Tag: baseball

Revisiting a massive biff of an old post: Chris Sale to the Braves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As daily as I can, I like to look at the posts I’ve blathered over the years, utilizing the On This Day WordPress extensions.  It feeds into what narcissism I do have, I like to see if there have been any noteworthy changes in my opinions over the years, and in cases like this, it’s interesting to see when I’ve made some clairvoyant predictions or in this case, colossal biffs.

A year ago, I was none too pleased to see that the Braves’ solution for their lack of pitching depth was trading for Chris Sale, when there were many acceptable pitchers available, such as Sonny Gray, Tyler Glasnow, Dylan Cease, and as pipe dream as it would’ve been, Shohei Ohtani.  Some were more preferable than others, but any one of them would have been an obvious upgrade to what was a typical Braves-ey pitching rotation.

All of the ships sailed, and then the Braves traded away noteworthy infield prospect Vaughn Grissom to the Boston Red Sox for Chris Sale, which had me scratching my head and immediately pondering just how bad of a deal this was sounding like; even more so when the Braves immediately extended Chris Sale for two more years at actual money, something that the Braves are basically allergic to doing, locking themselves in for two more years at $38M.

Sale used to be one of the best pitchers in the game, but he was two years removed from Tommy John Surgery, a maligned season where his numbers fell off a cliff, and looked like he was busted goods at this point.  At the time, it seemed like the Braves were trading away a valuable chip for a broken pitcher, and I thought that this was going to be a colossal L for the Braves, punishment for being the usual Braves-ey cheap, bargain basement hunters.

Fast forward back to present time, and Chris Sale is the National League Cy Young winner, after pitching the triple crown of leading the NL in Wins, Strikeouts and ERA.  I’m not entirely sure how he didn’t get a unanimous vote, but the BBWAA is a bunch of spiteful blowhards who don’t really vote with any objectivity in the first place, so I guess it’s no surprise, but the point is, I doubted the effectiveness of acquiring Chris Sale, and was completely wrong, and I’m big enough to admit it.

Chris Sale was the epitome of the ace pitcher he used to be for the White Sox and the Red Sox, and he truly turned the clock back and pitched lights out baseball all year long.  Especially when Spencer Strider went down, it was Sale who was the bastion of stability and acted like the stopper, when Max Fried buckled under the weight of the walk year, Charlie Morton really started to show is age, and whenever the squad kept trotting Bryce Elder out there and expected fans to accept him as a viable starting pitcher.

And to further reflect on the trade itself, Vaughn Grissom put up a clunker season for Boston, hitting mediocrely for their Triple-A squad and even worse when he was called up.  He’s still pretty young and playing ahead of his age expectations, but if the last three years have been any indication of what kind of path he’s headed, then it looks like the Braves are going to continue to win this trade, as long as Sale continues to pitch well and Grisson continues to slide.

Although I admit the biff I had had with my opinion of this trade, the worst part of it all is that this does buy the Braves front office a little equity with the opinion that they might know what they’re doing.  It brings some validation to their decisions to shop the bargain bins and for a little while, it gives them a little grace whenever they pull this act again in the near future, that their next (few) low-risk/high-reward decisions could always end up being the next Chris Sale.

As pleased I was with Chris Sale in 2024, Chris Sale was most definitely the exception and not the rule, and I’ll be ready to pounce on scathing the Braves for being the Barves when they make their next shitty Braves-ey cheapskate move, without much concern that I’d have to revisit it in the future if I’m wrong.

Pretty sure the Dodgers are banking on the world ending

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There’s not a lot to like about the Dodgers winning the World Series; it’s precisely what MLB had wanted when they wrote their script for the 2024 season, with golden boy Shohei Ohtani having one of the greatest seasons in baseball history and then capping it off with a world championship.  It validated the importance of spending money, because the Dodgers spent money like they had the infinite money code in Sim City, and there was no plucky Cinderella squad to dethrone them and give hearty lols to baseball fans outside the greater Los Angeles area.

