a couple days before Pedro Grifol was fired as part of a midsummer managerial change.
All along, these White Sox had to deal with the fact that they were on pace to be — and eventually became, by one measure — the worst team ever.
“We haven’t really talked about it, obviously. You don’t really want to talk about that,” Lopez said of the unfortunate distinction, weeks before the White Sox earned it with their 121st loss of the season Friday in Detroit. “We had a lot of guys come through the clubhouse. We’ve had a lot of change, a lot of moving parts. But obviously we know it would be the 2024 White Sox (in the record books).”
But even though they took interim manager Grady Sizemore’s lead and avoided acknowledging the losses — Davis Martin, at one point, said, “I don’t give a shit about our record right now” — all those defeats were expected, to a degree. While no one anticipated an all-time amount of bad, especially the competitors who continued to claim they showed up every day expecting to win, this White Sox team wasn’t expected to be good. They were given a 0.0-percent chance of making the postseason by preseason prognosticators, after all, and even Chris Getz said recently that he wouldn’t have been surprised by a loss total as big as 110, which itself would have been a new franchise high.
What did come as a surprise was the White Sox’ inability to show the type of improvement that Getz and Grifol promised prior to the start of the season. Getz focused on low-cost additions to the roster that didn’t inspire much confidence in dramatic offensive improvement, but he spent the offseason touting an aim to improve the defense, while Grifol advertised a new style of play that erased mistakes, heightened fundamentals and featured aggressiveness at every turn.
None of that materialized, with the White Sox closing the season as the sport’s worst offensive team and worst defensive team.
“I don’t know,” Lopez said when asked why none of those hoped-for improvements came about. “The environment was a little different. We had a good spring training. It was a pretty busy spring training, a lot of work and a lot of stuff like that. But when we got here, I don’t know, I guess the losses kind of piled up and it kind of got a little bit old. It was just a tough environment. It added up, and we couldn’t make up for that.
“We didn’t expect that out of spring training, because of the guys that we had. It’s been a great clubhouse in here. We really do enjoy each other, and we like coming to the ballpark to hang with each other, on trips. It’s not due to lack of effort. We come here, and we work our tail off to get better. We just seem like we’re falling short, unfortunately.
“It’s been tough, because we want to win baseball games.”
Lopez’s comments were peppered with more of what we’ve heard all year, talk of a strong clubhouse, an area where Getz did manage to make strides. White Sox clubhouses were downright dysfunctional in recent years, as recent reporting has only illuminated, but even before that dirt was dug up, Getz’s predecessor, Rick Hahn, admitted to making some of the moves he did at last year’s trade deadline to address issues in the clubhouse.
Getz might not have made the moves to build a winning team this offseason, but he brought in players who were far better equipped to handle a season like this, a season unlike anything any team has had to deal with.
“I think that’s the only way we’ve gotten through this season,” Martin said last week. “People always ask, ‘How do you get through it?’ It’s a really tough season. But when you show up to the ballpark and you thoroughly enjoy every guy in this locker room, you almost look forward to it. It’s like seeing your friend in school. I can’t wait to come and see (Jonathan) Cannon, (Drew) Thorpe, the whole starting rotation. Those are my friends who I want to see. We have a great time.”
That, though, has also been well-trod terrain this season, and frustrated fans demanding more wins never seemed to care. They still don’t.
Lopez grew up in the suburbs and has known White Sox fans his whole life. So he gets it.
A good clubhouse? So what?
“There’s been clubhouses that aren’t good, but their record shows 100-win seasons. And they get to the playoffs, and they lose,” Lopez said. “Well, our clubhouse is really good. It’s not like we’re at each other’s necks every time we’re in here, we’re not pushing and shoving each other. People are coming in and handling their work.
“Obviously wins and losses are a thing, but there’s been teams that may not have a good clubhouse and they’re done (before the end of) October, too. They have all the best guys in the world, and they don’t get it done. It’s just baseball. It’s crazy how it works.
