Black Sox 2: The once-a-century descent into a losing franchise

The White Sox are rapidly approaching a rare, overall losing mark, 124 years into their history

Are you a fan of the Futility Watch we’ve been running all season?

OK, maybe “fan” isn’t the right way to put it. But starting on Friday night, you’ll notice a new line added to all the other ignominious stats tracked there: All-Time Franchise Record.

And this, this is the tale of why we’re adding All-Time Franchise Record.

Backstory

Updating Today in White Sox History on a daily basis involves a LOT of tooling around Baseball-Reference, and that tooling trips over one particular header, every day:

Seeing this header before chasing a game event in 1951 or player transaction from 1936, it “suddenly” dawned on me that the White Sox were getting really close to the .500 mark. (Mind you, in the offseason, that mark was actually 62 games better than .500, 9,553-9,491. So, anticipating a 100-loss season adding another 40 or so games to the misery, I decided to see how many times in the past the White Sox had been a “losing” team (an all-time record worse than .500). Plus, there would be time to prep a story to run in early 2025 marking the moment the team fell to “losing.”

Why next year? Because to do so in the 2024 season alone would have warranted a 49-113 record — and that could never happen in a million years, right? And even if so, worst case, the story would be triggered by a terrible losing streak to end the year, one that saw the team collapse into a 113th loss on the last day of the season.

Not. In. Early. August.

Plot Twist

So, I was sitting on this factoid (I alluded to in on an offseason/early-season podcast or two, but who listens to those, right?), supremely confident that the numbing nature of this season would mean that no one would really bother to realize the ugly history that was approaching.

Well, I was wrong. On Tuesday night, “White Sox Jack” dribbled out this tweet that got a LOT of eyes ... and just like that, my WHAMMY of a story crumbled:

Kudos to Jack, but goddam it blew my big reveal.

So, anyhow, here’s the story that would have run likely next week, as the White Sox dropped another five or 10 games and broke bad into the wrong side of .500.

White Sox tradition

If you’re a young fan, perhaps born in this century or barely old enough to remember the World Series win, you have a very jaded view of who the White Sox are. To you, the White Sox are a joke of a franchise, with a losing tradition, in some stage of perpetual failed rebuild. Your team signs abusers, won’t pay for talent, cares little about fan happiness or welfare — in short, your favorite team makes you wonder why it is your favorite team.

I can’t solve that for you no matter how much money you want to paypal me for Sox Therapy, but I can tell you that this is NOT historically the tradition of the Chicago White Sox.

In fact, for all the dry spells and truly godawful seasons, the White Sox have only had one losing era, and correspondingly, one stretch as an overall “losing” franchise. And it took the ultimate poison pill, the Black Sox, to trigger it all.

The darkest era in White Sox history came in the wake of the Black Sox scandal in 1919 that saw the suspension-banning of the team core at the end of 1920. The significant nullification of a championship roster took hold immediately and triggered 30 years of floundering and 40 years between World Series appearances. In the 30 seasons from 1921 to 1950, the White Sox had seven winning seasons. Four of the five worst White Sox seasons ever (discounting the future leader of the pack, 2024) came in this 30-year stretch.

But still, the White Sox had built up such an amazing record in the first 20 seasons of their existence — by the end of 1920 the White Sox were 313 games better than .500 thanks to suffering just four seasons of their first 20 campaigns with a losing record. Thus, it took almost the entire three-decade malaise to erase the winning profits Chicago had put together in its first 20 seasons.

Descent into losing

But, erase it did, and by 1948, the piper got paid. The 1948 White Sox started out 0-4, which dropped them to .500 as a franchise for the first time ever — before that time, the closest the White Sox were to .500 overall was in their first season of 1901, at 2-1 and 3-2. However by April 26, 1948, the White Sox became an overall losing team for the first time in 48 seasons. A few wins and losses later, and the White Sox plunged into a lifetime losing record for the long haul — starting on May 5, and lasting more than eight seasons after that.

