The Chicago White Sox on Friday broke Major League Baseball’s 62-year-old single-season record with the most losses during a season with their 121st defeat against the Detroit Tigers.
The White Sox lost the game 4-1. The Sox were trailing 4-1 in the ninth inning. Andrew Vaughn made a lazy fly to right center, which the Tigers caught despite a little collision. Thus, 4-1 Tigers was the final.
Adding insult to injury, former Sox announcer Jason Benetti was on the call for the Tigers as they clinched their first playoff berth in 10 years Friday night — under manager AJ Hinch, whom the Sox could have hired instead of Tony La Russa in 2020.
All this came after the Sox had won three games in a row against the Los Angeles Angels and had hovered at 120 losses. On Thursday, the Sox shut out the Angels 7-0.
Earlier in the week, some fans were glad to see the White Sox win, but some came to games in hopes of seeing them break the record and ended up disappointed.
The 121 losses eclipsed the total that the 1962 expansion New York Mets recorded. The White Sox had already surpassed the 2003 Detroit Tigers, a team that lost 119 games, setting the American League record. MLB only counts records set in the modern era, which began in 1900, so the 1899 Cleveland Spiders’ all-time record of 134 losses is not included.
The incredible feat of futility was the culmination of a long, grueling season in which the White Sox recorded multiple double-digit losing streaks, including a 14-game skid from May 22 to June 6, and then an American League-record 21-game losing streak between July 10 and Aug. 5. All that losing led to the firing of manager Pedro Grifol during just his second season at the helm. In less than two seasons, Grifol led the team to more than twice as many losses as he did wins.
Grady Sizemore took over as interim manager for the rest of the season.
The White Sox then recorded another 12-game losing streak that lasted from Aug. 23 through Sept. 3.
Jeff Chiu / AP
It’s been a season unlike anything fans of the franchise, which will mark the 20th anniversary of its last World Series win next year, have ever seen. The team’s winning percentage through Sunday of .231 is still significantly behind the next-worst season in franchise history, the 1932 White Sox that went 49-102-1 and posted a winning percentage of .325.
Until this season, the White Sox team with the most single-season losses in franchise history was the 1970 team, which went 56-106. This year’s team is just the sixth in franchise history to record 100 or more losses in a season, according to Baseball Reference, which has team statistics going back to 1901, the year the American League formally organized.
“I feel your pain”
The White Sox record has been so bad that even the team’s official X (formerly Twitter) account has been having some fun with the piling up of losses lately.
On Sept. 18, after a loss to the Angels, the team’s post for its final score read, “FINAL: the other team scored more runs than us.”
Last Saturday, the team posted, “FINAL: can be found on the MLB app,” after a loss to the Padres.
Then on Sunday, the team’s account posted a version of a widely used GIF of a car attempting to quickly drive onto an exit ramp, representing the team’s social media administrator, turning away from posting the final score and instead opting for “literally anything else.”
The Sox kept it up on social media after the Friday night loss.
A post read:
Things we’d rather do than read comments:
- Get a root canal
- File taxes
- Eat 5,000 saltine crackers without water
- The cinnamon challenge
- Put ketchup on a hot dog
- Bear crawl across the Sahara Desert
- Walk barefoot on an L train
The post also showed a separate window on a computer desktop screenshot showing a dejected Southpaw White Sox mascot, with the text, “slams laptop shut til tomorrow.”
The situation even prompted famed horror writer and Boston Red Sox fan Stephen King to weigh in on social media.
“Chicago White Sox fans, I feel your pain,” King posted on X. “As a fan of those other Sox, I tried to switch my loyalty to Cleveland during one particularly awful season (Butch Hobson, I’m talking about you). I couldn’t do it. Things will get better. They CAN’T get worse.”
Mark J. Terrill / AP
Despite the jokes on social media, White Sox team leadership has faced questions about what went wrong and how the team has been withstanding the historically difficult season.
General Manager Chris Getz summed up the feelings of the organization last month when he spoke to members of the news media after Grifol’s dismissal.
“There was lack of production overall,” Getz said. “I mean you look at how many games that we’ve led early and weren’t able to finish or how many games we haven’t been able to come back to get a win. Obviously, there was something that was broken. We know the flaws in this roster, but with that being said, we expected to win more games. We did.”
After last Sunday’s loss to the San Diego Padres, the team’s 120th of the season to tie the major league record, Sizemore, in true manager fashion, attempted to downplay the importance of the historic mark for the club.
“No loss is good,” Sizemore said. “Like I said, it’s not something we’re focused on. I think probably everyone outside of this clubhouse will be more obsessed with it than us.”
