‘They are that bad’: Inside the White Sox’s road to

Buster Olney

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Buster Olney

ESPN Senior Writer
- Senior writer ESPN Magazine/ESPN.com
- Analyst/reporter ESPN television
- Author of “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty”
Jesse Rogers

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Jesse Rogers

ESPN Staff Writer

Sep 25, 2024, 11:33 AM ET

MORE THAN 17,000 fans — and 375 dogs, attending the season’s final Dog Day promotion — descended upon Guaranteed Rate Field on Tuesday, there to see the Chicago White Sox set the modern-day mark for losses in a single season. One fan even printed out a hard ticket for the game.

“It’s history,” he said. “I want to have a piece of it.”

Inside the clubhouse, players have taken the ignominy in stride over the past 156 games, 120 of them losses. But knowing that this record-setting moment was coming didn’t take away the sting of its arrival.

“This isn’t the kind of attention we want,” outfielder/first baseman Gavin Sheets told what was the largest media contingent of the year, according to several players.

Six hours later — after a pregame rain delay of an hour and five minutes followed by an eighth-inning comeback against the Los Angeles Angels — the White Sox ended the night exactly where they started it: one game away from becoming the worst team in modern baseball history.

Chicago improved to 1-94 when trailing after seven innings — but celebrated the victory on the mound to boos loud enough to be heard through the stadium. The fans’ complicated feelings showed all game long, with a mix of cheers and boos when things went right for the home team and at others chanting “Sell the team!” when things went wrong.

“First comeback win being this late in the season is hard to believe,” outfielder Andrew Benintendi said after the game. “People here tonight were trying to see history. They’re going to have to wait one more day. Maybe.”

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There are bad teams in every baseball season. Some of them lose 100 games, maybe more. That was the fate many expected for Chicago – even within the franchise — coming off a 101-loss 2023 season. But unless they have five more unexpected wins in them, the 2024 Chicago White Sox will soon live in baseball infamy as the worst team ever, supplanting the 1962 New York Mets who were 40-120.

“I think if you would have told me we were going to end up flirting with the record I would have been a little surprised,” general manager Chris Getz said Sept. 16. “Now if you would have told me prior to the year that we would have ended up with over 100 losses, 105, 110, I wouldn’t have been as surprised. But this is the cards that we’ve been dealt at this point.”

How does a team go from winning its division three seasons ago to creating a new standard for failure? A disaster of this magnitude must have multiple tributaries. It’s not only about the decades-long habit of owner Jerry Reinsdorf loyally clinging to employees past peak effectiveness. “Old news,” said one staffer. It’s not only about a wave of injuries; lots of teams deal with a lot of injuries. It’s not only about a first-time manager whose tenure was infected by a toxic clubhouse mix. Lots of teams have veterans who don’t get along, though the White Sox seemed to have had more than their share. It’s not only about a handful of players performing at their worst. It’s not only about a first-time general manager taking his first turn on the learning curve. It’s not necessarily about spending — in an era in which teams have slashed payroll to facilitate tanking, the White Sox’s payroll is about $145 million, ranked 18th among 30 teams.

According to more than two dozen sources inside and outside the organization, it’s all of that, together. Over the course of the season, there were missteps from every level of the organization — and just plain bad baseball — that turned the 2024 White Sox from a bad team into a historically awful one.

“There is so much randomness in our sport, and the worst teams still usually win a share of games,” said one rival executive. “But [the White Sox] have taken the randomness out of the sport. They are that bad.”

March 28

Record: 0-0

IN LATE MARCH, then-White Sox manager Pedro Grifol and Getz were trying to decide on their Opening Day starter. Two weeks earlier, the White Sox had traded ace Dylan Cease to the San Diego Padres for prospects. The deal came together late because Getz was intent on getting maximum value for the 2022 AL Cy Young runner-up, but it left the team without time to find a replacement for their ace.

It also effectively served as a white flag on the big league season, the first in charge for the 40-year-old Getz. The new general manager turned his focus to how to build assets amid a lost year.

