Since the White Sox hadn't reached the postseason of a traditional 162-game season since 2008, I'm learning about all the ways a prolonged streak of Octoberless baseball formed my writing and site-management habits. For instance, I was far more hesitant to make fall plans with any meaning this year, whereas a couple years ago I suggested a wedding date for the second half of October because there was zero threat of overlap.
There's also the matter of playoff baseball looming over typical first-week-of-October posts like minor league affiliate recaps and the year-in-review fare, because the significance of the ALDS made the minors look exceedingly minor by comparison, and we had to wait for the White Sox to finish the postseason -- or, more accurately, the postseason to finish the White Sox -- to understand whether additional series changed the way we interpreted the regular season.
I'm seeing a similar shift in my attitude towards the best/worst games lists. The White Sox had so many victories that it was hard to pick 10, which is why I use the "companion game" device to stretch the 2021 list past a baker's dozen.
PERTINENT: The top 10 White Sox winners of 2021
Baseball being a zero-sum game, there are far fewer losses to sort through. What's more, in a season where the White Sox coasted to a division title, a fair chunk of the losses were of the can't-win-'em-all variety. Even if they took particularly ugly forms, they were sprinkled in between streaks of far better play, which made everything more forgivable.
We still maintained the tag for regular-season losses that might stand out at the end of the year, and they're easy enough to remember when seeing the score, or maybe just a few details from the recap. Just like other years, we can sort them into varieties.
Outright stinkers:
Outright stinkers where position players pitched:
- Angels 9, White Sox 3 on Sept. 16 (Romy González)
- Red Sox 11, White Sox 4 on April 19 (Yermín Mercedes and Danny Mendick)
Spectacular crashes:
Slides into the sea:
Losses within losses:
- Blue Jays 6, White Sox 2 on June 9 (Nick Madrigal's injury)
- Cleveland 5, White Sox 0 on May 2 (Luis Robert's injury)
Mismanaged affairs:
Games against Houston:
- Most of 'em
Still, none of these threatened the White Sox's chances for a division title, which cost them a fair percentage of their significance. In previous losing seasons, I felt compelled to categorize the losses where their shortcomings manifested themselves in particularly egregious forms. When you're inundated with 85 to 100 losses year after year, it feels useful to highlight the ones that best symbolized how far the rebuild had to go.
In a full winning season where October can be anticipated two months out, losses take on a different meaning. By the time September rolled around, White Sox fans were intimately familiar with all of the potential pitfalls that had been exposed over the first five months of the season. The way the offense tended to disappear against good teams. The right-handedness. The ground-ball ruts. Liam Hendriks' home-run issues, Craig Kimbrel's everything issues. Tony La Russa's traditionalist leanings. The unclear health. Some might've been back of mind, but they were ready to be summoned at a moment's notice in the event of a bad matchup.
In this light, detailing the individual losses feels unnecessary. It's a relic from 2013 or 2016 or 2018 when a White Sox blog's readership was mostly sickos ...
... but when more of the readership is drawn to the White Sox by actual entertainment value than mere summer ritual, there are more constructive ways to process the defeats besides rubbernecking. A lot of them will probably make their ways into the Offseason Plan Project, which will be opening up a week from now. Adjust your plans accordingly.