But personally, I think worst of all is that it opened the door for Dodgers fans, most of whom are fairweather front-running troglodytes whom it’s clear to see how short of a time they’ve been Dodger or baseball fans, based on how loud they are on the internet about their sudden unyielding fandom of the team.  I haven’t seen such fervent sore winning from any fanbase, including Philadelphia; those cocksuckers flip a few cars, set fire to them, have a parade, and then it’s back to normal the following week.

The thing is, now that the Dodgers have won an actual championship, as opposed to the Mickey Mouse COVID World Series from 2020, all these slimes claiming to be Dodgers fans are all over the fucking place now, celebrating everything the team does, which also happens to be MLB’s favorite squad, much like all the memes that exist about how the NFL so flagrantly favors the Kansas City Chiefs.

And when there’s such blatant favoritism, then the rich tend to get richer, and the Dodgers have made a lot of news during the offseason, not just with Ohtani winning the National League MVP that was a formality, but the fact that despite the fact that they committed over a billion dollars to free agents last winter, they’ve invented some more currency and have gone ahead and committed even more money to signing Balakey Snell (5 years, $182M) and extending Tommy Edman (5 years, $74M).

Naturally, this raises a lot of questions on how the Dodgers are funding their roster full of All-Stars, MVPs and Cy Young winners, at top-dollar contracts, and the answer is really quite simple: the Dodgers are spamming the ever-living fuck out of deferring money, and are completely comfortable at accruing colossal amounts of debt that will be due to be paid way down the line.

What a lot the people who are crying foul on the internet don’t really understand is that what the Dodgers are doing is 100% completely legal and allowed, it’s just the fact that there’s no team in history that has been this flagrant and so quick and willing to basically sign almost every one of their big-name free agents to deferred money deals.  Most teams are owned and operated by businesses and many businesses tend to err on the side of risk-averse, and being risk-averse usually means an aversion to accruing debts, especially those of which are measured in literal hundreds of millions of dollars.

Continue reading “Pretty sure the Dodgers are banking on the world ending” →

Fuzzy the Clingstone: as if it were going to be anything remotely interesting

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Braves’ AA-affiliate Columbus Clingstones announce the name of their mascot – Fuzzy

Naturally, I didn’t expect much when I found out that the Columbus Clingstones were seeking out a name for their anamorphic peach mascot.  Not that they’re being forced by the Braves like they once used to, but being a Braves affiliate still means they’re not going to do anything remotely interesting or willing to rock the boat.  I didn’t know, nor did I really care to look into what the other options were,* but considering “Fuzzy” won out, I can’t imagine that they were possibly anything competitively intriguing.

*Fuzzy, Pit, Stoney and Cobbler; yep, nothing exciting

Fuzzy is the name that a three-year old toddler names their favorite stuffed bear.  Or any sort of stuffed thing that comes into their possession that they declare in two seconds that they want to have forever and is already their best friend.  I love my kids, but they’re still too young to be coming up with some seriously clever and/or meta thinking names for the things they want to name yet, but they’re also four and three years old, and I have a hard time believing that of the alleged 675 fan suggestions, they were all toddlers.

Unsurprising though, considering the lukewarm response to naming themselves the Clingstones, a term that most people outside of the southeast have never even heard of, that they would go with an absolute snoozefest of a name like Fuzzy.

I was hoping that the Clingstones would’ve carried on a trope started by the AAA-affiliate of the Braves, when they were crowdsourcing for a new name; they came up with four finalists, had a voting period, and when the vote was over, they announced a name that wasn’t even one of the options to begin with, the Stripers.  In all fairness, the Stripers was way better than all of the available options so it wasn’t all for the worst, and considering what options the people of Columbus had to pick from, it would’ve been both hilarious and productive if the same kind of thing happened here as well.

Frankly, as much as I like the actual mascot of Fuzzy (what can I say, I’m a sucker for anamorphic food mascots), I hate the name.  It would’ve been great if they had their silly little voting period, and then in the end, went ahead and declared that the name of the mascot be Clinger, the Clingstone.

