This is the story White Sox fans have been waiting for all year. That year is almost over, and the White Sox are on the cusp of the wrong kind of history, but with three games remaining they may have finally turned up the only lifejacket on their sinking ship of a season.
The Los Angeles Angels are even more depressing.
Yes, this is recency bias, as the Angels just got swept in Chicago, the final game a 7-0 loss in which they were baffled by Chris Flexen—the win ran his record to 3-15 on the season—and bullpen anonymoids Gus Varland and Jairo Iriarte. It was the Angels' 12th loss in their last 15 games, and a perfect end to what is already the Angels' losingest year ever; the only shame is that they couldn't truly end their season now. Instead, they will disgust their fans one … well, three final times, probably, against the half-as-soulcrushed Texas Rangers, who went from a World Series parade to 11th place in a year.
But the Rangers are just tedious. The Angels are a White Sox-level dumpster conflagration, only with slightly different fuel. Not only did they assemble their worst season ever, but it felt every bit as bad as it was the whole time. The team was drab, unaccomplished, and listless on a daily basis, and has been aired out by manager Ron Washington in increasingly urgent and florid ways. “We forgot to bring real ballplayers into the organization,” Wash said earlier this week. “Nothing against these guys here but they’re not big-league baseball players.”
While Washington later said he misspoke (and truth often turns into misspeaking with an hour's reflection and one sternly written text from on high), he wasn’t really wrong. He and the players around him spent this year losing in the dullest possible ways, all as their previous best player ever does sport-bending things only 31 miles up the road and their previous-previous best player ever missed almost all of the season with a slowly decomposing body. There will not be another Shohei Ohtani for the Angels, and quite probably not another Mike Trout either. This is true of most other franchises in baseball, too, but help is not on the way, here. The Angels have gone to this new realization cold turkey—frozen, supermarket-quality turkey.
Thus, getting swept by a team who was actually a month's worth of losses worse than them when the series began is in its own way a worst-ever moment. The White Sox have been so galactically bad from the very start of the year that it became easy to forget the other terrible teams littering the bottom of the standings, like Miami, Colorado and Washington; we'd include the new West Sacramento franchise here, but they have some entertaining bombers who might go completely stats-nuts in their new flash-fried minipark.
And we definitely forgot the Angels. It can sometimes seem like that was the whole idea, because they have been so devoutly camouflaged from notice for so long. Even the Ohtani-Trout combination, which should have lit up the sky and led us toward a cultural renaissance for the sport, ended up almost 70 games below .500 in their six seasons together. The Rangers and Nationals, who were even worse, got rings. The Angels, as is the custom, got nothing.
This week, though, was the worst of all. Games that should have been played in private, or safely simulated on a computer, were instead played in front of people that came to see them—well, came to see the White Sox break the major league record for losses. And even then, the Angels couldn't make anyone happy. They disappointed White Sox fans twice by letting the local nine walk off wins Tuesday and Wednesday, and then laid down like curs on Thursday. I mean, good on Flexen for having his best start of the year and lowering his season ERA under five, but the White Sox have no business beating anyone, 7-0, especially when the only thing their own fans want is a 121st loss that makes the first 120 worthwhile.
But this is the era of screw-the-fan (see this as proof), so that is also in part on the Angels. We could spin this into a bilious paragraph of Arte Moreno abuse, but he doesn't even podium in the worst-owner-in-baseball event, nor does Jerry Reinsdorf. John Fisher sweeps the board there, now and for the foreseeable future.
Still, as we continue to try to celebrate the invertebrate Chicagos, we should remember that even they won't be worse than they were this next year. The law of big numbers all but forbids it, and if they somehow are worse, they should be relegated to Conference USA until they get their shit together.
The Angels, on the other hand, have been this featureless and bland seemingly forever, even if this is the first year they were this bad. Even their one World Series had no memorable player or season (without looking, guess who their 2002 OPS leader was; we dare you). But this week was as close to unforgivable as sport can manage. We ask for so little—a record for inadequacy worthy of the name, a team not leaving its home to move to nowhere, stuff like that—and then someone hold-my-beers their way to the front of the line and makes everyone incrementally more dissatisfied.
Then again, we shouldn't have expected the Angels to perform even this simple task. I mean, they've managed so few with any adequacy this season that it made no logical sense to think they'd muscle up now, even against these White Sox. This ends up being on us, frankly. We should have paid better attention and not bought the notion that even this team could beat the White Sox once. The Angels don't do satisfaction for their own fans, so why would they take care of anyone else?
