As the White Sox got ready to begin a four-game series against the Yankees at Rate Field, a cheery reporter, full of pleasant questions as always, wanted to discuss how good the remainder of the season could be.
In other words, it was time to poke the 100-loss bear.
The Sox were 48-85. With 29 games to go, they had a chance — albeit a remote one — to avoid a third straight triple-digit-loss season if only they could play winning baseball the rest of the way. A 15-14 finish wouldn’t light the world on fire, but it would get the job done, leaving them one “L” shy of the ignominious 100 mark.
So: How about it, then? Something to shoot for?
“I don’t think anyone would be like, ‘Hey, it’s a successful year if we don’t lose 100 games,’ ” pitcher Shane Smith said, sounding rather unimpressed by the idea.
But Smith is just a rookie. What could he really know about this?
Outfielder Michael A. Taylor, on the other hand, has been around the block. This season is Taylor’s 12th big-league go-round, and he has yet to experience an “oh, no” 1-0-0; his worst team, the 2022 Royals, lost 97 games.
Alas, Taylor pretty much dismissed the premise, too.
“I don’t think it’s going to change much if it’s 100 or 97 if we didn’t get any better, didn’t learn anything from this season,” he said. “It’s more about going about it the right way, to me. If we stay under 100, great, but it’s kind of like this threshold that doesn’t mean anything to me at the end of the day.”
What about rookie manager Will Venable? He never played for a 100-game loser, though the team with which he debuted in the majors as a late-August call-up, the 2008 Padres, came within a whisker, losing 99.
“Of course, no one wants to lose 100 games,” Venable said. “But we’re trying to win every game because we want to win every game. I don’t think [100] will come up as a topic of conversation with us, but it certainly exists.”
The 2008 Padres didn’t talk about avoiding 100 losses, either, though Venable remembers a “very serious, very competitive” core of veterans — Jake Peavy, Trevor Hoffman, Brian Giles — leading a mostly young team with several prospects getting initial tastes of the big leagues. The vets instructed the newbies that every game mattered, even in a losing season, right down to the end. The Padres rallied around that notion and ended up going on the road for the last time and having a winning trip that, whether they looked at it this way or not, kept triple digits out of the history books.
“There’s just so much to play for on a daily basis, even if you don’t have the playoffs in front of you, that should make it exciting to come to the ballpark,” Venable said.
Last year’s record-setting 121-loss Sox struggled in that department at times.
“All I know is when guys show up, if they were on the team last year, compared to this year, they enjoy being at the ballpark a little more,” one Sox player said.
Mind you, this was heading into the series against the Yankees. Turns out it didn’t go so well for the South Siders, who dropped the first three games before staving off a sweep on Sunday. At 49-88 with 25 games remaining — 16 of them on the road — entering September, the Sox needed to go 14-11 to stay under 100 losses, which might be only slightly more likely to happen than chairman Jerry Reinsdorf doing the Cha-Cha on “Dancing with the Stars.”
Since going 10-4 to begin the second half — easily their best two weeks of the season — the Sox are in a 7-19 stretch that’s almost reminiscent of their futility in 2024. “Almost” because nothing could be quite that awful, not even the pathetic performance of this year’s Rockies, whom we might as well refer to as the White Rox. The Rox were worse than the 121-loss Sox through April (5-25 vs. 6-24), May (9-49 vs. 15-43) and at the All-Star break (22-74 vs. 26-72), but now, after losing two of three to the Cubs over the weekend to fall to 39-98, their winning percentage of .285 is far ahead of where the Sox ended up, which was at .253.
The current Sox might not feel strongly about the 100-loss topic, but that’s probably the wrong number to focus on anyway. It’s time to invoke the absurdly bad Sox of 1970, who finished 56-106.
The 1970 Sox finished a scant 42 games out of first place in the American League West. Manager Don Gutteridge, the successor to Al Lopez, failed to make it through September, getting pushed out by general manager Stu Holcomb, who’d recently — as in one day earlier — replaced fired GM Ed Short. For a baseball man, Holcomb sure had spent a lot of his career at the college level. All of it, in fact — the bulk of it coaching football and basketball, but not a single inning of baseball. Just the man for the job, no doubt.
Until 2024, that sad-sack squad had the most losses of any Sox team since the franchise began play in 1901. Guess what, folks? These Sox still must scratch out eight wins from here to clear the 1970 bar. Otherwise, they’ll be tied to the 2024 team forever, with the two most “L”-acious seasons in Sox history coming back-to-back.
Is avoiding that something to shoot for? Goodness, one would hope so.