If the Black Sox threw a game, could these White Sox catch it?
The brutal 2024 team vs. the scandalous 1919 squad might be the best board matchup in baseball.
The most fascinating matchup in baseball is, unfortunately, a board game.
If the 1919 White Sox played the 2024 White Sox, who would win?
Call it Eight Men Out vs. Forty Games Out. The Black Sox against the Bleak Sox. And it would have the potential for legitimate mayhem that only Chicago can provide.
The 1919 team lost that World Series to the Cincinnati Reds because its most influential players were trying to. Imagine the frustration, and the collateral damage, if they discovered they couldn’t lose for winning, if they ran up against a club that is still four wins short of Denny McLain’s 31 in 1968, a lost battalion whose last win streak (two or more) ended on June 29. The last time the Bleak Sox won any game, Donald Trump’s ear was still unblemished.
So the 1919 crew, resourceful and venal as it was, might not know the lengths it would take to pour victory into jaws so accustomed to defeat.
Eddie Cicotte could toss the slowest of lollipops and still mystify a ‘24 Sox lineup that is hitting .218 with 332 runs in 110 games. Chick Gandil’s deliberately weak grounders might still find a hole in a current Sox defense that is second in the A.L. in errors (66) and a runaway last in most defensive runs saved calculations.
The South Siders would then have to contemplate the wrath of Arnold Rothstein’s goon squad, and how little it would tolerate such imperfect, uh, execution.
Unfortunately, fictitious suspense is the only kind that exists at whatever they’re calling the White Sox ballpark these days.
The Sox lost their 17th consecutive game on Wednesday night. They have lost 84 games and won 27. To avoid equaling the 1962 Mets, whose ineptitude is the kind against which all others are measured but who also were an expansion team, Chicago will have to win 14 of its remaining 51 games. (The Mets only played 160 games.) That would be a .275 pace and would represent a hot streak, since the Sox are currently at .243.
Speaking of .243, no Sox player of 200 at-bats or more has a batting average that high. Tommy Pham was over that particular line, but he left in a trade-deadline diaspora that also sent shortstop Paul DeJong, reliever Michael Kopech, starter Erick Fedde, infielder Eloy Jimenez and reliever Tanner Bates to kinder shores. DeJong, in fact, could be in for some playoff fun with Kansas City. Same with Fedde and Pham in St. Louis. None of the departed White Sox looked back, presumably, the same way you don’t want to catch your dog’s plaintive eye when you’re out the door for vacation. It’s too fraught. Meanwhile, the Players Association is changing the technical language for White Sox players from “service time” to “time served.”
This is the second time in 2024 that the Sox have suffered through the longest losing streak in franchise history. Their bullpen has blown 28 saves. It has taken the loss in 11 of Chicago’s past 24 games, and the club is 8-23 in 1-run games. It has a 1.49 WHIP and has walked 210 batters, by far an MLB high. Nothing corrodes a clubhouse like a blown lead, particularly when victory is glimmering, like a mirage.
Shipping Kopech to the Dodgers is at least a tourniquet, if not a cure. It was pure folly to expect Kopech to close in the first place. He has had legendary stuff since he was drafted by the Red Sox out of Longview, Tex. back in….let’s see….ten years ago? Kopech has a career walk rate of 4.7 every nine innings. A starter can overcome that. A reliever might as well go out there with a hatchet and a Dalmatian.
The White Sox got Kopech and infielder Yoan Moncada, one of the most lionized minor league players in decades, from Boston for legitimate ace Chris Sale. That’s the same Sale who finished off the 2018 World Series for Boston. That was also part of the White Sox teardown of six years ago. The definition of a “rebuild” is that there was something solid that existed at that place. Otherwise, it would just be a “build.” In this case the house was condemned, and whether Ken Williams or Rick Hahn or current general manager Chris Getz deserves the blame is a little moot at this point. It takes a village to, well, destroy a village.
And yet some of the moves made sense. The White Sox got a lot out of slugger Jose Abreu, who was the MVP in 2020, and then let him walk to Houston at his precise expiration date. They got Dylan Cease from the Cubs, and they drafted Carlos Rodon, and they picked up Fedde from a career revival in South Korea. Lucas Giolito has done little since the White Sox let him go. Liam Hendricks had 75 saves in two years and was eighth in the Cy Young voting in 2021. Then he came down with non-Hodgkins lymphoma
They still have outfielder Luis Robert, who hit 38 home runs in 2023 but has shown up for only 55 uninspired games this year.
They drafted lefty Garrett Crochet, from the U. of Tennessee, in 2020. This is his first year as a starter, and he leads the league in strikeout rate and has a 6-8 record which, on this team, is like making the cut at the Masters while you’re carrying your own bag. Crochet has had Tommy John surgery and might have been the ideal trade-deadline prize, but he said he would demand a long-term extension to pitch in the postseason from any team that acquired him. That removed the Sox’s leverage, but if he’s this good he should be their No. 1 keeper.
But then the White Sox have had long, barren stretches before. They did win the World Series in 2005 and surely became the last team ever to throw three consecutive complete games in a playoff series (ALCS vs. the Angels) but that was their first championship since 1917, two years before the scandal. The literati never has given the White Sox a therapy hug as it always did to the Cubs and Red Sox, maybe because they were always the workingman’s team on the shunned side of town. They have drawn 2 million fans only once since 2011.
It does not help that 88-year-old Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner since 1981, is trying to get a new stadium. Who knows if it will work again? Kansas City said no to the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium renovation hopes, and now the Chiefs are eyeing a move across the border to Kansas. These are the Chiefs, a team that has won the past two Super Bowls and has one of the best quarterbacks of alltime, and they can’t raid the civic cookie jar. That doesn’t bode well for the White Sox, as they threaten to remove Casey Stengel, Ed Kranepool and Choo Choo Coleman from baseball folklore.
The one consolation for Sox fans is that the Cubs’ comparative misery might be deeper, considering their hopes were higher and that they are paying $8 million this year for manager Craig Counsell. Such schadenfreude will not help the Sox find a way out of their own wilderness, a dismal swamp that isn’t entertaining enough for Hollywood. At least the Black Sox knew how to crash the plane.
As a lifelong White Sox fan, I find it only fitting that the largest word count in the past twenty years from a writer not associated with a Sox blog (like the excellent Sox Machine) or a beat writer comes during this putrid season.
Sports Illustrated, for example, was still swooning over the Red Sox they spent the first few paragraphs of the article on Chicago’s 2005 WS title reminiscing about Boston getting off the snide shortly before.
Peyton and Tom graced the cover of that issue - previewing a MNF matchup. It was the most Dangerfield of moments, I tell ya.
When Rodney’s wife begged, he took her to the kitchen. We fans are past pleading for a trip to the playoffs. We just want the divorce. Some want a funeral, but fear Reinsdorf is eternal.
But hey, 2005 happened, and I have the t-shirt to prove it.
Not much to add. Reinsdorf isn’t the worst owner in sports only because there’s plenty of competition for that distinction. It’s clear that the 2005 championship was a non-replicable confluence of good moves and good luck. (I’ll also throw in that the Bulls might not have won a single championship had Reinsdorf not inherited MJ when he took over the team.)