SAN DIEGO — The White Sox will all but certainly go down as the worst baseball team of the modern era. The only question is, just how low will they set the bar?
With a game Sunday against the Padres, three against the Angels at home and three at the Tigers to close out the season next weekend, a handful of losses for a team that tied the American League record at 119 with a 6-2 loss to the Padres on Saturday is to be expected.
The 119 defeats are tied for the second-most by any team in the modern era. The 1962 Mets have the major-league record with 120, and the 2003 Tigers had held the AL record alone.
“I never thought I’d see this record broken in my lifetime, but here it is,” said former Mets pitcher Craig Anderson, 86, one of the surviving members from the 1962 team who is paying close attention. “We’ll see what happens.”
There’s a significant difference between these Sox and the ’62 Mets, an expansion team that had been welcomed with open arms in New York five years after the Giants left for San Francisco. Mets fans had low expectations and loved their team through the last day of the season, when most of the players went on the field holding a “We love you too, Mets fans!” sign.
Nothing like that is expected to happen after the Sox’ home finale against the Angels on Thursday. Sox players know where they stand with the fans, who are taking out their anger against ownership and management but are offering players little in the way of hugs.
Fans are up in arms over how far the Sox have sunk since they took the Central Division with 93 wins, putting up winning records in every month of the 2021 season.
Most players know what the record is, but it’s not a topic of conversation among them.
“In the clubhouse, it isn’t talked about at all,” Gavin Sheets said. “At this point, if we’re one game short of the record, is it more of a success than breaking the record? Honestly, no. One hundred twenty losses or 122, there’s not a level of success from one to the other. In here, it’s about how we get this behind us and what we learn from it and make sure it never happens again.”
Former manager Pedro Grifol, who was fired on Aug. 8 when the Sox were 28-89, knows there’s a personal side to the failure that can get lost.
“These guys try, and, you know, you’re there [with them in spirit],” Grifol said Friday. “And they hurt when they don’t get it done. Those players are good people, the Gavin Sheets and Andrew Vaughns. They’re just good people.”
Good people who collectively might not muster enough to win 40 games. The Sox were 0-3 in March, 6-21 in April, 9-19 in May and June, 3-22 in July, 4-22 in August and 5-13 in September.
A 21-game losing streak that was snapped shortly before Grifol was fired was the low point.
“You come out expecting to lose,” Sheets said of the staggering run that covered 26 days. “You got media all over and all this attention that we really didn’t need that was on us. An extremely difficult time. We’ve come a long way since then. It’s always a grind, but this was uncharted territory for anybody since the Mets, you know? It’s something we’ll say we’ve done together, and we’ve really hung in there as a clubhouse together.”
All for one and one for all, for better or worse. Probably worse than anyone.