121 losses?! The numbers behind the White Sox’s season of shame

The record loss total for the White Sox is the headliner, but it’s also an avatar for a whole slew of incredible numbers and the rampant dysfunction that has fueled them. Some are more or less trivial, but still pretty incredible. Some are explanatory, telling us a bit about how the White Sox have done something that should not be possible.

Here are 12 numbers — beyond 121 — that help explain the 2024 Chicago White Sox.

81.7%

The 1962 Mets lost 120 games, but, remarkably, they were fun. Even as the losses piled up, their fans embraced the expansion team. Manager Casey Stengel kept the baseball writers entertained. One of them, Jimmy Breslin, wrote a classic book about the season (“Can’t Anyone Here Play this Game?”).

There hasn’t been anything fun about this year’s White Sox, and it’s hard to see anyone wanting to write a book about them. Their fans, as they say, have stayed away in droves. The White Sox social media team threw up its hands. The ineptitude gathered so much momentum that a kind of fatalistic schadenfreude set in. When the club reached 114 losses, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a poll, asking, “At this point, are you rooting for them to break [the loss record]?”

Out of 1,450 respondents, 81.7% said they were.

7

Starting pitching has been the foundation for the White Sox’s success this season. You might scan that and see it as pure snark and, in a sense, that’s what it is. Still, Chicago’s starters as a group haven’t been tragically bad. It’s a bad rotation, but White Sox starters rank 24th in fWAR and 27th in FIP. Other teams have been worse.

Inside the White Sox clubhouse

Can you imagine how bad this would be if the White Sox had not gotten occasionally competent starting pitching from the likes of Erick Fedde, Garrett Crochet and Jonathan Cannon? Well, you really don’t have to, because we’ve seen that team since the All-Star break.

Fedde’s seven wins are going to lead the team. That’s a remarkably low number but not unprecedented. Just last season, JP Sears and Shintaro Fujinami led Oakland with a mere five wins apiece. What’s remarkable is that Fedde is going to lead the White Sox in wins even though he was dealt at the MLB trade deadline, two months before the end of the season. His last win for Chicago was on July 10.

Fedde and Crochet rank one-two on the team in bWAR and have been flat-out good for most of the season. Crochet was a leading Cy Young candidate into June, but to protect his arm (and trade value) the White Sox curtailed his workload. He hasn’t pitched more than four innings since June 30, a span in which he has started 14 times. Well, you can’t win if you don’t go five, so Crochet’s win total has been frozen at six since he beat the Red Sox on June 7.

So, by default, the long-gone Fedde is your 2024 White Sox win champ. With seven.

12

As mentioned, the season will end with Fedde and Crochet finishing 1-2 in bWAR and wins on the 2024 White Sox. They will do those things even though neither has won a single game for Chicago since July 10. Zero. From the two best pitchers on the team.

Since Fedde’s last Chicago win, every team in baseball has gotten at least 25 wins from its starting pitchers. Except for the White Sox. Since Fedde’s last South Side victory, Chicago’s starters have gone 12-52.

This number has more than trivial value because it in part explains how the White Sox’s descent to this historic nadir accelerated as the season progressed. As bad as Chicago was, for a while it could count on being competitive at least two out of every five times through the rotation. With Crochet being forced to turn things over to a historically awful bullpen after, at most, four innings, and with Fedde donning a Cardinals uniform, those two days were lost.

20

No one has suffered the ramifications of the White Sox’s lack of options more than right-hander Chris Flexen. This figure represents the number of consecutive starts he made in a game his team went on to lose. That’s a modern record.

We could have also gone with 23. That number represents Flexen’s streak of starts without earning a winning decision, a streak that was finally snapped Thursday.

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Flexen has an ERA+ of 83 (100 is league average), yet he’s going to lead the White Sox in innings pitched (160). He finished just two innings short of qualifying for the ERA title. He wouldn’t get that kind of volume on a better team, but there are pitchers this season with worse ERA+ figures and more innings. Through it all, he has been healthy and one of Chicago’s five best available starters.

Like the team around him, Flexen has been a nasty combination of subpar performance and bad luck. He has had some decent outings, including 10 quality starts. His rate of quality starts (33%) is below average, but over 30 games that should have yielded much better than a 3-15 mark. According to Baseball Reference, Flexen is tied with Fedde and Colorado’s Austin Gomber for the most games (7) in which he has exited with a lead that was blown by the bullpen.

The bottom line is what it is: Flexen finished 2024 with three wins over 30 starts. In all of baseball history, among pitchers with at least 30 starts, only three have fared as badly. Two of those were Jerry Koosman (1978 Mets, also 3-15) and Spencer Turnbull (2019 Tigers, 3-17).

The third and possibly most apt historical comp for Flexen’s record is Jack Nabors, who went 1-20 for a team the White Sox ought to keep in mind over their remaining games. We’ll get to them.

35%

That’s the White Sox’s save percentage. Yes, that 35% mark, built upon an MLB-high 37 blown saves, is the worst in baseball and it’s not close. Miami is second worst at 53%. The MLB average is 63%.

The number gets worse the more you contextualize it. According to Stathead, it’s the worst figure in a full season of the expansion era (since 1961). Since World War II, only the 1949 Cincinnati Reds (33.5%) were worse. But let’s face it, this is far more dreadful than that because bullpens play such a major role in team performance in today’s MLB.

Chicago’s relief ERA (4.77) is 29th in the majors, with only Colorado’s Coors Field-affected figure worse (5.30). The bullpen has walked 327 batters — 57 more than any other club. Only one bullpen (Toronto) has yielded more homers (82). Chicago’s starters have departed with 27 leads that were then blown by the relief staff. That’s five more than any other club.