At the outset of spring training, Garrett Crochet was given the opportunity to do something he’s never done in the majors: work as a starting pitcher. The White Sox staff challenged him to be more efficient, to have more 15-pitch innings than 25-pitch innings, and he’s done what they’ve asked. The White Sox had no other obvious candidates for the honor of Opening Day starter, and Getz believed that if Crochet could excel as a starting pitcher, the left-hander might develop into a valuable piece of their roster — or on the trade market. He told Grifol, “F— it, let’s start Crochet.”

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It was thrilling news to deliver to Crochet, a player whose confidence had wavered in the past, but it was also the first barometer reading of a serious problem: The White Sox’s pitcher in their first game of the season would be making his first career start. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, only three non-expansion teams in the live ball era (since 1920) have debuted four new starters since the previous year in the first four games of a season, as the White Sox did with Crochet and journeymen Erick Fedde, Chris Flexen and Mike Soroka. The bullpen was also a problem area: the most dynamic talent, Michael Kopech, fought the yips at the end of the 2023 season, and the entire relief corps had been turned over since the previous Opening Day with veterans Aaron Bummer and Reynaldo Lopez leaving via trade or free agency in the offseason.

Crochet pitched great on Opening Day, allowing one run in six innings, but the White Sox lost 1-0 to Tarik Skubal and the Detroit Tigers. And then they kept losing — 7-6 in their second game against Detroit, 3-2 in their third. By Chicago’s fourth game, Chris Flexen was hammered in a 9-0 rout by the Atlanta Braves, and the White Sox fell to 0-4.

Meanwhile, a lineup already thin on big league talent was getting thinner. Eloy Jimenez, a top prospect acquired in 2017 and signed two years later to be a foundational piece of a previous rebuild, played three games before he was sidelined with a hamstring injury. On April 5, Luis Robert — in theory, the best player on the White Sox’s roster — suffered a hip flexor strain as he was running the bases; he’d miss the next two months. Yoan Moncada, the longest-tenured of the Chicago regulars, also suffered a hip injury. Little more than a week into the season, a third of the lineup was out, and the White Sox had won just one of their first nine games, with a run differential of minus-30.

They didn’t win a series for almost a month, a stretch that included a sweep at the hands of the Cincinnati Reds, who outscored them 27-5 in a three-game set in mid-April. Several first-year Reds, who had considered signing with the White Sox, expressed confusion about their winter decisions.

“Oof,” one Cincinnati player said. “What happened to all their pitching?”

After taking over for Tony La Russa as manager, Pedro Grifol inherited a clubhouse one team source called “as negative a place as I’ve seen anywhere.” Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports

May 26

15-38

AFTER EIGHT WINS in the first two weeks of May, a brutal stretch awaited Chicago: series against the New York Yankees, Toronto Blue Jays, Baltimore Orioles and Milwaukee Brewers.

In the third game against the Orioles, with Crochet on the mound, the White Sox lost, again, to the Orioles’ Kyle Bradish. The team was 15-39, Grifol’s second season as manager had started badly, and he was pissed off. He praised Crochet to reporters, but said the rest of the team is “f—ing flat.” The words did not land well with a clubhouse of beleaguered players — it sounded to them as if Grifol was piling on blame, rather than sharing it — and some of them pushed back when speaking with reporters. “He’s going to feel that way, and obviously we’re going to have a different feeling,” catcher Korey Lee said. “He’s entitled to his own opinion, and we are also.”

Sheets said, “I’m not sure. I think we ran into a pretty good pitcher with pretty good stuff.”

“I mean, we were trying,” one White Sox player said later. “For better or worse, that was it, right there. … I think that could have been the beginning of the end for Pedro.”

Grifol had been hired by then-GM Rick Hahn and former club president Kenny Williams early in the 2022 offseason. Hahn and Williams’ hope was that Grifol, who was from Miami and bilingual, would connect with the team’s core of Latin American players, but the hire was a gamble: Grifol had an impressive résumé as a coach, including the previous three years as the Kansas City Royals bench coach, but had never managed in the big leagues.