And with a name like that, it can create all sorts of room for interpretation, but most prevalently the fact that a clinger is an allegory for a little turd that is stuck to a creature’s butt, which seems appropriate for the absolute flop of a naming rebrand the Columbus baseball organization did.

It’s like, I really like the colors, the mascot, the general aesthetic of the team; but the names Clingstones and Fuzzy the mascot are just colossal whiffs.  It’s like I wish the team could borrow the Time Stone from Dr. Strange or Thanos, rewind just far back enough to where they got to the point where the brand kid was complete but didn’t have a name, and just re-did reality to where they might have gone with other names before the Clingstones and subsequently, Fuzzy.

But at least it served as impetus to create an image of Fuzzy the Clingstone being the clinger that the names of the team are in my opinion, and poop jokes sell, in my little slice of the internet.

Suck it, MLweeB

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not too thrilled with the fact that the Dodgers completed their season of destiny and won the World Series, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be happy for Freddie Freeman, who was obviously named the World Series MVP after batting .300 with an OPS of 1.364, four home runs, 12 RBI and the legendary walk-off grand slam in game 1 that basically set the entire tone of the series afterward.

Even though he plays for the Dodgers, the team he left Atlanta for, there’s not a bone in my body that holds any resentment or ill-will for the man, as he’s a first-class outstanding human being, embodies everything that’s good about baseball, and is someone whom requires a genuine effort to not like.  I am stoked that he has now won his second championship, played his butt off to win the WS MVP he easily deserved, and is getting the mainstream accolades and recognition that he deserves.

I just don’t care for the fact that the Dodgers organization are the world champions, because they kind of validated the importance of spending money, as they committed over a billion dollars ($1.185B to be exact)  to just four players, on top of their existing $230M payroll, and being a Braves fan, it’s aggravating to see teams that spend money that succeed, knowing the team I follow will never, ever spend in the same manner, and instead feed us all sorts of bullshit rhetoric and make excuses on why they won’t, despite all the evidence that exists that shows the economic benefit of a championship team.

Plus, the swarms of insufferable bandwagon Dodger fans scuttling out of the cracks and gutters like the cockroaches they are getting to be happy is annoying to me, and makes me make the face of the Friends watching meme whenever I see or hear all the front-running celebratory garbage that comes from them in the news or on social media.  It’s bad when I would rather put up with the devil I know in Yankees fans getting to be happy over Dodgers fans, even in spite of the shenanigans of the two outfield goombas who grabbed and tried pry the ball out of Mookie Betts’ glove among other typical bad Yankee fan behavior.

But most of all, the Dodgers winning the World Series is precisely what MLB wanted to be the outcome, because they’ve gone full weeb-mode this season, what with pushing Ohtanimania down everyone’s throats, and seemingly every popular team there is making a mad dash to acquire Japanese talent, none more than the Dodgers with not just Ohtani, but also Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and they’re all treated like these mystical Mr. Miyagis demonstrating karate for the first time in history based on how every little thing they do is made such a big deal about.

Make no mistake, the season Shohei Ohtani had was other-worldly, but for every game where he had a homer and two steals, Yamamoto goes five innings with three earned runs, and it’s applauded like he just pitched a Maddux.  Shota Imanaga has a low ERA in the first half of the season and people act like he knew how to throw a disappearing pitch, meanwhile the Braves’ Reynaldo Lopez led the league in ERA up until like August, but nobody cared about him because he wasn’t Japanese.

I think my favorite part of the World Series was that in spite of the monumental rocket ship the Ohtani hype train had strapped to it, fans and viewers were treated to a series of futility as he went a pitiful 2 for 19 (.105) in the series, an OPS of .385 and no home runs.  Aaron Judge was absolutely dragged by the media and fans for being ineffective, in comparison to Ohtani, he went 4 for 18 (.222) with an OPS of .836 and one home run.  It’s just that the Yankees as a team stunk it up throughout the series and used Judge as a scapegoat, while Ohtani could easily hide underneath Freddie Freeman’s Superman cape while the team kept on winning.