Finally, as an homage to our Fedde note: Chicago’s save leader is Michael Kopech, with nine. No one else has more than two. And, like Fedde, Kopech was traded away at the deadline. His last White Sox save came July 10 — in relief of Fedde’s final Chicago win.

9

Triples mean nothing from an evaluative standpoint. While it’s true that fast runners tend to get more of them than slow runners, ballpark factors loom almost as large. On top of that, Guaranteed Rate Field is a poor park for triples. About the only way to get one in that park is to poke a ball into the right-field corner and hope it rattles around a bit.

In many respects, the 1916 A’s are very much the historical antecedent of the 2024 White Sox. Like Chicago, that Philadelphia team was very good only a couple of years prior to its nadir, having played in the 1914 World Series. Like the White Sox, that good team was subsequently dismantled to horrific results.

The 1962 Mets were an expansion club, so at least they had a built-in excuse for their foibles. Heck, the all-time loss champ, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders — who went 20-134 the season before what we consider the modern era — get a pass. The Spiders were owned by the Robison family, who also happened to own the NL team in St. Louis. After the 1898 campaign, they transferred all the good players in Cleveland over to St. Louis. That’s not something that could happen these days.

Getting to 39 means the White Sox and their remaining proud fans get the straw-grasping option of pointing at Connie Mack’s worst team and claiming that, indeed, there was a team even worse.

2

That’s the number of managers Chicago has had this season, with Grady Sizemore taking over for Pedro Grifol on an interim basis in August. As bad as things were for Grifol (28-89), Sizemore has fared even worse (11-32) given the hollowed-out roster he has to work with.

Sizemore is the 43rd manager in White Sox history, a total that includes two-game stints for interim skippers Don Cooper (2011) and Doug Rader (1986). In what might be a permanent reminder of the 2024 ChiSox, Grifol (.319) and Sizemore (.256) rank 42nd and 43rd on the franchise list for manager winning percentage.

This will remain the case even if Chicago wins its final two games.

Minus-21.5

It’s not like the White Sox entered the season with high expectations. As of March 19, as spring training began to move toward the start of the regular season, their over/under for season wins stood at 61.5, per ESPN BET. That’s a 100-loss team, and given the nature of forecasts, that is a pretty stunning baseline. Still, Oakland (57.5) and Colorado (60.5) were even lower.

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The silver lining in low expectations is that they afford the opportunity to over-deliver. Indeed, the A’s are on pace for 70 wins, quite a jab in the eye at those early forecasts. The Rockies have been mostly as advertised but even they are on pace for 62 wins — a minor triumph.

The White Sox’s pace of 40 wins is 21.5 below their baseline expectation entering the season. No one else has even come close to that kind of showing. The next-biggest negative deviation from the over/under is 16.5 by the Miami Marlins.

In a nutshell, this encapsulates just how stunning this level of losing is for any team, much less the White Sox. Given some of the lowest expectations in the sport, Chicago has still managed to be baseball’s biggest disappointment.

Well, that is unless you are one of the 81.7% of respondents to that Sun-Times poll who hoped this would come to pass.

Minus-7

The White Sox’s run differential is bad. Really bad. They’re at minus-311 runs, on pace to finish at minus-317 on the season. The modern era record is minus-349, a mark set by the 1932 Red Sox and challenged by last year’s Athletics (minus-339). Chicago would have to really get hammered from here to break the record but, well, let’s just say that this is a barrel with no apparent bottom.

As it stands, the White Sox’s run differential is representative of a team that ought to win 47 games over a 162-game campaign, putting Chicago on track to finish seven wins short of its run profile. That’s the biggest disparity in baseball, with the Cubs (5.3) finishing a distant second — giving Chicago a firm grip on a leaderboard a city doesn’t want to be on even once.

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That seven-win shortfall might lead the majors this season, but it’s not a record or even that historically unusual. It’s a typical number for the unfortunate leader on this leaderboard in a given season. While bad luck doesn’t entirely explain this gap — check out that section above on the bullpen — misfortune does tend to play a large role in such disparities.

So it’s not misleading to claim that not only have the White Sox been baseball’s worst team, they’ve also been the unluckiest. This is evident in other ways:

• Using injury data from Baseball Prospectus, I calculate an in-season injury index for each team based on how much time players have missed and how good those players are. The league average is 100. The team with the best injury luck has been Toronto, with an index of 116.3. The Jays have had some key injuries (Jordan Romano and Bo Bichette, to name two) but the team’s overall volume of games missed has been low.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Dodgers at 84.3. L.A.’s injury woes, particularly when it comes to its rotation, have been well chronicled. The White Sox have an injury index of 89.9, ranking 27th. So, not only have Chicago’s key contributors struggled, they’ve also been injured a lot. There’s a joke about bad food/small portions in there somewhere.

• The Statcast leaderboards also underscore Chicago’s misfortune. White Sox hitters have the biggest disparities between actual and expected results, based on quality of contact, average, slugging and WOBA. It’s a clean sweep.

Meanwhile, Chicago pitchers are only tied for the biggest disparity between actual and expected WOBA allowed.

Look, you don’t get to 121 losses by being merely bad, though obviously that is a prerequisite. You also have to be unlucky. Across the board, Chicago has labored in futility and misfortune alike.

In short, everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.

274

Monday, Sept. 30, will be the 274th day of the year 2024 on the Gregorian calendar. The MLB regular season will come to an end. Come next spring, the White Sox begin a new season with a clean slate, every one of those 121 (and counting) losses confined to the history books.

For the White Sox, this winter and the seasons to come will determine whether getting a fresh start is, for them, actually a good thing. They can at least take solace in this: Historically speaking, it can’t get worse.

Can it?