And he was inheriting a splintered clubhouse. Liam Hendriks, then the team’s most prominent pitching star, is distinctly an extrovert — loud, friendly, accessible to the media, chatty. Three organizational sources say a rift had grown between Hendriks and some of the other veterans on the team, namely pitchers Kendall Graveman, Lance Lynn and Joe Kelly.

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In December 2022, Hendriks was diagnosed with cancer. He went through treatment in the spring of 2023 before making his way back to the team. In late May, the White Sox front office planned a welcome back news conference, and the team arranged for players to be in the room as Hendriks spoke with the media for the first time — an elementary show of support. Some veterans initially balked, and according to club sources, had to be talked into attending. The situation, one longtime White Sox staffer believed, was one of the worst things he had ever witnessed in professional sports.

The rifts went beyond the pitching staff, too. Former All-Star shortstop Tim Anderson was mired in a season-long slump while dealing with personal issues off the field and catcher Yasmani Grandal was described by one former teammate as someone who “tore people down instead of building them up.”

“It was as negative a place as I’ve seen anywhere,” said another club source.

Within a week after the White Sox traded Keynan Middleton to the Yankees during the 2023 season, the reliever spoke to ESPN about the White Sox’s culture. Asked where the void exists with the team, Middleton said: “Leadership in general. They say s— rolls downhill. I feel like some guys don’t want to speak up when they should have. It’s hard to police people when there are no rules. If guys are doing things that you think are wrong, who is it wrong to? You or them? It’s anyone’s judgment at that point.”

When some White Sox staffers read the words, they were furious, because they felt Middleton’s thoughts reflected a larger problem: With an inexperienced manager overseeing the clubhouse, the culture really belonged to the players, and they shared a large measure of responsibility for the problems.

At the 2023 trade deadline, other teams — aware of the dysfunction in the White Sox’s clubhouse — passed on opportunities to take on some of the veterans because of the ugliness of some of the emanating stories. One executive said of one of the pitchers the White Sox were trying to trade: “We’ve seen that act before.”

Grifol had a complicated clubhouse on his hands; he didn’t really do complicated. Some managers are practiced schmoozers, excellent politicians; Grifol is not, according to some peers. He is a hardcore baseball guy, strong in his beliefs, and expects players to be accountable. His preference, friends believe, would have been to focus on the day-to-day work, but instead, he felt compelled to tend to a fractured clubhouse.

June 23

21-57

IN THE SEVENTH startof his career, Jonathan Cannon took the mound against the Tigers. His previous two outings had been strong — 8⅔ scoreless innings against Houston and seven one-run innings against Seattle — but on that day, it all fell apart quickly.

The Tigers, who’d scored just five runs over their previous six games, scored five in the first inning and four in the second. Cannon was pulled in the second inning. After the game, the 2022 third-round pick was asked about his outing: “Baseball is a cruel game, and sometimes it doesn’t go your way.”

Meanwhile, in the opposite dugout sat A.J. Hinch, an enduring symbol of what could have been for the White Sox — what many feel should have been. In October 2020, Hinch was in the last days of his year-long suspension for his role in the Houston Astros‘ sign-stealing scandal — and he was the first choice of then-GM Rick Hahn to take over as the White Sox manager. Hahn viewed Hinch as an ideal candidate: He had a championship pedigree, an excellent reputation for communication, and an advanced understanding in analytics honed during his time with the progressive Astros. For Hahn, Hinch would be the guy who was going to drive the White Sox forward and help the front office define for Reinsdorf where and how the organization was behind. The White Sox were on the upswing then, with a young, talented roster and coming off a wild-card appearance in 2020: an attractive job for a managerial candidate. It seemed such a perfect fit that friends of Hinch assumed that is where he would work in 2021.

