The 2024 Chicago White Sox 27 most miserable losses, ranked
- by USA Today
- Oct 18, 2024
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October 18, 2024 4:08 pm ET
It’s been a few weeks since the MLB regular season came to a conclusion and the amount of absolutely stellar playoff action has somehow exceeded all the hype heading into October.
It has also made baseball fans at least temporarily forget that the summer of 2024 bore witness to the worst team performance the centuries-old sport has ever seen. The Chicago White Sox found new and exciting ways to make their fans miserable en route to a modern day record 121 losses.
Now, on the eve of the 2024 World Series, it’s time to look at those losses again.
After painfully cataloging the myriad ways in which the White Sox lowered the floor for Major League Baseball competency, we’ve narrowed down the list to the 27 most miserable losses of the season.
Games earlier in the season were likely to earn a higher ranking because by July it was clear this team had accepted its fate. Some games made it onto the list because of what happened on the field, some because of what happened in the stands and some because of what happened in the clubhouse.
All of it set a new standard for modern futility the likes of which we may never see again. Or maybe we will sooner than we think. In any case, and for the sake of historians who will study the 2024 Chicago White Sox in the distant future, let’s remember some losses.
27 Score: 7-6, CHC
Most embarrassing moment(s): For the second straight day at Wrigley Field, the White Sox grabbed an early 5-1 lead in the fourth inning against their crosstown rivals. If this team were ever going to prove it could learn from its mistakes, this was been the moment. Instead, the White Sox doubled down on their errors.
In the bottom of the fifth inning, the Cubs cut the lead to 5-3, then added another three runs in the bottom of the seventh inning to take a 6-5 lead.
Sox Machine’s Jim Margalus perfectly captured the madness of watching it all unfold:
The White Sox led 5-3 entering that inning, and Michael Soroka returned to the mound after a 1-2-3 sixth. He opened the inning by drilling Dansby Swanson, then walked Yan Gomes. In the middle of a protracted battle with Tauchman, he committed the White Sox’s second balk with an improper step-off, which allowed one runner to score when he bounced his 11th pitch of the plate appearance past Korey Lee for a wild pitch ball four.
In the top of the eighth, Paul DeJong mashed his 10th home run of the year to knot things up, but by this point everyone in Chicago knew how this was going to end. Mike Tauchman brought it to fruition with a walk-off home run in the first at-bat of the bottom of the ninth inning. He sent the second pitch he saw from Michael Kopech straight into centerfield.
It’s not just that this loss came one day after the Sox blew a 5-0 lead at Wrigley, or that it came three days after Tommy Pham’s absurd postgame comments in Milwaukee. Or that the team would get hammered even worse the next day in Boston to record the franchise’s longest losing streak at 14 games with a 14-2 loss.
For most of the summer, Sox and Cubs fans engage in a sort of cold war. No matter how good one or the other is, there’s a tug-of-war for superiority in the city. The Crosstown Classic is when that finally boils over onto the field.
That was not the case in this game. One team left the field knowing it probably wasn’t headed for a great season. The other left knowing for sure it was going to contend for the worst season in MLB history. And a whole city tuned in only to find out it had no choice but to accept just how bad it was going to get.
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