Which brings us back to Freddie Freeman, whom is the only thing I like about the Dodgers winning the World Series, because a I genuinely like, enjoy and admire, gets to be the focal point and superstar, everyone in Atlanta already knew of, everyone in Los Angeles is probably well aware of now, and probably every baseball fan in the world is aware of now too.

When the lights were the brightest, the stakes were the highest, Ohtani absolutely crumpled under the pressure.  Yamamoto, to his credit did pitch a great game in his one start, but when all was said and done, the World Series was the Freddie Freeman show, and even if it means that the Dodgers are World champions, I am okay with it.

This is Freddie Freeman’s world, and everyone; Ohtani, Yamamoto, the country of Japan, the rest of MLB, are just living in it.

Every baseball kid’s dream ending, starring Freddie Freeman

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Bottom of the ninth tenth, down a run, bases loaded, two outs; in the World Series.

The only thing more that there could’ve been was a full-count, but Freddie Freeman had to go ahead and remove that extra drama by instead blasting the first pitch he saw deep into the outfield stands of Dodger Stadium, and just like that, the Dodgers and their $241M payroll burst from the jaws of defeat against the Yankees and their $309M payroll to take the critical first game of the 2024 World Series.

If this game had ended in a similar fashion at the bat of anyone other than Freddie Freeman, this post doesn’t exist.  Especially Shohei Ohtani, and especially Max Muncy whom I think is the living embodiment of the meme of the guy that is part of the group project that gets an A but doesn’t actually do anything but gets to talk about the A like he did.  If Ohtani delivered the game-winning hit, I don’t post.  If it were Muncy, I don’t post.  Even if it were half-Korean Tommy Edman, I still have a literal list of topics that I’d rather spend my time writing about.

But Freddie Freeman is a guy whom it is impossible for a person like me to feel even the slightest amount of malice or disdain for, even if his actions result in outcomes that I did not want, like the Dodgers getting any sort of wins over the Yankees in the World Series.  Dare I say, when he clobbered that first pitch and in that split second where he and only he knew it was gone, and he begun holding his bat up triumphantly like an Olympic torch, only for nanoseconds later the rest of the his teammates and all the fans in Dodger Stadium realized it was headed out and began their approving roaring, I felt happy for him and only him alone, because that’s what Freddie Freeman means to me.

I mean, this is the dream outcome of the dream scenario that every baseball kid dreams about in their backyard, at some points in their lives, and Freddie Freeman just fulfilled it better than anyone could have possibly done.  In a sport that tracks absolutely every single play, instance and scenario, this was literally the only time in the history of the game, where a World Series game had ended in a walk-off grand slam.

Sure, I’m sure there will be lots of challenges and rebuttals that the only thing that tops this is a walk-off grand slam to outright win the World Series or comparing it to Joe Carter’s Series-ending walk-off three-run blast in 1993, but if we could just kick the nerds out of the room for just a second, and simply marvel at the magical moment we just witnessed.

Back to reality though, nothing changes with the fact that I still want the Yankees to win it, for the sake of my wife and her family, and the put a damper on Ohtanimania, and this heartbreaking L belongs to nobody but Yankee skipper Aaron Boone.  Why he trotted out a cold and rusty Nestor Cortes to face three-straight MVPs in extra innings is a decision that I already question, and imagine armchair baseball strategists and Yankee fans all around also question.

Aside from the fact that Cortes was colder than a pint of Häagen-Dazs buried at the bottom of a chest freezer in the garage, having not pitched since September, he’s a junk ball starting pitcher that relies on deception and trickery over having sheer, stuff, to get batters out, much less three straight MVPs in Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freeman. 

