Culture
The '24 White Sox are at risk of being worse than the '62 Mets: Can they avoid infamy?
Editor’s note: The White Sox have fired manager Pedro Grifol, the team announced Thursday morning.
OAKLAND, Calif. — It was two hours before first pitch, and Chicago White Sox manager Pedro Grifol sat in his office this week as he would before any other game. As his scuffling club prepared to face the Oakland Athletics, he settled in behind his desk, in uniform, and projected a sense of calm that belied his predicament.
On the day he was hired, in November of 2022, Grifol flashed the intensity of a baseball coaching lifer, a quality that helped him land the job. “We’re going to prepare every night to kick your ass, and that’s just what we’re gonna do,” Grifol said, a comment that has since gone viral because there have been precious few ass-kickings delivered by the White Sox. In this second year at the helm, Grifol is 89-190. And on this day, with his team on a 20-game losing streak, the conversation brought all the expected questions about his job performance.
In the public discourse, the end of his tenure has been referred to as a question of when, not if. Sitting back in his chair, Grifol politely introduced himself. For the next 10 minutes, he was at times thoughtful, acknowledging the desperate desire to win a game. When asked about a radio report that claimed Grifol had pinned all the losing on his players — part of a motivational tactic gone wrong earlier this season — his denial indicated a firm sense of the demands of leadership.
“What coach or manager in their right mind would try to separate themselves from adversity?” Grifol said. “When you’re in a group setting, when you’re all in this thing together. … It’s not my personality, it’s not who I am.”
But at other times, he flashed an edge.
When asked if he felt the talent in his clubhouse was better than the team’s record, Grifol said, “I’m not going to answer that question. What’s behind that question?”
When asked if he felt the conversation surrounding his team wasn’t fair, Grifol said: “I don’t read (the) media. I don’t have social media. So that’s a tough question. I know where we’re at as a team. I know where we’re trying to go, and what we’re trying to get accomplished. But as far as what’s happening out there, I can just imagine it.
“I’m not avoiding anything because I don’t hear the noise. I come here to work with the players.”
Just hours later, those same players would tie an American League record with their 21st consecutive loss. And though they’d come back the next day to end the losing streak, it proved to be a temporary reprieve. On Wednesday, the White Sox left Oakland on the heels of another loss, a 3-2 defeat that dropped them to 61 games below .500, 15 games worse than any other big league team.
With the season entering the homestretch, the White Sox remain on track to break one of baseball’s most dubious records.
In 1962, in the first year of their existence, the New York Mets did what no club had done in baseball’s modern era. In a single season, they lost a staggering 120 games. The 2024 White Sox are on pace to lose 123 games. They’ll need to win 15 of their next 45 games to avoid tying the Mets’ ignominious mark. It won’t be easy.
The rest of the season is now a race to avoid infamy, one that has become a national storyline, though the beleaguered manager seems taken aback by the scrutiny.
“This is a close-knit group,” Grifol said. “Here, you come from the outside, and nobody knows you.”
White Sox manager Pedro Grifol following a loss. (Bruce Kluckhohn / USA Today)
In 2023, when Chicago was expected to compete, their abysmal record necessitated a trade deadline sell-off. A year later, a team that began with low expectations has found a way to massively underperform, with a roster littered with hitters who have failed to live up to their career numbers. Luis Robert Jr. hit 38 home runs last year; he has just 12 this season. Andrew Benintendi was an All-Star two years ago; this season his OPS+ is 70.
Andrew Vaughn, Gavin Sheets, Nick Senzel and the recently traded Eloy Jimenez have all disappointed. Meanwhile, Robbie Grossman and Kevin Pillar struggled earlier in the year with the White Sox but have vastly improved with their new teams.
All this failure begs the question: Where is this all headed, and what is the plan to right the ship?
White Sox general manager Chris Getz, a 40-year-old former player, was elevated into his position late last season after the dismissal of longtime executives Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn. He hammered home the idea of getting back to contention, called this season the first year of a “multi-layered, multi-year project” and boasted about what he believes is growth in the organization’s pitching department.
“We made a pretty strong run at the major-league level with some of our starting pitchers — for two months time being at the top of the American League with our starters,” Getz said in an interview this week. “That is not something I think many people believed we were going to be able to accomplish.”
Yes, there was a stretch where the team’s starting pitching excelled, however, as a whole the staff has accomplished very little. The White Sox team ERA is 4.83, better than only the Colorado Rockies.
This season is more painful than anyone expected, Getz acknowledged. He knows it’s hard to watch. He came in unproven, and his previous work as the club’s director of player development hadn’t yielded many positive results. But as a GM, he believes the organization is in a better place now, overall, than when he inherited it.