And the hole was dug deep, because at the end of the three decades of losing, the White Sox weren’t messing around: 1948-50 combined into 112 games under .500. So it’s no surprise the turnaround back to becoming an overall winning franchise took awhile; a franchise-best 17 straight winning seasons began in 1951, but it took until 1956 to get back over the hump for good.

The 1956 season definitely was going to be the year to put all that losing in the rear-view mirror, but despite getting within a game of .500 early in the year, the White Sox only got back to the surface on June 17. From there, the Pale Hose bobbed along, above and below .500. But by August 14, at 57-50 on the season, the White Sox were back to their original status as a winning franchise.

In almost 70 years since, not only have the White Sox not fallen back into a lifetime losing record, they haven’t really come close. The 1989 season was the only close call, but at season’s end the club stood just 25 games over at 6,867-6,840 — and then took off like gangbusters in 1990, never once dipping worse than .500 all that year.

But, now?

But now, the White Sox are careening toward a lifetime losing record for just the second time in their history. We are now within days of it happening. Theoretically, if the current losing streak stretches to 22 games, the White Sox could become a losing franchise again as early as late Tuesday night, August 6, at Oakland. Even a “good” run for the White Sox into August would surely see them at 5-10 or 7-12 at some point, meaning that August 2024 will almost certainly be the breaking point.

After almost exactly 68 years, the White Sox will be a losing franchise once again.

It’s hard to say whether the White Sox will be sunk for another eight seasons, as the club suffered seven decades ago. But the idea that the franchise will be back in the black as soon as 2025 or even 2026 — remember, it won’t be just a single winning season to right the ship in all likelihood, but enough winning to fill back up the hole that’s going to be dug the rest of 2024 and presumably at least 2025 — is foolhardy.

One thing a White Sox fan of today — counting all but our very our oldest fans now — could always have claimed is that their team is a winning one. You had to be a fan (and probably a kid) in 1956 or earlier to have last legitimately claimed you rooted for a losing franchise.

Through the wasteland of 1968-70, the Sox in shorts in the painful 1976 campaign, the dismal turn the team took in the late 1980s, the stumbling done in the late 1990s and post-Series, and perhaps even the earliest moments of the rebuild era, a fan could stand tall and recognize that no matter how dismal the present, their club still had won more than it lost.

Well, mask up, friends. We are about to go underwater.

Looking ahead: When will we resurface?

It’s a great question. We know that 2024 is going to end with the White Sox only about 20 games worse than .500 as a franchise; even finishing out at the current 123-loss pace, the club would enter 2025 “only” 22 games under .500. Presuming we anticipate 2025 to be a 102-loss season, that tacks another 40 losses around our necks, so roughly 60 games worse than .500. If the best case could be a jump toward competitiveness from there, we can project, say, 71 wins in 2026 (with the club now about 80 games worse than .500 overall) and back to a .500 season in 2027.

So, how long will a team on the rise take to make up 80 games? If the White Sox jumped to 90 wins in 2028, that still just erases about 20 games off of the deficit; thus to crawl out of this quickly and have this “losing era” mirror that of 1948-56, the White Sox would need to reel off four 90-win seasons or perhaps just three very dominant seasons to get back to even.

It’s a big presumption that the White Sox, with a new wave of talent in the minors right now and even yet undrafted, can sustain 90-win seasons; the pandemic didn’t help any, but the White Sox only got a single, 93-win season of dominance out of this last rebuild. Tripling that will be no easy task.

Best case, the White Sox are back even or to a winning franchise with a dominant three seasons in 2028-30. Realistically — and still assuming the White Sox will be able to sustain winning a few years down the road in much the way the Orioles are beginning to do in the mid-2020s — it will take four 90s-win seasons to get back to the surface.

So, realistic best case, the White Sox are back in black and an overall winning club sometime in 2031.