Personally, I have this belief that starting pitchers are not ideal candidates to come out in relief, especially in extra innings, because pitchers are often neurotic creatures optimally comfortable in defined roles, and a guy like Cortes has been a starter for most of his Yankee career, and starting pitchers are mentally okay with an occasional hit and an occasional run, because as starters, they have the cushion of knowing they’ve got several innings behind and beyond them for the team to battle on their behalf.  All that cushion vanishes in late and extra innings, and more often than not, starting pitchers don’t fare well in those scenarios.

In all fairness, Cortes did manage to get demi-god Ohtani out, thanks to the gutsy selfless crashing into the stands catch by Alex Verdugo, but when I heard that Mookie was getting the intentional walk so that they could go lefty-vs-lefty with Freeman, my face literally made the wince emoji .

Now Aaron Boone has been applauded before in understanding modern baseball strategy, but going Cortes vs. Freeman will be one that I’m sure many will be questioning for a long time, especially if the Dodgers outright win the World Series.  Freddie Freeman is a career .273 hitter against lefties with an .804 OPS which is nerd speak for he hits left-handed pitching very well.  Conversely, Mookie Betts has never recorded a hit off of Nestor Cortes; granted, both sample sizes are extremely small, limited to a single game earlier in the season, but when it comes down to it, I would rather have taken my chances on Betts than Freeman, but I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.

It’s a shame too, because a lot of standout Yankee performances are wiped out in this loss; Gerrit Cole’s six innings because apparently 5-6 innings is applause worthy in today’s baseball, the aforementioned Alex Verdugo catch into the stands, Giancarlo Stanton continuing his torrid postseason run with another home run, and for me, Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s bonkers baserunning in the tenth that gave the Yankees their one-run lead going into the final frame is a shame to have wiped by Boone’s questionable management.

Make no mistake though; in order for this moment to be preserved in immortality, the Dodgers must win outright.  Much like Chisholm Jr.’s baserunning will be forgotten in the loss, Freddie Freeman’s walk-off grand slam will be reduced to a statistical anomaly if the Dodgers don’t win the whole thing.  And as much as I have genuine love in my heart for the man, I’m still pulling for the Yankees, and hope that this one magic moment is the extent of Freeman’s contributions to the Dodgers’ cause.

FOX’s Shohei Ohtani coverage is out of control

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Let’s get one thing out of the way – I have no dislike for Shohei Ohtani.  Even if he is Japanese and the world has basically fetishized him into oblivion, I don’t have any beef with the guy.  He legitimately is basically the greatest player to have played the game of baseball at this point and seems like a pretty humble and level-headed human being.

But the way FOX and the rest of the media world has continuously forced him down the throats of every baseball fan, sports fan or just television watcher, is definitely making me sour on the concept of Shohei Ohtani, and it goes without saying, is among the chief reasons why not one iota of my being won’t be rooting for the Dodgers to take the L in the World Series.

Nobody likes being told what to do.  I don’t like being told what to do.  I definitely don’t like being told what I need to like, and the way FOX has gone so ridiculously out of the way to put Ohtani on this pedestal has been ridiculous and embarrassing frankly, and not even being teammates with Freddie Freeman, whom I will always be a fan of, and would ordinarily be okay with him winning another World Series with someone else as long as it weren’t with the Dodgers.

The “X Time Away from Shohei Ohtani” was mortifying to discover that FOX was doing, and I’m glad to have been watching more AL playoffs as opposed to the NL, because it seemed inevitable that the Dodgers were going to win the pennant after vanquishing of the Padres, and although I didn’t witness any of these obnoxious bumpers myself, I saw plenty of screen caps and memes enough to know just how much I hated them.

This is the kind of thing that would make me hope for failure and ineffective at-bats, but because he really is that incredible of a baseball player, of course he delivered in many of these long-called for at-bats, which added to the e-bile I felt in my thoughts about the Shohei Ohtani coverage.

Like, whether it’s on television, or on various social media platforms, or ESPN or any other sports sites, one of my go-to snarky remarks is that I can hear the Oriental gong going off whenever Shohei Ohtani is being discussed, because that’s just how much he has caught the imagination of the collective world with his baseball talents.  It’s almost obnoxious to know that he’s actually a pretty decent dude, notwithstanding the potential gambling problem/scandal from the start of the season which was kind of refreshing to think that amid all of his Mr. Perfect-isms, he was flawed too like the rest of us.

