Photo: Nuccio DiNuzzo/Getty Images
Maybe it’ll happen today, maybe tomorrow. But at some point this week, the Chicago White Sox will set the Major League Baseball record for most losses in a season, a mark currently held by the 1962 New York Mets. Casey Stengel, the manager of that legendarily awful team, was so befuddled by their ineptitude that he said, “The only thing worse than a Mets game is a Mets doubleheader.” As the 2024 season comes to a close, Aaron Judge is finishing up maybe the best season ever for a right-handed hitter, while Shohei Ohtani puts exclamation points on the first 50-50 campaign of all time. But what the White Sox are doing is equally historic. We have never seen anything like it before.
And I wonder if we should appreciate it more.
It’s natural to focus on successful teams: Winning is, after all, the point of every game, the reason we have scoreboards in the first place. But we remember the truly great teams far more than we remember the regular everyday champions: to be the best at something will make you immortal.
It thus stands to reason that being the best at losing is also eternal. Do you know who won the World Series in 1962? Do you even care? The only thing that has lasted from that year is the horribleness of the Mets. Besides being more memorable, losing is more relatable and far more familiar than winning. A finite few of us will ever understand what it’s like to be revered, to have tens of thousands of people chanting our name. But doing our best and falling short? Of being bested by a superior? Things not working out? We all know that feeling.
The 2024 White Sox know that feeling better than any other baseball team (and, considering the number of games in a baseball season, more than any other major American sports team ever). It’s not like there’s anything all that noteworthy about them. The White Sox are bad, but their badness does not represent some hubris or some sort of cosmic justice. They have a halfway decent farm system, and they began the season with actual talent on their roster — most of whom they traded away at the deadline, allowing some of their best players to flourish elsewhere. They’re a historically below-average team, sure, but also one with a long, rich history, including a World Series title this century (something most baseball teams can’t say) and one particularly high-profile mom-jeans-wearing fan. They’re not doomed as a franchise. They’re simply having a very, very bad year. Just ask them. After the Sox’s record-tying 120th loss on Sunday, outfielder Andrew Benintendi — the former Red Sox All-Star and World Series winner who is signed to this team for two more years — said, “It’s the same as every other loss. They all suck, regardless of how many there are. It doesn’t matter to us.”
But while White Sox players may be treating this all with the classic “one day at a time” sports mentality, the rest of us can see that something special is happening, something unprecedented — something maybe even inspirational. After all, the White Sox will play baseball again next year. Nobody died. The franchise didn’t disband. They’ll never lose this many games again, and someday they’ll make the playoffs, and their fans will be happy again. They’ll probably feel even better because this happened. After all: They will have earned it.
Contrary to what the average Yankees or Celtics fan might believe, your sports team doesn’t have to win every year to avoid being seen as some sort of failure. And the good stuff is less exciting without the bad. This is the pleasure of a team like the White Sox, or, say, the 1976 Buccaneers (who went winless), or even last year’s Detroit Pistons, who had the ninth-worst record in NBA history and at one point set a record with 28 consecutive losses. Future wins — and they will come — mean more because of the hardships of the past. The losses make the winning matter. When the Buccaneers won their two Super Bowls this century, there were fans alive, wearing Bucs pewter, who were there for every single one of those losses in ’76. If the Chiefs win the Super Bowl again this year, well, big deal; they won the last two. But if the Lions, a notoriously hapless franchise that also once went winless back in 2008, finally takes a title, it’ll be the biggest story in the country. It’s why the Chicago Cubs’ World Series title in 2016 remains a peak baseball moment: We know what their fans went through to get there. You might say, if anyone dared to quote Drake anymore, that they started at the bottom, and now they’re here.
There does seem to be a bit of an epidemic of bad sports teams lately, and that’s probably not an accident. As front offices in all sports become more obsessed with efficiency and allocation of resources, the worst place you can be is in that muddy middle — not good enough to fight for anything more than a low playoff seed but not bad enough to earn a high draft pick for the future. It’s smarter to just bottom out and lose like crazy for a while in order to build your next great team. Before 2019, there had never been more than three MLB teams that lost 100 games or more in a season; there’s been four in every season since. (Though it looks like we’ll top out at three this time around.) Across all sports, the philosophy seems to be this: If you’re going to lose, lose big.
But by next Monday, the White Sox season will be over. And while the team will have set a new record for futility, losses, it turns out, are not like carryover minutes on your cell phone: You’re still 0-0 when the next season begins. There is beauty in losing, gravitas in losing — lessons to be learned in losing. We will never know what it’s like to be Michael Jordan, or Tom Brady, or Patrick Mahomes, or Shohei Ohtani. But the 2024 White Sox? We have an easier time imagining that. And yet, we get up and play the next game anyway.
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