A reflection on the White Sox, and why we love losing streaks
As we roll into the final third of the 2024 Major League Baseball season, one topic has captivated fans across the nation like no other.
I’m not talking about Paul Skene’s meteoric rise to the top of the Cy Young race as a rookie or Aaron Judge’s dominant campaign for his second American League Most Valuable Player Award. Nor am I talking about the Cleveland Guardians’ surprising contention for the best record in baseball or Bobby Witt Jr. making the third-year leap. What I’m talking about, rather, is the Chicago White Sox’s plunge toward the bottom of the standings.
Coming into this season, nobody expected the White Sox to light the world on fire. Their +25000 preseason odds of ending the season as World Series champions were better only than Oakland and Colorado’s +50000 marks. Their 61.5 projected win total was also third-worst in the league ahead of those same two teams. All this to say, we all knew the White Sox would struggle this season.
What was more surprising, however, was the extent. Still, this isn’t the first time that an already bad team has underperformed. What caught people’s attention, however, was their remarkable ability to find a way to lose. From June 22 through July 6, the White Sox lost 14 games in a row.
The first skid turned some heads, but they remarkably topped that with a 21-game losing streak starting on July 12, lasting until they finally snapped it on Tuesday with a 5-1 win over the Oakland A’s, who were 47-67 heading into the game. The victory left Chicago tied with the 1988 Baltimore Orioles as the longest American League losing streak and they finished just two losses shy of the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies’ 23-game skid.
For some context on how long that streak was, Joe Biden was still the Democratic presidential candidate the last time the White Sox had won a game prior to Tuesday. As Twitter user Jay Cuda pointed out, the moon also made a full rotation around the Earth in the time that it took the White Sox to win another game.
For some more context, if every game on the White Sox’s two losing streaks had been canceled, they would still have the worst winning percentage in the major leagues at 33.7%, trailing Oakland in the American League at 41.4% and Colorado and Miami in the National League at 36.2% and 36.4% respectively.
What’s interesting about streaks such as the White Sox’s is that losing games causes fans to lose interest, but being historically bad brings it back up. On Monday, before the skid had been snapped, I went online and checked the price for the White Sox’s home game against the Cubs on Friday night. The game had the potential to set the record for the longest losing streak in modern Major League history (since 1900) at 24 games and tickets were starting at $96. The next day’s game against the same team had tickets starting at just $11.
Some might say that it’s just the nature of rises and falls. People like storylines and watching a team lose 20 games in a row is, if nothing else, a story. Yet, winning streaks seldom garner the same attention. The average basketball fan could likely tell you the Detroit Pistons had the longest losing streak in the NBA last year, dropping 28 straight games from Oct. 30 through Dec. 30. Could they tell you who had the longest winning streak?
For those wondering at home, the longest winnings streak in the NBA last season was 11 games, held by the league-champion Boston Celtics and the Houston Rockets.
The Celtics finished the season well ahead of the pack, with their 64 wins putting them 14 games ahead of the Eastern Conference’s regular-season runners-up, the New York Knicks. The Rockets, however, were a middling team. They finished the year at 41-41 and missed the playoffs at 11th in the Western Conference. As such, their 11-game winning streak stands out as much more of an aberration than the last-place Pistons stringing together a series of losses. Still, the Rockets’ streak never drew nearly the attention that the Pistons’ did.
Even taking the local angle and watching the Twins on a daily basis, does the average Minnesotan know that the Twins’ 12-game surge back in May is still the longest in baseball this season?
At the end of the day, what it mostly comes down to is schadenfreude, a German word meaning pleasure taken from another’s misfortune. With only 12 teams making the playoffs, two winning pennants and one claiming a championship, most baseball fans know going into the season that they won’t see their team win anything of substance.
Cinderella stories are what make sports special, in many ways. Even when we watch our teams fall to fourth or fifth in the division, there’s always a small glimmer of hope in the back of our mind saying, “all they need to do is sweep each of the next four series and we’re back in contention for that last wildcard spot.”
It’s the same reason we watch SportsCenter’s Not Top 10 on Sunday mornings. Hoping against hope only goes so far, so it’s nice to be thankful for what you have. As we watch the Twins continue to jostle for postseason position with the Kansas City Royals and Boston Red Sox, the White Sox streak brings some levity to the season. Win or lose, regardless of where we see our team’s finish, it’s nice to take a moment to realize that it could be worse.
At least we weren’t raised on the White Sox.