The Chicago White Sox are bad. Obvious worst team in baseball bad. After their latest series sweep from the Minnesota Twins, which included a 5–2 lead blown in the eighth and ninth on Tuesday, they’ve fallen to 3–22, a .120 win percentage. It doesn’t take much knowledge of baseball to recognize just how dreadful that is.

Now, sometimes when a team gets off to THIS bad of a start, there’s a bit of a hyperbolic response. It is way too early to declare this White Sox team the worst to ever grace a baseball diamond. The beginning of the season, in particular, lends itself to white hot starts and cool-as-can-be stretches being amplified beyond what they should through such a small sample size. Things change. Some teams get it together as the season goes on and others who led the pack early run out of gas just as quickly. Still, it’s hard to ignore when it looks this bad, feels this bad, and, under the hood, is, indeed, that bad.

In terms of offense, the White Sox are a cut below the other 29 teams with a collective .189/.263/.292 slash line. By FanGraphs’ wRC+, they’re comfortably in dead last with a mark of 62, a full 38 points below league average. Their value reflects the awful offense, as the team has been worth -2.2 WAR so far despite a valiant effort from Gavin Sheets (143 wRC+, 0.4 WAR). Their pitching is similarly dreadful. They’re the second-worst team by ERA at 5.26 with only the Colorado Rockies, a team whose pitching is frequently hamstrung by their ballpark, beneath them. Adjusting things with FIP paints them as baseball’s worst staff with a 4.87 mark followed by Colorado at 4.61. On top of everything, they’re butchers in the field, with their -14 DRS coming ahead of only the Miami Marlins (-15) and New York Mets (-18).

I don’t particularly want to kick Southsiders while they’re down. How Jerry Reinsdorf has treated this team is shameful and I don’t see how it gets much better from here, especially since the Sox aren’t even allowed to pick within the top ten spots of the draft this year. Sports are a business, sure, but when your team is worth over $2 billion and has yet to sign a player for over $100 million, when other franchises of lesser value have managed that, AND is pushing for a publicly funded, ludicrously expensive new stadium deal, it says something about the folks running things at the top. It was only a few years ago this team looked primed to fire into the stratosphere and become true World Series contenders. That is unacceptable.

What I want to do, if only for my curiosity and yours, is paint around the lines here. Let’s look back at other historically bad starts and see how this White Sox team stacks up. And, maybe, we can find at least a bit of hope in here somewhere.

Where the White Sox Rank Among Historically Bad Teams

The good news for the White Sox is that they don’t have the worst record through their first 25 games. Hooray! That dubious honor falls to the 1988 Baltimore Orioles, who lost their first 21 contests and fired their manager before getting into the win column. They’d add a couple more losses and a win from there to get to 2–23 which would eventually become 54–107 by season’s end. Very bad, but not enough to beat the 2018 squad that bottomed out at 47–115.

What’s not good for Chicago is that only two other teams in the modern era have kicked off the season this poorly — the 2022 “ Where you gonna go?” Cincinnati Reds and the infamously bad 2003 Detroit Tigers. Scarily enough, of the three other teams accompanying the Sox at the bottom, their -85 run differential is worse than all but one of them through this point — the Reds, who ended with the best record of them all at 62–100.

Although the start looks really bad, there are plenty of teams arguably worse that were looking slightly more favorable through 25 games. Most recently, last year’s 112-loss Oakland A’s mustered five wins against twenty losses yet sported a far worse -112 run differential and, at a glance, looked like the less talented team after shipping off Sean Murphy. While not a modern-era team, the legendarily putrid 1899 Cleveland Spiders similarly captured a fourth of their win total at 5–20 before proceeding to drop another 114 games. Then again, the 1962 Mets, another benchmark of awful, only boasted a -48 run differential.

Amateur numbers, frankly.

For another perspective, let’s look at how the Sox right now stack up to some of the worst teams in history with their hitting and pitching. Were the season to end today, the team’s miserable 62 wRC+ would be far worse than the ’62 Mets (80) and ’03 Tigers (80), though it’s still a far cry from the ghastly 33 wRC+ posted by the Spiders. Fellow slow starters like the ’88 Orioles and ’22 Reds similarly bested the Sox’s numbers at 88 and 86 wRC+ respectively by the time their seasons ended.

On the pitching side, things continue looking bleak. By ERA-, a stat that adjusts for park and league with numbers lower than 100 being above average, the White Sox sit at 136. That’s a considerably lower mark than the miserable Mets (123), the de-clawed Tigers (121), and the brutal Orioles (116), though, again, not the Spiders (165). If there’s one thing you can definitely take away from this piece, it’s how well the Cleveland Spiders’ pure suckage holds up to this day.

Can the White Sox Avoid the Wrong Kind of History?

Obviously, nobody expected this White Sox team to be good. They shipped off Dylan Cease in the offseason after losing 100 games in 2023, after all. Are they really THIS bad though? Eh, I’m not so sure.

They’re certainly passing the smell test as one of the worst teams ever, but none of the three teams who got off to historically bad starts to open the year went on to become the worst team in baseball history though (ok, maybe the Tigers are a bad example there…) Even when adjusted for era, I feel these Sox could run circles around that god-forsaken Spiders team. One thing on their side right now is injuries. Their offense, in particular, is without its few potential difference makers in Luis Robert, Yoán Moncada, and Eloy Jiménez. Things could at least get a little better as the team gets healthy and the weather warms up.

What I’m saying is, this is a conversation we have every year when a team does something like this. This same discourse came with the advent of last year’s A’s and the 2022 Reds, as well as many other teams before. At the end of the day, baseball’s gonna baseball. Bad teams end up with better records than you’d think all the time and nothing is ever for certain.

Are the White Sox on pace to make some unfortunate history? Sure. Will they actually get there? It’s way too early to say. The only thing for certain is that fans have a long year ahead.