The South Siders’ soul-sapping run, culminating Friday with the single-season losses record, is what happens when a disgraceful front office intersects with plain old bad luck

When the history books are written, there will be all manner of different ways to describe the historic putridness of the 2024 Chicago White Sox. The unprecedented loss total will be one. The incomprehensibly bad performance of the team’s position players will be another. The three separate losing streaks of 21, 14, and 12 games. There will be ample time for all of it. The White Sox lost their 121st game on Friday night, the most in a modern era that dates to 1901. They are also the worst team of that span by win percentage, sitting at 39-121 with two games left to play. After a scrappy home sweep of the Los Angeles Angels allowed them to avoid a 121st loss at home, the dam finally broke in a 4-1 road defeat to the playoff-bound Detroit Tigers.

But maybe the most modern barometer of the White Sox catastrophe of 2024 is the media environment around the team. The club’s rights-holding TV broadcasters have been at its throat all season. And as Chicago approached their milestone loss, the White Sox’ own social media stopped bothering to tweet out the team’s results (or they did until a late, unexpected winning streak). Their efforts turned out to be the only vaguely successful thing about the entire season: “FINAL: can be found on the MLB app,” one postgame post on X read. Another had this zinger: “FINAL: the number of runs we scored was not greater than the number of runs they scored”. Soon, there was only this: