Beautiful Loser
There’s the old adage that no one ever remembers who came in second. It’s even more likely that no one will remember who came in second to last. There’s probably no worse fate in sports than to be the second worst team of all time. Which brings us to the 2024 Chicago White Sox. The team has lost 120 games this season and their next loss, assuming they realize what now has to be seen as a goal, will make them the losingest MLB team of the modern era. My San Francisco Giants have been hovering around .500 for the entire season. How boring is that. How utterly forgettable. Up until their elimination from playoff contention, I watched nearly every inning of every game. Commentators Mike Krukow, Duane Kuiper, Dave Flemming, and Jon Miller are the soundtrack of my life. And yet, ever after those endless hours of dedication, I won’t remember anything about this middling season (other than the fact that this was the year we got cushions on our seats at Oracle Park). White Sox fans will never forget 2024. And so today, we’ll start things off with a pastime as American as baseball: Punching down. All baseball fans, even those as disappointed in our seasons as I am, can look down on the lowly Chicago White Sox. At least until they lose one more game, at which point, those of us stuck in the land of half wins and half losses might feel just a little jealous. At least losing that much is funny. Will Leitch in NY Mag: The Beauty of the White Sox’s Historically Abysmal Season. “It’s natural to focus on successful teams: Winning is, after all, the point of every game, the reason we have scoreboards in the first place. But we remember the truly great teams far more than we remember the regular everyday champions: to be the best at something will make you immortal. It thus stands to reason that being the best at losing is also eternal. Do you know who won the World Series in 1962? Do you even care? The only thing that has lasted from that year is the horribleness of the Mets. Besides being more memorable, losing is more relatable and far more familiar than winning. A finite few of us will ever understand what it’s like to be revered, to have tens of thousands of people chanting our name. But doing our best and falling short? Of being bested by a superior? Things not working out? We all know that feeling.”
+ Sam Anderson in the NYT (Gift Article): How Does a Baseball Team Lose 120 Games? Every Way You Can Think Of. “I walked out to Section 108, notebook in hand, like a zoologist documenting the last frog pond in the rainforest. I wanted to know many things. What does it feel like to witness, up close, this much losing? How had everything gone so wrong? And why on earth would anyone pay to see it? ‘It’s a mental illness,’ [a fan named] Beefloaf said, succinctly.”
+ ESPN: Chicago White Sox use wit to report recent defeats. It’s funny now. But if the White Sox don’t lose one more game, no one will be laughing. So go out there and give ’em hell boys. And White Sox fans, heed the words of baseball’s most quotable philosopher, Yogi Berra: “It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.”