“It helps going to the ballpark every single day if you have a good clubhouse. You don’t really dread it. You can ask a couple guys in here, I don’t know if they dread coming to the ballpark, even with our (win-loss) record, which I guess is a positive you can take away from a tough season. … Obviously, it’s a little tougher to take positives away from the record that we have, but that is one positive is that I do truly enjoy everybody in here.”
Still, that truth is not likely to change the negative emotions White Sox fans are feeling as this crash-and-burn season is finally snuffed out.
“The thing about White Sox fans is they’re not dumb. They know and they see everything,” Lopez said. “Obviously, sometimes, they can be hostile, which is good. You want a hostile crowd against the opposing team. But they’ll let you know if you’re slacking, if you’re not playing hard.
“The best I can say is that (this season) is not due to the lack of effort. It may be that sometimes we’re outmanned or that guy is better on the mound than we are hitting most days. But it’s not due to the lack of effort. We come here, and we want to win. We’re super competitive in here.”
Credit: Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports
The page can finally turn now, even though Getz & Co. have been focused on a future beyond 2024 since he took over last summer. Getz has a new manager to hire, more changes to make to the behind-the-scenes parts of the organization and more development to oversee when it comes to prospects and young players. All that will take priority to stocking up on free agents and other acquisitions that would dramatically improve the team’s fortunes in 2025, with Getz already admitting that there’s not much to anticipate when it comes to the White Sox’ free-agent activity this winter.
As reducing payroll is expected to remain a focus, it would seem Lopez might be a candidate to not return, as he’ll be due a multi-million-dollar payday through arbitration, even after his OPS-plus of 75 made him 25 percent worse than the average major league hitter this season. As good a presence in the clubhouse as he has been, the production wasn’t there, as was the case for most of his teammates, too.
Lopez said he hopes to be back, even as he admitted he doesn’t know what the future holds. The White Sox have non-tendered players and brought them back on cheaper deals. Lopez loves playing for his hometown team. And he believes in what Getz is doing and the future the general manager is crafting.
And, drawing on his days with the Royals, who have launched themselves into the playoffs after that 106-loss season last year, he thinks the White Sox could turn things around in a hurry, too.
“We’re not too far off,” Lopez said. “Look at what the Royals did. I was a part of that team when we lost 100 games. And then they built around some guys, they spent some money, and look at them now. If you look around here, you’ve got (Garrett) Crochet, Cannon, you’ve got some guys down in the minors that can throw a little bit from the left side. You add those guys, you add a couple other pieces around (Luis Robert Jr.), and you never know what can happen. It happens so quick.”
The Royals, obviously, had an aggressive winter spending on free agents, something these White Sox don’t seem primed for at this point in their rebuilding effort. To hear players in the clubhouse, be it Lopez or Crochet or others, suggest winning might be in the offing sooner than anticipated isn’t exactly surprising. After all, they’d like to be part of a winner.
But this seems to be a slower-moving process that Getz is overseeing, and two of the players Lopez mentioned — Crochet and Robert — seem destined to spend the entirety of the offseason in trade rumors and could be shipped out before Opening Day next year. That would again push the White Sox further from contention, even if it sets them up for a brighter future years down the road.
As for now, though, White Sox fans and these players don’t have to worry about their team losing for another five months. By then, hope will have sprung eternal and everyone longing for baseball during a frigid Chicago winter will forget about just how much of a pain it was to sit through a 121-loss season.
Won’t they?
“I think you’ve just got to turn the page,” Crochet said last week. “It’s tough that it feels like a lost year when you look at the record, but it never truly is one. We’ve got a lot of areas, individually and as a team, that we can grow in, and now it’s just taking it into the offseason and working toward that.
“Obviously, (White Sox fans) wanted to see us win more games. We wanted to win more games, as well. … Wish we could have put together a better season for them. But we are where we are because of what we’ve done, and there’s nothing that’s going to erase that fact.”
