UPDATED: Yet Another Thinkpiece about the White Sox

We’re now in baseball’s offseason. And while I have hockey to keep me company while we wait for pitchers and catchers to report to spring training, I wanted to briefly remember what could have been: another Phillies deep run. I remember the magic run we made in 2022 to erase years of sports shows showing Ryan Howard’s gruesome Achilles tear in 2011. Howard’s injury was my first introduction to the emotional devastation that Philadelphia sports can bring; his injury almost immediately erased the joy I felt from watching the Phillies win in 2008. I then had to endure a nearly decade-long rebuild featuring the joys of middling players like Freddy Galvis and Maikel Franco, players that I thought were good as a kid, but the adults in my life saw we were not. And then we got Bryce Harper in 2019, and slowly but surely over the next few years, improved. I’m proud of the success I’ve seen (and the many reasons to troll Braves fans), but I would like to see another trophy, please and thank you.

Now, the above paragraph is me being conciliatory. The next few paragraphs are not that.

It would have been REALLY nice if we had made it PAST THE FIRST ROUND. Would’ve been even nicer if we extended our first-half success TO THE SECOND HALF. Would have been even nicer if we hadn’t been blown out by the Athletics, who don’t even have a stadium, and the Yankees, who saved their choking for Game 5 of the World Series and also DIDNT HAVE A POST ALL STAR BREAK SLUMP. ALL OF OUR RIVALS WERE EITHER ELIMINATED IN THE PLAYOFFS OR DIDN’T MAKE IT OR WERE VERY BEATABLE BUT NO…… OUR OFFENSE JUST HAD TO SHUT DOWN AND WASTE AMAZING PERFORMANCES FROM OUR ACES. YOU DISAPPOINTED MY MOM. MY MOM WHO WATCHED ERIC LINDROS (I am seriously not kidding, one of these days I’ll write about the Legion of Doom one of these days) AND WATCHED YOU WASTE ZACK WHEELER’S PERFORMANCE IN GAME ONE. HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO HIM??? WE BETTER START SIGNING MORE PEOPLE SOON ISTG I DO NOT WANT US RUNNING IT BACK. JUST LOOK AT THE NEW YORK RANGERS AND HOW RUNNING IT BACK HAS AFFECTED THEM. WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

OH, AND 2025 WAS ALSO SUPPOSED TO BE OUR YEAR. THE WEAKEST THE NL EAST HAS LOOKED IN A WHILE, AND WE STILL COULDN’T GET OUT OF THE DIVISIONAL SERIES!!! WE CAN BLAME ORION KERKERING ALL WE WANT, BUT HE MAY NOT HAVE HAD TO BE IN THAT POSITION IF OUR OFFENSE COULD HAVE HIT THE BALL. YES, I’M GLAD WE RESIGNED SCHWARBER, BUT WE SHOULD HAVE LET JT GO. STUBBS AND MARCHAN WOULD BE A GREAT CATCHING TANDEM BUT NOOOOOO WE GOTTA HANG ON TO THE 2022 GLORY THAT IS FADING BY THE SEASON. RUNNING IT BACK WITH THE SAME MANAGER AND HITTING COACH, IN PARTICULAR A MANAGER THAT HAS MADE SOME QUESTIONABLE PITCHING DECISIONS, IS NOT GOOD. I EXPECT THE 2026 ALL STAR GAME TO BE THE HIGHLIGHT OF THIS UPCOMING SEASON.

Even in the deepest pits of my Philadelphia sports-induced agony, I can hold solace in this one truth: at least they’re not the White Sox. Yes, the team that had such a bright future just a few years ago, even making it to the playoffs in 2021, has had consecutive 100-loss seasons in 2023 and 2024 (101 losses in 2023 and 121 in 2024). A more laudable feat is tying the Philadelphia Kansas City Oakland Athletics, a team that managed to anger everyone in leaving Oakland for a potential move in incompetence this season. And that team lost more games than the White Sox LAST year. Now, there have been many good videos¹as to why the White Sox have set the single-season franchise record in losses, as well as an Athletic article that exposed how the White Sox barely had analytics departments and was a boys club for Jerry Reinsdorf that rivals Don Sweeney’s Bruins or Stan Bowman’s Chicago Blackhawks—how do you think they covered up video coach’s Brad Aldritch’s sexual assault of a hockey player for so long?—.

And yes, the losses were funny. When you can put one of their fielding gaffes against the Fightins to Yakety Sax, that becomes a team that will reach great heights of ignominy. I mean, Kevin Brown had the call of the year when he called a White Sox outfield collision against the Orioles that led to runs scoring as going full White Sox. You know your team has reached a new low when your incompetence becomes a verb. Also, life advice: never go full White Sox.

And the losing just kept on coming for the South Side; from a 21-game losing streak that tied the 1988 Baltimore Orioles for the longest losing streak in the American League to baseball analysts and announcers comparing this team to the 1962 Mets and the 1899 Cleveland Spiders (also the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who are in the same division as the White Sox, but they lost a paltry 119 games). At least the Mets and Spiders had reasons to lose so many—the Mets were a first-year expansion team, and the Spiders were torn apart by the organization moving many of their best players to St. Louis. The White Sox have nothing to blame but their incompetent ownership, which took a promising 2021 team that took the Astros to the brink in the division series and ran it aground like the Edmund Fitzgerald.

On the same day that the Phillies clinched a playoff bye into the division series, I was watching a different record clincher on the extremely overpriced MLB.tv streaming service (seriously, MLB has to slash the prices of their streaming service). The Tigers, amid an August to September hot streak, were playing the White Sox to clinch an unforeseen playoff berth. The White Sox were playing for a more ignominious goal, which was to not set the modern (since 1901) single-loss record. They had held this humiliating achievement off by winning against the Angels (which led to the team setting their single-season loss record with 97 games).

But the Tigers were not at the same level as middling to horrendous. The Tigers took the first lead with a two-run fifth inning. While the White Sox did get a run back in the top of the sixth, the Tigers added two more runs in the bottom of the seventh courtesy of a Matt Vierling double and Fraser Ellard scoring on a wild pitch to win 4-1. I texted my shift partner at my library job at school (shout out Bryn Mawr Libraries!!) that I would be a few minutes late just to witness this hilarious achievement. 121 losses is the most the White Sox have achieved since the 2005 World Series win that only their fanbase remembers.

Speaking of the fanbase, I could hear White Sox fans chanting “Sell the Team” at previous games; perhaps Jerry will. But that is a more hopeful outlook; given his decision to remain the White Sox owner as long as he lives, White Sox nation will have to prepare for more incompetence. Just please don’t move the team to Nashville; they already have an incompetent hockey franchise and do not need another one to stink up their town.

I guess the lesson here with the 2024 White Sox is how bad ownership, namely ownership surrounding oneself with yes men, as well as a refusal to adapt to the changes of the game, leads to such tire fires as the White Sox. As I’m planning to write about the upcoming MLB season, in particular, the Philadelphia Kansas City Oakland Athletics’ move to Sacramento, as well as the Rays playing in the Yankees spring training field due to Tropicana Fields’ drubbing by Hurricane Milton, I am taking the White Sox as a hilarious yet meaningful lesson into incompetent ownership. Even though the White Sox lost fewer games in the 2025 season, it isn’t hard to lose more games than last season. It also helped the White Sox that their farm system bore new fruit in Colson Montgomery. Hopefully, the White Sox won’t waste them as they did with Elroy Jiminez, Tim Anderson, Garrett Crochet, and other members of the 2021 White Sox roster.