Chicago's Southside Sadness

Amid a 20-game losing streak, the White Sox are barreling towards baseball infamy.

Oakland Athletics v Chicago White Sox / Jamie Sabau/GettyImages

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece on this historically bad season for the Chicago White Sox. That was on June 16th, when the team had just 71 games under their belt. Surely things had to get better, right? Wrong. In fact, it’s gotten even worse for the Southsiders. Yesterday the ChiSox lost their 20th consecutive game which dropped their record to 27-87, good for a .237 winning percentage. To put it into perspective, the American League All-Star team has won more games since July 11th than the White Sox. They are on pace to lose 124 games, which would be the most since the 1899 Cleveland Spiders whose 20-134 record remains the worst in American/National League history. But that may not even contextualize how utterly horrible this team is. I dug into some numbers to illustrate how the 2024 Chicago White Sox may truly be the worst baseball team ever.

Winning Percentage

The White Sox currently rank as the sixth-worst team by winning percentage dating back to 1889. As you can see though, teams did not play quite as many games back in baseball’s formative years, so their total losses may well eclipse nearly all those in front of them.

But as we know, winning percentage is not everything and does not solely define the ability of a team. Let’s examine some other numbers.

Wins Above Replacement

The White Sox are on pace to finish with a mere 2.0 Wins Above Replacement. Should this hold, this would place them as the seventh-worst all time in total team WAR¹. The table below ranks all teams since 1889 with fewer than 10 total WAR per 162 games (to account for the shorter seasons in the old days, and odd-ball abbreviated seasons like 2020 and strike-shortened campaigns)².

When considering both WAR and winning percentage, few challenge the White Sox. Only the 1890 Pittsburgh Pirates and 1899 Cleveland Spiders have considerably worse WAR + Win% combinations. While the 2003 Tigers rival this year’s Sox, the ‘63 Mets are the only other squad that could arguably be put into the same conversation.

Pitching and Hitting

Let’s now examine teams’ specific pitching and hitting abilities based on how they compared to the rest of their league. To do this, I found the z-score for each team’s ERA (for pitching) and OPS (for hitting). The z-score tells us how many standard deviations away from the average a number is. For example, the 2024 White Sox’s OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) has a z-score of -2.52, indicating that their OPS is 2.52 standard deviations lower than the league average. The same logic applies for ERA, although since a low ERA is preferred, I reversed the signs so the -1.63 z-score for the Sox’s ERA means their ERA is 1.62 standard devotions higher (worse) than this year’s league average. I added together the two z-scores to get a holistic view of team pitching and hitting relative to the rest of the league in their respective seasons.

The White Sox are the third-worst, relative to the league average in their respective season, when considering ERA and OPS together. Unsurprisingly, the infamous Cleveland Spiders take the crown for the worst.

Bringing it All Together

In this piece, we have analyzed winning percentage, WAR, winning percentage combined with WAR, and the individual components of pitching and hitting relative to league average. Only the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, 1915 Philadelphia Athletics, 1890 Pittsburgh Pirates, and, yes, the 2024 Chicago White Sox rank among the seven worst in all areas. The White Sox current losing streak has driven them into the depths of baseball infamy. At 41.5 games out of first place in the AL Central, the team has nothing left to play for this season, besides avoiding the distinction of the most pitiful team in the history of baseball.

1. Based on a sum of FanGraphs Pitching and Batting WAR

2. Calculated by multiplying total team WAR/G by 162.