It’s another day, another loss for the Chicago White Sox, but there was something special about Sunday’s loss.
Sunday’s 13-7 loss to the Minnesota Twins marked their 20th consecutive loss — a good number that gives this team the national stage it deserves. No team has suffered a 20-game losing streak since the Baltimore Orioles lost 21 games in a row in 1988.
In Chicago, we’re used to the White Sox losing. This is their business. But 20 in a row? We’re past the point of embarrassment.
In Chicago, we’ve been watching the Red Sox look on track to break the 1962 Mets’ modern record of 120 losses, but now they may surpass the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies’ 23-game losing streak.
Shame, your name is the White Sox.
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On NBC Sports Chicago’s beloved, brutally honest postgame show Sunday, host Chuck Garfien rattled off some familiar insulting statistics.
“After 40 games, the team lost 12-1 to Minnesota, which was their 20th straight loss,” he said. “I could have been like that all day, going 1-12 against Kansas City…”
Just then, Frank Thomas interrupted. Thomas, of course, is the greatest player in franchise history and a semi-regular co-host of the show. As a hitter, Thomas pays great attention to detail. On this show, he wanted it to be accurate, too.
“Sixty games under .500,” he said. “Down there. Sixty games.
It was then that Gaffin realized his mistake. With the loss, the White Sox dropped to 27-87. Talk about a big injury.
“Sixty games,” he said. “I said they were 40 games under .500.”
With a bit of drama, he dropped a stack of papers on the carpet.
“They’ve got 60 games under .500!” Gaffin yelled, then sat back in his chair.
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That’s when Ozzie Guillen, Gaffin’s daily co-host and the team’s World Series-winning manager, brought up a statistic I recently came up with: If you take away the Red Sox’s Two straight losses and they still have the worst record in franchise history.
Look, it’s one thing to be the worst team in baseball for a season. After all, someone has to do it. But add in a 14-game losing streak and a 20-game losing streak (and counting), and that makes them a serious contender for the worst baseball team in modern history. Become the laughingstock of the ages.
The ’62 Mets were an expansion team with a certain amount of whimsy. They have great grooms Sloanberry and Casey Stengel. Jimmy Breslin’s book Is There No One Here to Play This Game? was a classic, and seven years later, the amazing Mets were world champions.
But the White Sox have been around since 1901. It’s still a long way from the rebuilding effort that should bring many championship parades to Chicago.
Two years after the Red Sox won 93 games and the AL Central, they hit what we consider rock bottom. That was last year, when the Red Sox lost 101 games and Red Sox president Jerry Reinsdorf made a move we didn’t expect, firing longtime front office manager Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn. Reinsdorf promised a quick turnaround under new general manager Chris Gates. No one believed Jerry at the time, because why would they? After so many years, fans no longer have trust in him.
For some reason — well, money — the team retained head coach Pedro Grifoll, who currently has an 88-188 record. But he was a lackluster coach all season, and the focus quickly turned to his job status after the trade deadline. It seems cruel that Gates and Reinsdorf haven’t fired Griffoul yet. Maybe they’re waiting for him to win a game so he can go out on a high note.
“That means Pedro has been under .500 in 100 games since he took over,” Guillen said. “Hoo, ho boy.”
Ozzie now has existential crisis on postgame show pic.twitter.com/5eCUlirBgI
— White Sox Talk (@NBCSWhiteSox) August 4, 2024
Guillen, who won the World Series with the Red Sox in 2005, said he needed to see a psychiatrist because he had been angrier and sadder than usual lately. reason?
“I don’t think I’m a bad coach, but they picked Pedro over me,” Guillen said to laughter on the show.
Guillen received a token interview for a vacant position, which he gave up in 2011, after Tony La Russa resigned in 2022 due to health issues. to get the job, which was not the case under Williams and Hahn’s previous regime. I agree with them, but only because organizations need to move forward, not backward.
Guillen added: “I swear to God, when Rick Hahn called me and said I didn’t have the job, he said, ‘We found the next Ozzie Guillen.'”
When Hahn tries to praise Griffoul, Guillen, who went 678-617 (.524) in eight seasons, certainly doesn’t like the comparison now. But I bet he’s happy that the Red Sox performed so poorly without him.
Many fans expected Guillen to replace Grifol as soon as the team fired him, but why would he have a headache? If I were any of the coaches under Grifol, I wouldn’t take the job. You don’t want to answer questions about this team, this season, twice a day.
Now, in the final stages of his career, Grifol spent some time doing what so many failed coaches and managers under the Reinsdorf regime did: curry favor with the owners.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” Griffoul said, according to the Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune. “It was taken out of context and somehow it was flipped over and over again and people How you want to look at it. Jerry is a winner, okay? He’s a competitor. No, he’s not satisfied.
People have interesting definitions of what makes someone a winner, especially when they work for perennial losers.
The Bulls have finished below .500 since their true outright champion, Michael Jordan, retired in 1998. The 2005 playoffs were the only time they won a series, and 2020 and 2021 are the only times they made the playoffs in back-to-back seasons.
But Grifol was addressing an audience, even as his body hung in the air.
If the Red Sox are swept in Oakland this week, they could break the 61-year-old Phillies record on Friday at home against the Cubs. The atmosphere was somewhere between a funeral and a carnival.
I can’t imagine Grifoll being at the forefront of this. How could you do this to him? How can you keep him around and insult the intelligence of your fans?
It’s a bad situation for everyone, but it’s not just Grifol’s problem, although he’s certainly responsible for making a bad situation worse.
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As Gaetz focused on building the farm system, he tried to add some defense to last year’s sloppy defensive unit to make the major league product more acceptable, but he failed in a very public way. Surprisingly, the consistently injured core hitters were injured again early in the season (Yoán Moncada played only 11 games and was in the team’s top 10 in bWAR), and the season fell off a 3-22 start track. At least the starting pitching is stable, and Gaetz and his staff have bolstered the organization’s pitching prospects.
This is all part of the upside of failure: It allows the front office to improve the organization, sometimes quite quickly. This was the plan after the 2016 season and it worked until it failed. But Gaetz’s move was widely criticized at his first trade deadline, with new baseball rules limiting the Red Sox to the 10th pick in next year’s draft.
Money will be an issue. The Red Sox’s attendance is down again, and their television broadcasts, once a highlight of the team, are now considered the worst in baseball. The team’s contract with NBC Sports Chicago is coming to an end and a new RSN (with the Bulls and Blackhawks) will debut this fall.
There is still a long way to go before we can regain decency. At least there’s pre- and post-match TV, which is as honest and critical as ever. Those shows, campfire shakes and pitching in the minors are the organization’s only goals.
The White Sox have lost and lost and they’ve had so much practice that now they might be the best they’ve ever been.
(Nicky Lopez reacts to Sunday’s loss Photo: David Berding/Getty Images)
