White Sox threatening 1962 Mets' unwanted record for futility

CHICAGO — When Grady Sizemore, the 2000s wunderkind and neophyte coach, took over as interim manager of the White Sox in August and addressed the team for the first time, he referenced what everybody knew but nobody wanted to talk about.

The White Sox weren’t merely bad. They weren’t just terrible. They were — are — without hyperbole perhaps the worst team in the history of baseball.

The 1962 Mets went 40-120 in the first season of existence for the franchise. That remains the record for most losses in a year since the start of the 20th century.

After losing to the Mets, 5-3, on Saturday night, the 2024 White Sox are 31-106. That puts them on pace for 125 losses.

“Obviously, no one wants to be the worst team of all time,” said outfielder Andrew Benintendi, a former Yankee and a 2018 World Series champion with the Red Sox. “But we’re not thinking about it at all in here.”

That was Sizemore’s message, which seems to have stuck, if not yielded tangible improvement. The White Sox are 3-17 since the firing of Pedro Grifol.

“I told these guys early on, we’re not focused on the record,” Sizemore said. “We’re focused on the Mets today and one series at a time, and that’s all we can worry about. The record is not anything that we can focus on.”

Benintendi added: “We’ve definitely heard about it. It feels like all year we’ve been hearing about it. For us in here, we’re not even considering or thinking about it.”

And veteran pitcher Chad Kuhl: “It’s hard to block out . . . It’s something that you hear, but at the end of the day, everybody is playing for themselves and playing for the team, playing for their careers — trying to prove that they belong here.”

Such a level of futility comes with mind-boggling statistics to match.

Among them: The White Sox were eliminated from playoff contention on Aug. 17, the earliest date in the divisional era (1969).

They are 46 1⁄2 games out of first place in the AL Central.

After losing to the Mets on Friday and Saturday nights, they have won only four of their past 43 games.

Read that again: four wins in 43 games.

Their season transitioned from extremely bad to historically bad in mid-July, when they started a 21-game losing streak. That tied the AL record for most losses in a row.

“It had been a little bit,” reliever John Brebbia said when it finally ended.

Brebbia isn’t with the team anymore. His 6.29 ERA was deemed unworthy of even this roster, which is a total mishmash.

They have a front-end starting pitcher (Garrett Crochet, an offseason trade candidate), a potential star with a severe down year (Luis Robert Jr.), a veteran on a hefty contract (Benintendi, less than halfway through his five-year, $75 million deal), a trade-deadline prize (Miguel Vargas, acquired from the Dodgers), a former Met (righthander Chris Flexen), rookies you’ve never heard of and journeymen just happy to have a spot.

First baseman/DH Andrew Vaughn has been on the team since 2021, when the White Sox won the division title and made it to the playoffs for a second season in a row. He was part of a core that was supposed to lead the club to regular relevancy.

But then prospects never became studs, guys got hurt and a couple of managers got let go. So it goes with rebuilds sometimes.

“The season hasn’t gone our way,” Vaughn said. “Losing stinks. It’s the worst.”

Infielder Nicky Lopez said: “It’s easy to slip into that trap where things aren’t going well and you start playing the game in the wrong way. Obviously, we can’t take any of these losses back. We have to keep going forward.”

Lopez, previously with the Royals, got a taste of good baseball late last season when he got traded to Atlanta on the way to that club’s sixth straight division title. Atlanta dealt him to Chicago in the offseason, though, so his

experience this year has been different.

“You can compare us to whoever, but when you’re losing ballgames, it’s never fun,” Lopez said. “How many wins did they have that year?”

The 1962 Mets had 120 losses.

“120 losses,” Lopez repeated. “Yeah, so, I mean, what do we have? 102?”

It was 104 at that moment.

“Then we have 20-something games left,” Lopez said.

After Saturday’s game, the countdown is at 25. The White Sox need to go 12-13 or better to avoid the infamy of matching the Mets as the losingest team ever.

The attempt at mental math was visible on Lopez’s face.

“All right, well, here we go,” he said.

By Tim Healey

timothy.healey@newsday.com@timbhealey

Tim Healey is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. Born on Long Island and raised in Connecticut, Tim has previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Boston Globe and MLB.com. He is also the author of “Hometown Hardball,” a book about minor league baseball in the northeast.