Culture
The White Sox — 81 games under .500! — are piling up mind-blowing numbers for the ages
Editor’s note: This is a Weird and Wild short. To read this week’s full Weird and Wild column, go here.
For weeks now, months to be honest, we’ve been spending way too much valuable time making all-important comparisons between the 2024 White Sox and Casey Stengel’s legendarily hapless 1962 Mets. But now we know: That was actually the wrong comp.
These White Sox (current record: 33-114) would need a miracle to out-win those ’62 Mets (40-120). So it’s time to do something I never thought would happen: It’s time to turn our attention to those even more legendary 1899 Cleveland Spiders (attractive final record: 20-134).
I came to that mind-blowing realization Thursday morning, when the reality of this nutty little number hit home:
81 Games under .500!!!
As a longtime chronicler of everything Weird and Wild, I’ve seen a lot of stuff. But I thought to myself as I stared at the standings: Have I ever seen THAT? Have I ever seen any team that fell 81 freaking games under .500?
Here’s the truth: Nope. I. Have. Not. And neither have you, unless you’re a spritely 108 years old. And even if you are indeed 108 years old, your memory of previous 81-under-.500 history might be a little hazy. So allow me to fill you in.
The ’62 Mets? Sorry. Never got to 81 under.
The 2003 Tigers? Sorry. They never made it either.
Both of those teams got to 80 under. But it takes a truly special group to sink below 80 games under the sea. So let’s salute these White Sox because they’re one of those extraordinary teams that took a wrong turn and just kept going.
And who are those extraordinary teams? Here they come — the only teams in American League/National League/19th-century American Association history that ever got to 81 under or worse (in chronological order):
Whitey Witt’s 1916 A’s — Fell to 81 under at 33-114, just like these White Sox, except it wasn’t until Sept. 27 and they had only six games left in the season … but they somehow won three of them! (Final record: 36-117.)
Harry Colliflower’s 1899 Spiders — There’s a reason the Spiders are the poster boys for single-season futility, you know. They plummeted to 81 under on Aug. 31 (at 19-100). They still had 35 games to play … and they lost 34 of them! (Final record: 20-134.)
Kirtley Baker’s 1890 Alleghenys — Once upon a time, before the Spiders, these guys were the standard for 19th-century ineptitude. They descended to 81 under on Sept. 16 (at 21-102). They had 14 games remaining … and won two! (Final record: 23-113, plus two ties.)
Toad Ramsey’s 1889 Colonels — The worst team in the American Association’s glorious history, the Colonels tumbled to 81 under at 26-107. Fortunately, it was Oct. 8, so they had only five games left … and won one! (Final record: 27-111.)
And that’s the whole 81-Under Club. But if you were paying attention (in case we spring an end-of-season 2024 White Sox quiz on you), you might have noticed something. Only once, in nearly a century and a half of major-league history, had any team awakened this early in September and found itself 81 games under .500 or worse. And it was … those 1899 Spiders, because of course it was!
Yet now the Spiders have company, in these 2024 White Sox? What a time to be alive.
GO DEEPER
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Wednesday’s loss to the Guardians dropped the White Sox to 1-27 in their past 28 games at home. (Kamil Krzaczynski / Imagn Images)
But meanwhile, in other important White Sox news …
They can’t go home again! Since the second game of their July 10 doubleheader with Minnesota, the White Sox are 1-27 when they play baseball in their home park. One and 27! According to Baseball Reference, only one other team in the modern era has ever had a 1-27 stretch at home (or worse). And it was those 1916 A’s (also 1-27, in a messy 28-game span in July and August).
So that means, just since that game against the Twins on July 10, nine teams have more wins at Guaranteed Rate Field than the team that plays half its season on that field. There would be more teams, of course, but only nine have been allowed to play there by the schedule-makers of America.
Second to none! This seems impossible, but the White Sox are now 6-43 in the second half. Six and 43! Does this seem bad? How about historically bad. Since the invention of All-Star breaks, the fewest games any team has won in the second half of a non-strike season is 15, by Orie Arntzen’s 1943 A’s (15-61). I’m starting to think the White Sox aren’t going to catch them.
Late starters! In a related development, White Sox starters are now 2-30 in the second half. Two and 30! The record for the worst second-half winning percentage by any rotation is .167 (7-35), by Paolo Espino’s 2022 Nationals. I’m starting to think the White Sox might not catch that group, either.
No one will save you! On those sporadic occasions when the White Sox take a lead, they’ve been known to call on their bullpen to protect it. Here’s how that’s gone:
When they bring in their relievers in save situations, their bullpen’s record is now 3-17. Three and 17! Plus a 7.79 ERA, 31 blown saves and (somehow) more home runs allowed (26) than saves converted (18).
I rumbled through the Baseball Reference files for way too long. How many other teams could I find, since the dawn of the modern save rule in 1969, with more gopherballs than saves in those situations? That would be none!
I could keep going here for hours. But did you know …
• This White Sox team hasn’t started a pitcher with a winning record in over a month? Not even some opener who was 1-0. It’s 36 games in a row now, the fourth-longest streak in franchise history.
• The White Sox have now lost their first game of every month – April, May, June, July, August and September? Can’t beat that kind of consistency.
• It’s Sept. 13 … and the White Sox have won 33 games! You know when the Guardians won their 33rd game? How about May 22! That’s three and a half freaking months (and 111 days) ago!
• And finally, is it too late to wish a happy 105th birthday to Loyola of Chicago icon Sister Jean? As a friend of mine reminded me on Sister Jean’s birthday last month, she’s been gracing our planet for more than a century now. And she has seen the White Sox win a postseason series in exactly one of those 105 years (2005, obviously). I’m starting to think the chances of her seeing another series win this October aren’t good.
GO DEEPER
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(Top photo of Luis Robert Jr.: Matt Krohn / Associated Press)
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
Take me to visit a dysfunctional family with oceanfront real estate
by Meg Mitchell Moore
Moore is a dependable ingredient in any summer reading soufflé. Her airy novels accomplish what they came to do: entertain and transport, without the pyrotechnics of, say, books that eschew quotation marks. In “Down With the Shipmans,” three sisters, laden with baggage, converge on their late mother’s beach cottage, only to learn that their father and his much younger wife are planning to sell the place.
The stakes are high, the drama is juicy and the views are sublime. Moore even provides two beach dogs — Leo (an unruly pit bull mix) and Cinnamon (“golden retriever, red bandanna, long pink tongue”) — to keep things lively. (Comes out June 2)
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