The 2024 Chicago White Sox are the worst baseball team ever. That is not an exaggeration.
That may seem hard to believe for a franchise that has been around for over 100 years playing in a league that has been around for approximately 150 years, but it is true.
This season, in the lowly AL Central, the White Sox did not just lose over 100 games, they broke the MLB record for most losses in a season.
An MLB season lasts 162 games, meaning a mediocre record would land a team at 81-81. The Boston Red Sox finished this season with a .500 record and finished just five games outside of the playoffs. Certainly disappointing, but not terrible.
Finishing with around 70 wins and 92 losses by the end of the year will certainly keep you out of the playoffs, this year’s Washington Nationals finished as the third-worst team in the National League with a 71-91 record. Terrible.
But all baseball teams want to avoid the dreaded 100-loss mark. The worst of the worst teams suffer this fate. It could be injuries, trades or poor management that doom a roster, but these teams are truly hopeless.
Both the Miami Marlins and the Colorado Rockies barely broke that mark, going 62-100 and 61-101, respectively. Unthinkable. (The Los Angeles Angels saved themselves the embarrassment by going 63-99)
Dipping any lower than that, and you’re looking at the worst teams in baseball history. The 1945 Philadelphia Phillies went 46-108. The 2003 Detroit Tigers struggled to a 43-119 record. The last team to lose 115 or more games was the Baltimore Orioles, who went 47-115 in 2018.
For years, the 1962 New York Mets were the absolute worst team the MLB had seen with a deplorable record of 40-120.
For 52 years the record stood. It would take a team that would finish the season last in home runs, hits, walks, third-worst in ERA, third-most runs allowed and twelfth least RBI in an MLB season ever to break that record.
The White Sox went on an American League record-tying 21 game losing streak in July and August. They lost 71 games before All-Star Week, the most games lost before the break ever, and on Sept. 27, the White Sox fell to their archnemesis, the Detroit Tigers 4-1 to set the new MLB record with 121 losses.
The Southsiders won their final two games of the year to only beat the Mets by one game, ending their season 41-121.
Want to find the one team worse than these Sox? You have to go back to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. Yes, that year is correct, 1899. The Spiders finished 20-134 in a league with 12 teams including the Chicago Orphans (now Cubs), the St. Louis Perfectos (now Cardinals) and the 1899 National League Champions, the Brooklyn Superbas (now the Los Angeles Dodgers).
The Spiders are the only baseball team to have more losses than the White Sox. They played in a league with only 12 teams, before the MLB was even called Major League Baseball, and the World Series was yet to be invented.
Back in the present day, the Chicago White Sox social media team stopped posting the scores of their final games, instead opting for very tongue-in-cheek responses like, ‘the other team scored more runs than us’ or ‘FINAL: can be found on the MLB app.’
The players on the team were well aware of the situation that they were in. An ESPN report by Jeff Passan highlighted how the team attempted to stay positive.
This season’s White Sox very literally found the bottom of the barrel for a baseball franchise. The future will hopefully look brighter, as they have the fourth-best farm system in the league, according to FanGraphs.
If there’s one thing Chicago can take away from this season, at least in regards to next year, there’s is literally nowhere to go but up.
