Baseball Bytes: Seriously, How Are the White Sox This Bad?

Plus, the postseason field is nearly buttoned up already, and Marcell Ozuna makes an unprecedented comeback.

Welcome to Baseball Bytes¹ — a new-ish column I’m experimenting with, in which I point out three byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!

⚾ Finding Company for Chicago’s Misery

I’ve already written about the Chicago White Sox a decent amount this season. But as things keep getting worse and worse on the South Side, I just can’t stay away.

After 11 straight losses — part of a horrid stretch of 47 L’s in 54 games² — the team is well on its way to breaking the 1962 New York Mets’ modern record of 120 losses in a single season. According to my composite forecast on Sunday morning (before the blowout loss to Baltimore), Chicago was set to finish the year with an astonishing 121.7 losses. They were also projected to finish nearly 20 games behind the Rockies, the next-worst team, which doesn’t even seem possible.

But at the same time, we do know terrible teams like this happen. Since the MLB schedule expanded to 162 games in the early 1960s,³ there have been 13 other teams who lost at least 110 games during the regular season. So I thought it might be fun to break down how each of those teams might be grouped in terms of how they got this bad.

• The Oddball: 1969 Expos
  
  Expansion teams will be a semi-recurring theme here, but the first edition of Les Expos were unique in the sense that they actually had some pretty good position players — RF Rusty Staub had 6.2 WAR, LF Mack Jones had 3.7, 3B Coco Laboy had 2.6, etc. — and were only somewhat below-average at the plate despite losing 110 games. Montreal’s big problem was MLB’s worst pitching staff by WAR, but even there they were only tied with San Diego for the worst FIP in the league, and ranked third-to-last in ERA. This team undershot its Pythagorean expectation by seven games and probably didn’t quite deserve to be remembered among a group this horrible (as evidenced by its much more respectable record the following season).
  

• Surprisingly Decent Rotation, Can’t Hit At All: 2024 White Sox, 2019 Tigers, 2004 D-Backs
  
  As bad as the 2004 White Sox have been, it bears mentioning that their starting rotation is a lot less horrible than we would expect based on their overall record. Staff ace Garrett Crochet is tracking for 4.3 WAR/162, and Erick Fedde was doing even better before he got sent to St. Louis at the trade deadline. The rest of the rotation is more like Chris Flexen types, and the bullpen ranks 29th in WAR, but Chicago does not have the worst FIP in baseball by any means… they just have a leaky defense and the game’s worst offense by a mile. And in that sense, they’re oddly similar to the 2019 Tigers and 2004 Diamondbacks — both of whom had rotations that, while not exactly good or even average, were far from the worst in MLB, and were undone by the league’s worst offenses by WAR.
  

• Surprisingly Decent Lineup, Can’t Pitch At All: 2023 A’s, 2021 D-Backs, 2021 Orioles, 2018 Orioles, 2013 Astros
  
  This group is basically the inverse of the previous one. They weren’t great hitting teams or anything, with an average wRC+ of 87.4 (the league mean is 100) and average batting WAR percentile of 14.5, but those figures are actually significantly better than the averages for the other teams on our list of 110-game losers. And in each case, there were at least a player or two in the lineup who were legitimately concerning to face — think of Brent Rooker on last year’s A’s, Cedric Mullins on the 2021 Orioles, or Jason Castro on the 2013 Astros. Instead, these teams suffered from either the league’s worst pitching staffs by WAR or something close to it, with an average ERA 26 percent worse than the MLB norm.
  

• Balanced Badness: 2003 Tigers, 1969 Padres, 1965 Mets, 1963 Mets, 1962 Mets
  
  The most surefire way to build a 110-loss team, of course, is to just construct a group of uniformly terrible players who are bad in every facet of the game. That’s what this group managed to successfully do, and it’s probably no coincidence that it features multiple expansion squads — San Diego in 1969, and the early-to-mid-1960s Mets teams under Casey Stengel that were basically an extended, multi-year expansion effort. The ‘03 Tigers are the more bizarre case here; they were around .500 a few years earlier, and would be in the World Series within three seasons of their 119-loss campaign. But for 2003 at least, Detroit had the losingest team in baseball since the ‘60s Mets… until the ‘24 White Sox came along, most likely.

⚾ Do We Know the Postseason Field Already?

September is typically when the baseball world gears up for pennant races, with teams and fans starting to really get anxious about their postseason fates. And given how compressed this year’s top clubs are, we might expect that to especially be the case now that the calendar has flipped to the final month of the 2024 regular season.

That’s why it stood out so much to me that the distribution of the composite playoff odds (as of Sunday AM) had such a wide chasm between the top of the league and everyone else:

Clearly, we know that 76 percent does not equal 100 percent. There’s always a chance that one of the teams from the top group could fall out of playoff positioning, and one of the team’s below could leapfrog their way in. The Mets and Cubs were each within 3 games of the wild card on Sunday afternoon. But as of Sunday morning, 12 teams were at or above that 76 percent threshold, and nobody else was even at 30 percent. (The Mets sat at 28 percent, and the Red Sox were next at 14 percent.) So it’s very possible that we already know the entire 12-team playoff field right now, September drama be damned.

⚾ Ozuna’s Shocking Triple Crown Comeback

Atlanta fans might differ with me in this opinion, but it’s hard to exactly root for DH Marcell Ozuna at this point, given his extensive history of off-field incidents such as domestic violence and driving under the influence. However, whether you think he should have gotten the opportunity or not, the comeback he has made this season is nothing short of incredible. Ozuna currently ranks second in the National League in batting average, second in home runs and tied for first in RBIs, meaning it’s still possible he could secure the NL’s first Triple Crown since Joe “Ducky” Medwick in 1937.

And the path he’s taken back to this level is unprecedented in baseball history. Currently tracking for 5.0 batting WAR, he would be the first player in AL/NL history to ever:

• Have a 5+ WAR/162 season (he had 7.1 in 2020, granted in a shortened schedule)

• Have a below-replacement WAR/162 in at least two of the next three seasons

• Return to a 5+ WAR/162 in the fourth season

Only five other players in history — Jose Altuve in 2022; Jim Wynn in 1972; Tommie Agee in 1970; Orlando Cepeda in 1967; and George Davis in 1905-06⁴ — have ever even followed the pattern of 5+ WAR, sub-replacement in 1 of the next 3 seasons, then 5+ WAR again. Ozuna would stand alone in being so bad for multiple seasons, but also in having two great seasons sandwiched around that.

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Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes

1. Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.

2. Somehow not the most ever in any 54-game stretch, but tied with the 2021 D-Backs for the most since the 1916 Philadelphia A’s lost 50 of 54 at one point.

3. 1961 in the AL, and 1962 in the NL.

4. Davis technically did it multiple times, in the sense that he was above 5 WAR/162 every season from 1901-06 except for one (1903), and in the one he was below replacement level.