Who'd have thought? Certainly not baseball's 2024 schedule makers, who couldn't possibly have predicted that this year's White Sox's road to eternal infamy would include hosting the team whose ancestors they threaten to eclipse for season-long futility.
"Meet the Mets," the White Sox said of their weekend's house guests. They certainly proved extremely generous hosts, allowing the postseason-contending Mets to sweep them in Guaranteed Rate Field. By now, Chicago's South Side shrugs, when other condign responses seem more futile than the White Sox themselves.
In a way, the Mets out-scoring the White Sox 12-4 could be construed as showing mercy upon the downtrodden. By Baseball Reference's blowout definition (a five-run difference or better), the White Sox are 8-33 and counting. The Mets won with only a 4-run advantage Friday, a 2-run advantage Saturday, and a 2-run advantage Sunday.
"They are not quitting," said White Sox interim manager Grady Sizemore of his hapless charges after Saturday's loss. "They are not folding. But it would be nice to have some of those balls fall, to get some bleeders or something."
They've been the fastest to a hundred losses, the fastest to mathematical postseason elimination, and finished the weekend with a new franchise record for regular season losses. Their ballpark rang with chants of "M-V-P! M-V-P!" Sunday afternoon ... for Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, who started the day's scoring by hitting Garrett Crochet's first pitch of the fourth inning into the left center field bleachers.
I'm not sure "bleeders" is an apropos word out of a White Sox mouth this year. This team's been bleeding from square one. And they haven't even had a fragment of the perverse charm of the 1962 Mets whose modern-era single-season record of 120 losses the White Sox now threaten with too much credibility.
Which may be one reason why one starting pitcher and one relief pitcher on the 1962 Mets are wary of the Blight Sox pushing them out of the record books. Jay Hook was credited with the Mets' first pitching win, when he helped bust a Met life-opening 9-game losing streak. Craig Anderson was credited with back-to-back wins in relief during a May 1962 doubleheader, and they'd be the last pitching wins with which he'd be credited in his entire major league life, a 19-decision losing streak just ahead of him.
They're both well aware that this year's Mets are chasing a place in the postseason while this year's White Sox are chasing them and their 1962 teammates living, dead, or otherwise. Neither Anderson nor Hook wants to see the White Sox break their team's 120 in '62. "I want them to win at least 12 more games," Anderson told The Athletic's Tim Britton before the weekend set began. "I hope they do, for their sake." The White Sox would have to win half their remaining 24 games to make Anderson's wish come true.
"It's shattering when it's happening to you, and I'm sure the White Sox are feeling that right now," said Hook to the same writer. "I wouldn't wish that on anybody. You don't like to go through life thinking you were part of the worst team of whatever you did."
It's what the pair didn't say aloud to Britton that makes the big difference. So I'll say it, yet again. This year's White Sox, like numerous historically horrible baseball teams, merely suck. The Original Mets sucked ... with style. This year's Blight Sox don't even have the sense of humor of undertakers. The Original Mets cultivated one to survive.
Now, it's hardly the White Sox's fault that they lack a Casey Stengel to take and keep the hardest heat off their players. But deposed manager Pedro Grifol was something between a wet blanket and a grump, and Sizemore is too earnest to help. He's almost like National Lampoon's Animal House's Chip Diller, upright in his ROTC uniform, the streets overrun by the panicked under siege from a Delta House operation, pleading, "Remain calm. All is well!"
Telling the world his team isn't folding isn't enough. Especially since it's been folded since the end of May. That's when the Blight Sox stood proud with a 15-43 record. It wasn't even enough to leave them room for a comeback comparable to the 2019 Nationals — who were 15-23 on May 10, but 24-33 at that May's end, before overthrowing themselves to go 69-36 the rest of the way and wrest their way to a World Series conquest while they were at it.
Give Stengel the keys to a city, as New York did, and he'd say (as in fact he did), "I'm gonna use this to open a new team." Give Sizemore the keys to Chicago and he's liable to hand it to the opposition with the most sportsmanlike intentions after they handed his men their heads yet again.
"Come an' see my amazin' Mets," Stengel would hector. "I been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I didn't know were invented yet." Sizemore wouldn't shock anyone by saying, "It is what it was." He's hardly Grifol's kind of grump, he's too innately cheerful for that, but neither has he seized the moment with wit. He'd never cut the mustard in the Ol' Perfesser's parlor.
Sizemore can say his Blight Sox have hit more doubles so far than those Mets did all '62, and stolen more bases, too. But the '62 Mets even had a respectable team .318 on-base percentage to the Sox's .278. Getting the '62 Mets on base wasn't half the problem that keeping them there or cashing them in without them dying by hook, crook, or schnook was.
Well, on Sunday afternoon, the White Sox had an inning that could have been from the 1962 Mets play book: Luis Robert, Jr. took one for the team leading off the seventh, getting plunked by Mets starter Sean Manaea, but then he was thrown out stealing. Andrew Vaughn drew a 2-out walk and Gavin Sheets dropped a base hit in front of sliding Mets left fielder Jesse Winker, but Miguel Vargas flied out to Winker and out went that threat.
Those '62 Mets were also infamous for the sort of fielding that made you think (ha! you thought I could resist another telling) they really had Abbott pitching to Costello with Who the Hell's on First, What the Hell's on Second, You Don't Want to Know's on third, and You Don't Even Want to Think About It's at shortstop. The National League's first expansion draft rules and entry fees had much to do with it. But the Mets turned into Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Stengel Circus entirely on their own from there.
The Blight Sox defense at this writing is worth a few less defensive runs below league average than the Original Mets. But they don't have anyone on the team with a fortieth of the perverse endearment of the Mets' mid-May '62 acquisition Marvelous Marv Throneberry. Their whole defense is about as funny as a stink bomb in a sewage treatment plant.
"[T]he Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life," wrote Jimmy Breslin in his post-1962 valedictory, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?
This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married.
They were also the team through whom those people found ways to laugh through their sorrows before trying to drown them. Not so these Blight Sox.
"I love the idea that [the Original Mets] were the worst baseball team of the modern era," writes A Year in Mudville author David Bagdade, whose book reviewed the 1962 Mets but who admits to being a White Sox fan, the poor dear, "but that they lost with personality and humor and that they remain one of the most loved teams of any era despite (or possibly because of) their record. The '24 Sox are just a steaming pile of baseball ineptitude. They don't lose with personality and humor. They just lose. I don't want anything about this Sox team to be enshrined in baseball immortality."
Too late, perhaps. In their perversely entertaining ways, the Original Mets gave the downtrodden hope. If these White Sox caught the downtrodden drowning, they'd sooner throw them anchors.
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