MLB’s Not-So-Secret Crisis Has Been Exposed by White Sox Historically Bad Season

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Melissa Tamez/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
What if I told you Major League Baseball is relatively healthy right now?
After all, you can directly link the quicker, more action-packed gameplay ushered in by the new rules to the league’s rising attendance. It also helps that the sport is awash in generational stars like Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge and that competitive balance is trending back in the right direction after a lull in the 2010s.
Then there’s the Chicago White Sox, along with the other franchises suffering from bad ownership.
Of course, Jerry Reinsdorf’s White Sox aren’t merely a bad team. With 120 losses, they are momentarily tied with the 1962 New York Mets as the worst in MLB’s modern era. They must win all five remaining games to avoid claiming the record for themselves.
According to Baseball Reference, their entire 2024 roster is worth 4.7 WAR. It’s thus less valuable than 20 individual hitters, and even doubling that figure still wouldn’t get it to Bobby Witt Jr. (9.4) or Aaron Judge (10.4) territory.
Paradoxically, though, even these White Sox aren’t much of an outlier in more recent history.
They’re the only 100-loss team in MLB right now, but the Miami Marlins (99) and Colorado Rockies (97) are candidates to join the club before the regular season ends on Sunday. That would make this the sixth full season in a row with at least three 100-loss teams. Such a phenomenon happened twice between 1966 and 2017.
This mostly indicates a nefarious strain of indifference worming its way through MLB’s menagerie of fantastically wealthy owners. But for the White Sox, the operative word is incompetence.
Reinsdorf’s Unremarkable Reign on the South Side
It’s fair to say Jerry Reinsdorf has done well for himself.
After originally making a fortune in real estate in the 1970s, the 88-year-old bought both the White Sox and the NBA’s Chicago Bulls in the 1980s. The two franchises have since yielded seven championships and are now estimated by Forbes to be worth $2.1 billion and $4.6 billion, respectively.
Yet it is also fair to say that as a baseball owner, Reinsdorf is Very Bad At This.
It was a monumental occasion when the White Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1917 back in 2005, but overall they have a lower winning percentage under Reinsdorf (.495) than they did before his takeover (.502) in 1981.
And as good as it sounds in a vacuum, the franchise’s valuation comes with an asterisk. The cross-town Cubs sold for just $2 million more than what Reinsdorf bought the White Sox for in 1981, yet the former is now worth twice as much as the latter.
Just as he owns the White Sox, Reinsdorf also owns the short-sighted design and implementation of Guaranteed Rate Field, which is about as nondescript as the team. And now more than ever, he also owns the listlessness that has led the team to ruin.
He’s been lacking in imagination for the entirety of the 21st century, keeping the same front office in place for two decades and then hiring an underling (Chris Getz) to take over when he finally fired the old guard (Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn).
The team could reportedly follow the same playbook with interim manager Grady Sizemore. He has a worse winning percentage (.225) than Pedro Grifol (.239) prior to his firing, so that scans according to the White Sox’s special brand of galaxy-brain logic.
Speaking of skippers, remember when Reinsdorf intervened to hire Tony La Russa to manage the team in 2021, thus denying the front office its preferred hire in A.J. Hinch? Bringing back La Russa, who had previously managed the White Sox between 1979 and 1986, was emblematic of not just Reinsdorf’s to-a-fault loyalty, but also his disdain for modern analytical sensibilities embodied by Hinch.

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