As Labor Day dawned, four of the five teams in the American League Central were above .500 for the season.
Three of them, including the Minnesota Twins, appear destined to make the expanded playoff field.
Then there’s the Chicago White Sox, the most godawful assemblage of “talent” ever foisted on a fan base.
I commented a while back on the possibility that the 2024 White Sox would have a historically dismal record. It is now almost impossible for them to avoid it.
On Sunday they lost. Of course. That gave them 107 losses on the season, a franchise record with 24 games left to play. It also gave them 10 straight losses, their fourth double-digit losing streak of the season.
Their winning percentage at that point was .225, which somehow is higher than their team batting average (.219).
The worst team of my lifetime has been the 1962 New York Mets, who went 40-120 with one tie and one unplayed game. They at least had the excuse of being an expansion team (although other expansion teams weren’t nearly as bad).
In today’s baseball environment, with the amateur draft and bonus allotments, you almost have to try to be bad. And we’ve seen plenty of that in the past couple of decades, with Houston, Washington and Baltimore tanking multiple seasons to build a talent foundation for a championship level team.
But that wasn’t the intent with the White Sox. Even as they fell from 93 wins and a division title in 2021 to .500 in 2022 and 101 losses in 2023, they expected to be good.
There is no one reason for the White Sox to be this terrible. It’s a combination of things, starting with an ownership that values loyalty over accountability, which has led to an organizational stagnancy.
Last year, Jerry Reinsdorf finally cast off his front office leadership of long standing — Ken Williams and Rich Hahn — and promoted his farm director, Chris Getz, a former White Sox player. This despite the fact that the White Sox farm system has not been notably productive.
Which might be more about the scouting and drafting approach. From a very distant perspective, the White Sox are either ignorant of, or defiant of, certain principles of evaluating amateur talent.
For example: Don’t draft amateur second basemen. A player with a throwing arm strong enough to play in a major league infield is going to play shortstop or outfield in high school or college.
But the Sox used the fourth overall pick in 2018 on Nick Madrigal, a small second baseman with almost no power. This can work if the player hits like Rod Carew or Luis Arraez, but Madrigal isn’t at that level.
The next year the Sox used the third overall pick on Andrew Vaughn, a right-right first baseman. Again, a no-no.
Now, the Sox have had a string of quality right-right first basemen, from Frank Thomas to Paul Konerko to Jose Abreu, so they may have tossed that rule of thumb out the window. But Vaughn isn’t even C.J. Cron, and Cron can’t hold a job. A league-average hitter, which is what Vaughn has been over his time in the majors, doesn’t work at first base.
Missing on two consecutive high picks like that is not readily overcome.
Here’s the kicker: As bad as the 2024 White Sox are, they’re stuck with the 10th overall pick next summer. Under the current rules, established to discourage tanking, they can’t have lottery picks in consecutive years, so they are excluded from the top 10 picks.
They are a dead horse, and they’re going to keep getting beat.
Edward Thoma is at ethoma@mankatofreepress.