“At the end of the day, nobody’s going to feel or believe that we’re building toward something until it shows up in the win-loss record,” Getz said. “That’s the reality of our sport. That’s the reality of fan bases. Until that happens, there’s going to be a high level of skepticism.
“But for those of us that are living under the hood and understand this multi-layered project in front of us, they understand that this is part of the process that was set out.”
Many of those fans questioning the rebuild’s credibility also don’t believe that owner Jerry Reinsdorf will ever fully invest what’s needed to build the White Sox into a sustainable winner. After all, the most expensive contract in White Sox history is the $75 million that Andrew Benintendi earned before last season.
White Sox GM Chris Getz. (Kamil Krzaczynski / USA Today)
When asked if Reinsdorf would eventually increase his financial investment, Getz answered definitively: “Yes.”
“There’s going to be times when we’re going to have to tap into some financial resources to go after free agents, or pour infrastructure and technology and continue to expand and strengthen our front or departments throughout the organization,” Getz said.
“That’s all part of this plan that’s in place.”
That plan seems hard to envision, especially as the disheartening losses pile up, though like most big-league teams the White Sox don’t let on. This week, the clubhouse functioned like almost any other around the league. Before the game, players occupied themselves with card games or their phones. The mood was light. Even the quiet after Monday’s game seemed typical for a big league team. Whether a team is in first place — or in the running for worst team ever — there is mostly silence.
The most obvious difference: In this clubhouse, and with this team, the players are being asked to explain what feels almost inexplicable.
“We’re handling it fine, as best as we can,” outfielder Corey Julks said quietly. “We’ve got to rally as a team.”
The trade deadline similarly gave cold comfort to those hoping to see Chicago’s plan substantively advance. The White Sox were universally criticized for their return in a three-team trade that netted Miguel Vargas and two 19-year-old prospects for Erik Fedde, Tommy Pham and Michael Kopech.
Getz said he knew ahead of time the trade might be criticized. But he said he remains very happy with the return and hopes it can represent an organizational shift.
“Obviously, that’s why I’m here,” Vargas said. “I’m trying to bring that LA energy, trying to bring that here. Have that culture … trying to bring that here, that energy to be able to, in the future, have success.”
Vargas left a first-place club and joined one that was, at the time, on a 15-game losing streak.
In the days following, the toll of talking to the media about the club’s struggles was evident in its players.
“We just haven’t scored as many runs as the other team has for 20 games in a row,” pitcher Garrett Crochet said before a game this week.
When asked, probably not for the first or last time, about the anxiety of avoiding an all-time loss record, he said: “I’m done with this interview.”
John Brebbia, a 34-year-old workhorse reliever in his first season with the White Sox, is the oldest and most veteran player on the roster, and he believes the talent is better than the record. He understands the concerns over finishing with a worse record than the ‘62 Mets.
“It’s fair, it should be asked,” Brebbia said. “If it’s trending that way, we’re gonna get asked about it. It’s part of the job. I can’t speak for everyone’s motivation. But from my perspective, it looks like everyone shows up and wants to win as much as possible.”
But outside the lines, the White Sox have become a sideshow. Even the team-run postgame show has piled on with criticisms.
Prior to Grifol’s hiring, Ozzie Guillen reportedly was one of several candidates interviewed by the organization. His ties to the White Sox run deep, both as a player and later as the manager during Chicago’s World Series championship in 2005. He ultimately was not selected for a reunion and now serves as an analyst. After a recent loss, Guillen brought up the team’s choice of Grifol, and quipped on air: “I don’t think I was that bad a manager.”
The fans, too, have seen enough. Paper bags have become part of the standard uniform for some White Sox loyalists who still show up for games. In Oakland, in the stands behind the visiting dugout, White Sox fan Matt Verplaetse bought a ticket and sat alone. He wore a T-shirt that displayed what has long been a common refrain among the fanbase: “Sell the team Jerry.”
Verplaetse grew up in the Chicago area and has since moved to Northern California. He likes baseball and remains a die-hard fan, though he was still self-aware enough to poke fun at his attendance.
There is a lot to ask about the franchise’s future. The legitimacy of their long-term plan — and the quality of staff and players they’ll be able to bring in — are chief among them. But for now, over the final 45 games, Verplaetse has zeroed in on perhaps the most important question.
“I think everyone, going in, expected it to be pretty bad,” he said. “But (they) never predicted it being this bad. And now, it’s almost a morbid curiosity.
“How bad is it going to get?”
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: Getty Images / David Berding, Lachlan Cunningham)
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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