Reinsdorf, however, wasn’t interested. He felt he had fired La Russa wrongly in 1986 and bore a debt to an old friend. Above all else, Reinsdorf — who declined to speak to ESPN for this story — is consistently steadfast to friends and employees. In his time as owner of the White Sox and Chicago Bulls, he has had a lifetime of battles with owners and others, but he trusts his people. “Fact is, he might be too trusting,” said one staffer. La Russa was hired without Hinch even going through a formal interview with the White Sox.

Players complained to their agents about the 76-year-old La Russa, feeling he was out of step with a much younger generation of players. Privately, they questioned a lot of his moves. Publicly, he was second-guessed by fans and media for on-field decisions. But La Russa was in his fourth decade as a manager, bearing a stature that helped sustain a general stability, and in La Russa’s first year in 2021, the White Sox won the AL Central with a 93-69 record. “To this day [Reinsdorf] will tell people hiring La Russa was the right move, especially after seeing how the team did after he left,” said one source.

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La Russa was overcome by illness in his second season. When he left the team in August, the White Sox were 63-65. Disappointing, but not disastrous. The decision was made in the final days of the 2022 season that he wouldn’t return for 2023.

By then, Hinch’s Tigers were progressing; they finished in second place in the AL Central in 2023 and this year will end with their highest win total since 2016 and, likely, a wild-card spot. The Guardians and Royals have also improved, while the Twins remain consistently competitive. The AL Central is toughening.

The White Sox franchise, however, has moved in the other direction; the organization has fallen way behind, from top to bottom. After La Russa stepped down as manager, he was kept on as a consultant — and still had the ear of ownership.

Sources said that as Reinsdorf prepared to fire Hahn in August 2023, La Russa gave positive feedback about Getz, someone he’d gotten to know as the assistant GM of the White Sox, where he had worked since 2017.

A typical industry practice is to ask permission to speak to a range of candidates from other organizations — in some cases, division rivals, in an effort to glean a greater understanding of their information systems. Sometimes subterfuge is the only real reason for the interviews. But Reinsdorf wasn’t interested in that kind of learning.

He was presented the option of interviewing candidates outside the organization, and he declined. Getz was his guy, and nobody was going to change his mind. Getz was hired nine days after Williams and Hahn were dismissed.

“Jerry’s hands are still involved in the major decision-making,” one White Sox employee said. “I mean he’s the owner but whether La Russa was the right hire or not he didn’t let his baseball people make that call. It was laughable what he said [last year] … about letting his front office make decisions. Maybe in basketball, but not baseball.”

Getz, with his years of experience in the White Sox’s offices, is experienced in working with Reinsdorf — they discuss his moves, certainly, but Getz does not feel micromanaged, even as he immediately looked to implement foundational changes within the organization. Last fall, he hired one of the most progressive pitching minds in the sport, Brian Bannister, away from the San Francisco Giants, and installed Paul Janish, the former major league shortstop and Rice head coach, to lead the team’s player development.

This year, that work continued, even as Getz prepared for the daunting month ahead of him: The MLB draft and trade deadline were weeks away.

His focus was there, to the frustration of Grifol and some of his coaches, who believed Getz was not giving the big league team enough of his attention. They wanted to hear more from him and worried that the lack of communication was a sign of how he regards them.

At the All-Star break, Grifol held a team meeting, noting the team’s trajectory, their pace to set a new record for losses. No one in the organization wants that, he said, adding that this was a chance for many of them to play and shine in the big leagues — and he encouraged them to put in the work to make that happen. The White Sox lost their next game, extending their losing streak to five. And they continued to lose.

All-Star pitcher Garrett Crochet was one of the most coveted trade candidates of the summer, but the White Sox opted not to move him at the deadline. William Purnell-USA TODAY Sports

July 25

27-77

BY JULY, IT was a fait accompli that the White Sox would become one of the most prominent sellers before the July 30 trade deadline. There was no gradual rollout for Getz in his first summer. Instead, he had to consider dozens of possible trade combinations in a truncated timeline, and some of his peers with other teams wondered if he was ready, especially after some of his first trades.

