If you think baseball is boring, try rewatching the Chicago White Sox 2024 MLB season. It would be like watching a toddler try to build a sandcastle during a hurricane—ambitious, messy, and doomed from the start, but oddly entertaining. Last Friday, they lost their 121st game of the season, vaulting themselves into modern baseball history for the most losses ever.
Coming into the season, the team wasn’t really that bad, so what went wrong? For starters, Chicago started the year 3-22, and in a recent stretch of home games they went 1-28. They slumped through separate losing streaks of 21 games, 14 games, and 12 games. Over the course of the season, the White Sox had been outscored by more than 300 runs.
Their problems came from a culmination of injuries, slumps, trades, close losses, and even a robbed walk off homerun. They lost key starters for long periods of time throughout the season, including center fielder Luis Robert Jr., starting pitcher Drew Thorpe, starting pitcher Mike Clevinger, third baseman Yoan Moncada, starting pitcher Mike Soroka, and Eloy Jimenez (who was later traded). They traded many notable players including star pitcher Dylan Cease, outfielder Tommy Pham, pitcher Michaell Kopech, shortstop Paul DeJong, and pitcher Tanner Banks.
The team struggled mightily with hitting, ranking last in home runs, walks, OBP and OPS, and isn’t loaded with position player prospects in their burgeoning system. They only had one played bat over .250 (min. 100 AB). Their bullpen was also terrible, giving up more than 30 blown saves. Even when everything went right, they still managed to find ways to lose, which included an incredible robbed walk off home run by the Rangers.
While their season may have been disappointing, there have been hilarious moments coming out of it. The White Sox X (formerly twitter) admin found humor in their disastrous season with posts such as “FINAL: can be found on the MLB app” and “FINAL: the number of runs we scored was not greater than the number of runs they scored”. Naturally, they had many miscues on the field including base coaches forgetting to go on the field, little league level base running errors, and struggles to field a ground ball and accurately throw it at the same time.
Instead of further talking about their failures during the season, let’s dive into the positives of the White Sox season. Unfortunately, there is not a lot, but they did fire their manager and pitcher Garret Crochet emerged as a young star pitcher.
Honestly, with a little bit of health and game luck, the White Sox could have a significantly better 2025 season. However, because of new collective bargaining rules, the White Sox can’t receive a draft lottery pick; even after the worst season in history, they’ll pick no higher than 10th in next year’s draft. This rebound will be a long and difficult journey.
