White Sox lose 121 games in a season, making history

DETROIT — Friday night in Detroit, as people bought hats and ate hot dogs and sang along to rock anthems, the Chicago White Sox pulled off a staggering feat. They lost their 121st game of the season, vaulting themselves into modern baseball history by breaking the record for most losses, one previously held by the 1962 New York Mets.

And yet, because the White Sox lost that record-setting game away from home, in front of 44,435 delirious Tigers fans celebrating an unlikely run to the playoffs, hardly anyone present seemed to notice.

That might have been the most merciful thing. The record is a fitting end to a cursed year.

How bad were the 2024 White Sox? Up in the press box, reporters traded terrible stats like kids trading scary stories around a campfire. Chicago started the year 3-22, and in a recent stretch of home games they went 1-28. They slumped through separate losing streaks of 21 games, 14 games, and 12 games. Over the course of the season, the White Sox have been outscored by more than 300 runs.

After a while, the numbers feel less like statistics than like some sort of numerical insult comedy.

After Friday, all of those terrible numbers can be reduced to one big number, 121. (And it could go up with two games left in the season.)

So what went wrong? Basically, everything. Injuries, trades, slumps. Close losses. Flukey bounces. A game-winning home run robbed by a flying left fielder. Sitting at his locker one day, late in this miserable season, the pitcher Chris Flexen searched for a word to describe it. The best he could come up with, he said, was “weird.”

Setting the record in Detroit was, in itself, a kind of victory. It should have happened earlier. At the beginning of the week, the White Sox returned to Chicago tied for the record with 120 losses. The baseball gods had set them up perfectly. The team would make history at home, where the fans could let them hear about it. Early in the first game, when the White Sox dropped a pop-up, the crowd exploded. They chanted “Sell the Team” and “Break the Record” and “121.” When the White Sox won, the home fans booed.

“It’s definitely the first win I’ve ever had where the whole crowd was upset about it,” said Gavin Sheets, a first baseman for the team.

Somehow, defiantly, the White Sox won all three of their final home games. They refused to lose. Anyone who wanted to see history would have to travel to Detroit. In this season of loss, it felt like a small act of heroism.

In Detroit, history was overdue. And it came fast. In true White Sox style, the game got weird. In the first inning, a White Sox triple was demoted to a double because a Tigers fan reached over the wall and touched the ball while it was in play. Then the White Sox brought out all the classics: They made fielding errors and struck out and pelted their own catcher with wild pitches.

The Detroit crowd was loud and — unlike Chicago’s home crowd — seemed to have an uncomplicated relationship to its team. When good things happened, Tigers fans cheered. They had a lot to cheer about. By the seventh inning, they led 4-1.

Loss 121 ended in the perfect way. Andrew Vaughn, Chicago’s designated hitter, lofted an easy fly ball to right-center field — where two Detroit outfielders, as if paying tribute to the White Sox, ran into each other. One of them fell down. But he still made the catch. The game was over. It felt like a cruel parody of the White Sox season.

The White Sox slumped off the field. But very few people watched them go. The crowd seemed unaware of, or uninterested in, the White Sox’s disgrace; they were too busy roaring for their own team.

In the clubhouse, the White Sox sat, glumly, eating a postgame meal. After so many months of anticipation, what did it feel like to enter history? Sheets, the first baseman, said the moment surprised him. After those three improbable home wins, he thought maybe it wouldn’t happen. But then that last ball hit the outfielder’s glove. “And then all of a sudden…” he said, adding, “You realize you’re part of the wrong side of history. And so it was a little more frustrating, and — hurt a little bit more than I expected it to.”

One of the strange things about history is that it happens in normal time, right in the middle of everything else. Over in their clubhouse, the Tigers doused each other with champagne. For most of the season, Detroit had been bad — until, six weeks ago, out of nowhere, they became the hottest team in baseball. Tonight’s win had clinched their spot in the playoffs. It was a heartbreaking juxtaposition. The White Sox were just collateral damage. A footnote in someone else’s story.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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