The previous fall, he had traded Bummer, a coveted left-handed reliever, to the Braves for five players. The return stunned some rival evaluators, because they believed some of the players in the deal likely would’ve been non-tendered by the Braves. In truth, Getz was fully aware of the non-tender possibility — because Braves exec Alex Anthopoulos had told him so — and wanted the deal anyway, to ensure the arrival of Mike Soroka in the much-depleted rotation.

In the midst of the 2024 season, Getz and his staff had some of the best options in a depleted trade market: Erick Fedde, whom Getz signed to a savvy deal in the offseason after a year in Korea; Kopech, who struggled in the closer role but had 59 strikeouts in 43⅔ innings; and, most notably, Crochet, who had blossomed into a dominant starter. Getz was in constant communication with other teams, but he made the decision early: If no team met their asks, they’d keep the left-hander.

Five days before the deadline, Getz was eating breakfast when he got texts from a team asking him about tweets just posted that suggested Crochet would only pitch in the postseason if he got a contract extension — something Getz had not heard before from the player or his agent, Andrew Nacario.

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The timing of the breaking news was awful — not because it affected interest, but because with little more than 100 hours remaining before the trade deadline, Getz knew front offices would try to use the contract situation as leverage to diminish the asking price. But contending teams kept making offers — the Dodgers, Phillies and Braves at the forefront. “The sincere teams remained sincere,” said one White Sox source, “and the teams that weren’t sincere — they were out.” Said a rival executive: “I don’t think [the contract demand] affected his value.”

The White Sox believed that the Dodgers had enough to make a deal without top catching prospect Dalton Rushing included, but that offer from L.A. never developed. The Phillies turned down the White Sox’s request for top pitching prospect Andrew Painter as part of the package. The Braves had lots of pitching to offer, but the White Sox preferred a deal for position players.

In the end, Getz traded a chunk of his roster: Fedde, Kopech and Tommy Pham as part of a three-team trade with the Cardinals and Dodgers, and shortstop Paul DeJong to the Royals. Getz decided he would keep Crochet for the rest of the regular season and into the winter. He called Reinsdorf to tell him, and Reinsdorf was nonplussed in his response.

In some other front offices, Getz’s choices were panned. Some evaluators believed he didn’t get enough in the Fedde-Kopech-Pham trade; others questioned how he could’ve let the moment pass without dealing Crochet. He had the best available starting pitcher in the trade market, with big-market teams interested, and critics believed Getz should have flipped Crochet for building-block prospects. They wondered what kind of counsel he was getting from Reinsdorf, and others. “Somebody needed to tell him, ‘Look, this is the time when you have to trade him,'” said a longtime front office type who has worked through many deadlines.

Some rival evaluators disagree with the criticism, and so do the White Sox. Getz thinks Crochet will have at least the same trade value this winter, when teams in need of an ace will have more time to weigh the choice between paying big dollars for free agents like Blake Snell or dealing prospects for Crochet. And now teams know for sure that Crochet can handle a starter’s workload over a full season.

Hours after the White Sox made the decision to hold Crochet, they lost their 16th straight game.

In his first year as White Sox general manager, Chris Getz was tasked with a pitching staff overhaul and eventually firing manager Pedro Grifol as the team skidded toward the worst record in MLB history. Matt Dirksen/Getty Images

Aug. 8

28-88

AS SOON AS the trade deadline passed, Getz wanted to move on from his manager, according to sources familiar with his thinking. It was not a matter of if, but when. But with rumors swirling about Grifol’s immediate future, a meeting took place on July 31 between Reinsdorf, Getz, Grifol and La Russa. And then, for a week, in one of the stranger twists of the season, nothing happened.

On Aug. 6, a losing streak that began before the All-Star break finally ended, at an American League record 21 games, with a win over Oakland. “It was just really good to get this behind us. I thought we played a clean game today,” Grifol told reporters. “Any time you win it’s great. Any time you win when you lose 21 in a row it’s even better. I’m proud of these guys.”

