Why Are The White Sox Like This?

When the 2024 MLB season began, we had a suspicion that several teams would vie for the orthopedic slippers of the Worst Team in Baseball but we never thought that one team would fit so much better than all the others, and that it would aggressively challenge to be the worst baseball team since the end of the 19th century. It's almost as if there is a tangible benefit to being worse than the worst—some marketing or commercial benefit to being the most aggressively horrible team there is and may ever be.

How else does one explain the freefall of the Chicago White Sox from being our worst team in baseball to maybe the worst team in anyone's baseball? What's the payoff in being so demonstrably the 30th team in a field of 30? Extra picks at the top of the amateur draft? A stadium naming-rights deal with Cottonelle? Gift baskets from the Rockies, Marlins, and A's? Well, forget that last one. The A's don't spend on extravagances like gift baskets. 

But this isn't about the A's, who are relocating next year to be closer to the Park Fire because John Fisher's a genius. This is about the White Sox, who are hinting at moving to Nashville because Jerry Reinsdorf's estate planning includes an inexplicable desire to punish Tennesseeans. The White Sox have lost their last 14 games after already being the worst team in baseball by a week's worth of games, and this is their second 14-game losing streak since May. They haven't won a game with more than three runs scored since July 3, are on pace to score the fewest runs in a 162-game season since 1971, and are even four games worse than their Pythagorean numbers would indicate. They are as we speak worse by percentage than every team since World War I began other than the 1916 A's, 1935 Braves, and 1962 Mets.

This being the trade deadline and all, bad teams are farmed for their few useful assets, but the White Sox's only fully desirable playing card is pitcher Erick Fedde, who has had one decent half-season after six years of ick in Washington. Pitcher Garrett Crochet has cooled his own market by refusing to pitch in the postseason for any team unless he has a new contract (this clearly does not apply to the White Sox), and Luis Robert, the most promising everyday player, has a .210/.282/.440 slash and looks utterly hopeless at the plate.

So what's in the slog for the White Sox between now and the end of September—being the worst for the sake of being the worst? Can Reinsdorf make the state of Illinois build him a new stadium on the bones of this 40,000-seat charnel house? How bad do you have to be to win a billion dollars worth of pity, and then ask for double that? 

True, that's a lot of questions asking the same thing, but these White Sox are being much worse than they need to be. I mean, you can't be this bad unless you want to be this bad. Frankly, we think they know something we don't, because nothing happens by accident. There's a payoff for this, and when they get it, we'll call Reinsdorf a genius for figuring out the angle nobody else did. Maybe he's just the one guy in America who thinks John Fisher's find-the-bottom-and-dig plan is the act of a business genius, and that’s a thought to make your eyelids fall off your head.