The Chicago White Sox are Fighting to (NOT) Be the Worst Team of All Time
The only thing they've succeeded at in 2024, is being among the absolute worst.
The south side of Chicago has seen better days. The White Sox sit well in the basement of the AL Central with an 18-53 record prior to Saturday’s slate of games. The team is currently more games out of the playoff picture (20.5 games behind the Twins for the third AL Wild Card spot) than they’ve been able to win all season. The table below shows the club’s rank in popular team-level stats as of Saturday 6/15.
Only the Colorado Rockies are worse in any of the above stats (ERA and Fielding Independent Pitching, a.k.a. FIP). Even that comes with a bit of an asterisk as the Rockies play in the thin air of Denver, 5,200 feet above sea level, where scoring and home runs have historically come at a higher rate than the rest of baseball. Offense has been the weakest aspect of Chicago’s game. The team’s 78 wRC+ (Weighted Runs Created Plus) sits at the bottom of the league, and essentially means they generate runs at a rate 22% lower than league average. Their batting average of .218 is tied for 6th-worst in Baseball history, dating back to 18891. All of this, however, still doesn’t sum up just how bad this team really is in the context of Baseball history.
Top-Ten Worst Winning Percentage
If the White Sox are to continue on this pace, they will wind up with the 9th-worst winning percentage of any team in Baseball since 1889.
The infamous “worst team ever” Cleveland Spiders were so bad that the team was actually disbanded at the conclusion of the season. Even their fans fully checked-out. The team’s attendance dropped so low (averaging just 145 per game) that opposing teams began refusing to play there, thus forcing the Spiders to play most of their games on the road.2 Another team which appears three times on this list, the Louisville Colonels, were also disbanded after the 1899 season. Surprisingly (and kind of sadly), that wasn’t even one of the Colonels worst years. If the Sox continue to win just 25.4% of their games, they’ll wind up with just about 42 wins on the season (and 120 losses).
Team WAR Isn’t Much Better
As if a 9th-worst all-time winning percentage wasn’t bad enough, should the White Sox continue on this pace, they’ll end with the 11th-worst in WAR (Wins Above Replacement) over the past 135.
Unsurprisingly, the Cleveland Spiders had far-and-away the worst team Wins Above Replacement, with their team cumulatively playing at 10.2 wins worse than replacement-level. Individually speaking, the White Sox sport five players with a zero or negative WAR - Michael Soroka (P), Andrew Benintendi (OF), Andrew Vaughn (1B/DH), Eloy Jimenez (LF/DH), and Nicky Lopez (IF).
Combining WAR and Win Percentage Makes It Even Worse
To determine the worst teams based on both winning percentage and WAR, I took the rankings of each team (with 1 being worst) for WAR and Winning Percentage and added those ranks together to get a team score. The lower the score, the worse the team. The 2024 White Sox come in at number four all-time.
Can Things Get Better in Chicago?
Statcast is somewhat optimistic on the White Sox. The team’s Expected Weighted On-Base Average of .299 is 19 points higher than their current wOBA. Additionally, their 20-point gap between Expected Batting Average and actual Batting Average (.238 vs. .218) is the largest gap in the MLB.3 But when you’re this bad, there really isn’t anywhere to go but up. So, how will the White Sox end up? I ran a quick multiple linear regression model consisting of a handful of stats and predictive metrics, using the last five full seasons of team data, to predict how many wins the White Sox will wind up with this year4. The model performed extremely well, with an r-squared value of .995, was statistically significant, and was able to predict a team’s end-of-season record at an accuracy within 1 win. Assuming the White Sox play to the same level as they have up to this point, my model projects them to end with a record of 45-117, good for a winning percentage of .275. A slight improvement, but still very, very bad. Frankly, the only thing the White Sox really have to play for the rest of this year is to just not be one of (if not THE) worst team of all time.
Major League Leaderboards - 2024 - Batting | FanGraphs Baseball
1899 Cleveland Spiders season - Wikipedia
Statcast Expected wOBA, xBA, xSLG | baseballsavant.com (mlb.com)
Stats used in the model were Run Differential, Strength of Schedule (from Baseball Reference), Simple Rating System (from Baseball Reference), Luck (from Baseball Reference), wOBA, ERA, Batting WAR, Pitching WAR, and Defensive Runs Saved (from Baseball Reference).