Two days later, Getz called Grifol to tell him he was making a change. Third base coach Eddie Rodriguez, assistant hitting coach Mike Tosar and bench coach Charlie Montoyo — all of the White Sox’s Latino staffers — were also fired. Grifol is a lifelong friend of Tosar and knew Rodriguez from their days together in the Royals’ organization. Getz thought that while Montoyo held the title of bench coach, Grifol was mostly leaning on Rodriguez and Tosar.

Getz believed that to get the White Sox to a better place, these were the right staff moves to make in early August. But he knew the optics of the choices were less than ideal. Getz called Michael Hill, MLB’s senior vice president for on-field operations, to provide background for the decision. The league monitors the diversity of MLB coaching staffs and is expected to do so on the White Sox’s next hires.

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The front office promoted first-year coach Grady Sizemore to interim manager, essentially taking on-the-field decisions out of the dugout and into the executive suite. Sizemore had expressed no desire to manage but was picked because players like him. Getz stated that he’d look outside the White Sox family for a permanent replacement, squashing any talk of a reunion with Ozzie Guillen, who provides television commentary on games, or popular former catcher A.J. Pierzynski.

A month later, with the White Sox closing in on the all-time record for losses, the typically reticent Reinsdorf issued a statement. “Going back to last year, we have made difficult decisions and changes to begin building a foundation for future success,” he said. “What has impressed me is how our players and staff have continued to work and bring a professional attitude to the ballpark each day despite a historically difficult season. No one is happy with the results, but I commend the continued effort.”

Weeks after Pham was traded, he reflected on his time as a White Sox. The 1962 Mets had players like Pham — established veterans near the end of their days as active players, scu as Gil Hodges and Don Zimmer, who became witnesses to history.

“Everything compounded on the White Sox this season with injuries and rebuilding,” Pham said. “Guys are being allowed to develop in the big leagues and that’s never been done. Ten years ago you weren’t allowed to develop in the big leagues.

“I think the White Sox problem isn’t just a White Sox problem. I think it’s a universal problem going on in MLB. We have teams that are developing players in the big leagues. We’ve never seen that. Add all the injuries and the Sox are where they are.”

Sell the team signs and chants were prevalent throughout Guaranteed Rate Field when the White Sox returned to Chicago for their final homestand of the season. Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images

Sept. 24

36-120

BY MID-SEPTEMBER, IT seemed a matter of when, not if, the White Sox would break the Mets’ record. A long road trip to the West Coast garnered a 3-6 record, and the White Sox returned home with 120 losses.

Much of Tuesday’s game played out like so many of the defeats that came before it. The White Sox hitters failed to score for the game’s first seven innings. The bullpen finally wilted, and the Angels took the lead, with “Sell the team!” chants raining down from the stands.

“I get the frustration,” Sizemore said. “They want to see wins and they want to see them now.”

Though Chicago’s rally then postponed the seemingly inevitable, there are five more games in the season; the White Sox could climb to as many as 125 losses. Their path from here is unclear — because of new collective bargaining rules, the White Sox can’t receive a draft lottery pick; even after the worst season in history, they’ll pick no higher than 10th in next year’s draft. There is no quick path back to respectability for a team in the third-largest market in MLB. Fans booing might be the norm for the foreseeable future.

Still, Getz and his staff are looking ahead: refining a process through which they will hire the next manager, among a wide-ranging field of candidates from around the industry. As he did with lengthy processes to hire Bannister and Janish, Getz’s goal is to objectively pick the person who best fits the White Sox and what they need moving forward. This week, Getz made another important hire, tapping longtime scout David Keller — who spent many years with the Mets — to oversee their international department.

In mid-September, Getz watched a recent interview of UConn basketball coach Dan Hurley, about a tense meeting with his predecessor, Jim Calhoun. Early in Hurley’s tenure, he had complained to Calhoun about work impediments; Calhoun tells Hurley to stop whining and do the job. Getz relates to this. And as the White Sox disaster reaches its conclusion, Getz feels … energized. The challenge — the opportunity — is now as immense as the failure.

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