DETROIT -- Well, they finally did it.
The White Sox lost their 121st game on Friday night in Detroit. As far as optics for clinching the losingest season in modern MLB history go, having a long-suffering Tigers fanbase celebrate a surprise playoff berth is a bit easier than White Sox fans deranged by grief cheering the arrival of an indelible black eye for an organization that has earned it.
But if you've been around this organization long enough to see the full trajectory, maybe it stings all the same.
"It’s tough watching them celebrate out there when that was us just a couple of years ago," said starting pitcher Garrett Crochet.
One more time, an increasingly young team played hard but sloppily in a 4-1 defeat. As always, they had far too little offense to paper over their mistakes or make another strong showing by a young starting pitcher matter. Crochet looked good inside of a vacuum, but inside of a vacuum is no way to live.
"I didn’t know how I’d feel during it," said first baseman Gavin Sheets postgame. "Winning three in a row, maybe we could do something special and ride it out and win six in a row and you start to believe in that and think it’s maybe not going to happen. And all of a sudden on the last out you’re on the wrong side of history. It hurt a little more than I expected it to."
"Honestly, there’s nothing for me right now," interim manager Grady Sizemore said of his feelings about the 121st loss. "The frustration has been long before the number."
An honest-to-god series sweep over the Angels to close out the home slate this week has muddled the picture slightly for a full-throated declaration that this is the worst season ever. They've been playing pro baseball in this country for an impossibly long stretch of time, and Thursday's 7-0 triumph clinched a better winning percentage than the 36-117 Philadelphia Athletics of 1916. But this season's failure was definitive enough to get the head of White Sox baseball operations to openly admit fault, which used to be a reliable marker of the most extreme circumstances.
"Our fans certainly don’t deserve to go through anything like this," said general manager Chris Getz said this week. "They pay money to come to games and watch games. They look to watch the Chicago White Sox as a positive outlet and we haven’t been able to provide too many positive outcomes throughout the season."
A mid-inning Comerica Park scoreboard segment Friday night asked "Who has more?" between likely AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal's pitching wins and White Sox road wins. Skubal, to Tigers fans' amusement, has an 18-16 edge. The neverending supply of easy jokes aside, a surprising thing about a historic level of losing, and all the suffering and embarrassment that comes with it, is how quickly it becomes routine, banal.
"No real emotions," Crochet said postgame. "We had a bad April. We just never dug ourselves out of that hole. We are where we are because of the way we played, which sucks. But that’s just all it is."
Losing 121 games doesn’t happen quickly, even when it feels like it’s happening every day. As the past few years on Earth have proven, you can get used to anything, even losing, which first baseman Andrew Vaughn still readily describes as “the worst thing in the world.”
"All the great teams talk about being not too high or too low," said starting pitcher Davis Martin. "We've endured a lot of the lows. We're losing a lot, and record-wise it doesn't look great. But [emotionally] we're still here in the middle. Going forward the next few years when we are winning a lot of games, we'll be able to stay here."
Like the majority of the current active roster, Martin wasn't present for the full run, with Tommy John surgery rehab keeping him sidelined until the All-Star break. A franchise record 63 different players have been used this White Sox season, which both represents how difficult it's been for anyone to find footing, and also a roster heavy on young players trying to set themselves up for the future, ideally rather than having their self-worth tied to this current failed project. In this sport, developing a pain tolerance for failure is valuable work experience.
The White Sox postgame locker room is simply always silent when media enters, finding a team in medias res of processing more losing than any of them have ever experienced in their lives, dressing and departing in normal procedure. When a team goes 1-95 in games where they're trailing after seven innings, the recaps getting pretty easy to churn out, too. At some point in late April, evenings at Guaranteed Rate adapted a rhythm of upbeat and pleasant pronouncements to keep fighting in the afternoon, quiet defeats or the occasional shambolic late-inning collapses in the evening, and then capping off the night with assurances of “we know where we’re at,” as if anyone could forget.
“It’s not due to a lack of effort,” said infielder Nicky Lopez. “Guys are coming in here and working hard and trying to get better. It’s just seven o’clock happens, and we come up short.”
White Sox players spent the afternoon hours before clinching historical ineptitude playing cards, having lighthearted debates about clubhouse hygiene, and the typical playful banter that mixes in between the moments the clock hits a certain part of the daily schedule, and different position groups leap up for infield practice or catch play as if they're responding to an alarm no one else can hear. As depictions of previous years' clubhouses grow more and more toxic, no one is in a position to refute that this group stayed together as much as they claimed.
It's just that it became a survival tactic.
"It's easy for clubhouses to become fractured and just start pointing fingers when a season like this is happening," said Jonathan Cannon. "It hasn't always gone our way, but we've stuck together through it all."
Maybe the dispiriting thing -- or rather just a dispiriting thing -- about this whole season is the White Sox did not execute an unprecedented teardown to get here. That they can't pick higher than 10th in next year's draft is often portrayed as the big tragedy, but it's not clear how anyone feels this season should be rewarded, or that the team went through great lengths to secure such a prize.
Getz's deadline sell-off of six players was more remembered for ending with Crochet and Luis Robert Jr. still in-house. Tim Anderson was allowed to walk in free agency and few additions were made, but the Sox weren't in the bottom-10 for major league payrolls. They simply tapped the brakes on trying to compete for the first time in three years, and it immediately revealed to the world the horrifying state of the foundation beneath.
Teams rebuild all the time these days. Eclipsing 100 losses is no longer a unique disgrace. In the increasingly finite years of a major league career, it's more common than ever to spend a good chunk of it knowing the front office is biding time until better days. It's only through doing so many other things wrong for years that the White Sox made a down season into something that will sting and scar for decades, and remain in history for longer.
"It’s been an extremely difficult year for everybody," Sheets said. "It’s been hard mentally, hard physically. I feel bad for everybody in this room, to be a part of this."
Stadium security personnel that have spent the last six months trying to flag down fans before they could unfurl banners chiding Jerry Reinsdorf might disagree. Players and coaches that saw their own fans rooting against them during the final homestand, and have received taunts and mockery all year, have surely had enough. But the angry fans at Guaranteed Rate Field last week are a blessing. The Sox Twitter account getting ratio'd into oblivion represents a latent asset. A writer-owned, White Sox-themed website gainfully employing multiple people is a miracle. Angry fans are the best-case scenario.
The paying fans demanding an ownership change after an infield popup gets dropped between four White Sox defenders still feel that it's possible to prod their team into a better future. They are still here, and can still find a reason to be. The vacant 500 levels of the past week in Chicago represents those who see 121 losses, an impossible nadir without precedent, and have accepted that this is just the way things are.