Either way, I thought that I would have more to say about the subject than this, but I basically got my point across.  Enough with the Shohei Ohtani coverage, and at this point, him winning the World Series with the also-insufferable Dodgers is the absolute worst-case scenario there is as far as baseball is concerned.  It validates flagrant spending, egregious marketing of Japanese superstars, and makes a whole lot of obnoxious front-running Dodgers fans happy, which I can’t abide for.  I’d rather side with the devils I know, and actively root for the Yankees, if for nothing at all, would make mythical wife and my mother-in-law really pleased to see the Commissioner’s Trophy being hoisted in the Bronx.

But my parting thought, as insufferably obnoxious the Shohei Ohtani coverage and the Japan fetish has been these playoffs and this season, shoutout to Tommy Edman for being the NLCS MVP; that’s right, a half-KOREAN guy being the best player on the Dodgers for going 11-for-27 with an OPS of 1.023 and a home run.

Suck it, weebs

On the precipice of history: the 2024 Chicago White Sox

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Ordinarily, I would think I would be committing the ultimate jinx by writing this, and tempting the tides of fate into absolutely feeling the utmost need to punish me for my attempt at clairvoyance.  But I am doing so because I’m about to skip town for the next week, and when the historic inevitably occurs, I won’t really be in a position to be able to take the time to write about it, and I feel that this is one of those things best brogged about as close to its drop date, rather than being something having to be written in retrospect, like the unfortunate majority of the posts I write these days.

And let’s be real here, in order for the White Sox to avoid becoming the worst team in MLB history, they have to go 7-1 in their remaining games, and at the precise time I’m writing this, they’re down 4-1 to the Padres to which if the score holds, puts them at loss #119, tying the American League record for worst team in AL history, and one loss away from tying the 1962 Mets for the worst team in baseball history, before they’ll have several shots to futilely avoid becoming the de facto worst team in baseball history.

Yeah, it would take a legitimate act of god at this point for the White Sox to avoid making history at this point.  And if it were to actually happen, then I’d have received all the validation in the world that I needed to know that I am a supreme being that has actual influence on fates of the world.

But yes, this is a post to talk about and preemptively congratulate the 2024 Chicago White Sox, for becoming the worst team in Major League Baseball history.  Full stop, ever.  Not in this generation, this century, or some other made-up record,* we’re talking about: baseball is invented.  Period.  Worst team in history is the 2024 Chicago White Sox.  Period.

*oh and there’s a lot of this bullshit going around lately, like Elly de la Cruz becoming the youngest player to join the “25HR/65SB Club,” Bobby Witt Jr. being the newest member of the “30HR/30SB/10Triple Club” and any time Shohei Ohtani does anything, he’s the “only” member of the 51HR/51SB Club and you can hear the ancient Oriental gong ring when anyone talks about him

Seeing as how the Braves are slowly dying a truly slow and miserable bleed-out, and have fallen into a position of outside-looking-in as far as Wild Card positioning goes, the White Sox have actually been the thing that I’ve actually been tracking and paying attention to as an alternative.  And I have to say that it’s been really refreshing, from the standpoint of hoping for an outcome, and getting it with tremendous regularity; whereas the Braves inept offense keeps making them lose, much to my disappointment, I could always count on checking the scores and seeing the White Sox take L after L after L each night, as they keep on chugging to immortality.

It’s almost like being a kid again in 1996, watching the NBA box scores every morning and seeing the Chicago Bulls notch another W, en route to their historic 72-win season, and it seems fitting that it’s another Chicago sports franchise, also owned by Jerry Reinsdorf, that’s trouping their way towards a historic season, even if it’s not the side of history that a franchise would really want to be on. 

It’s still cool and incredible from a fan of history perspective, and even better that I have no real stake in it, other than the fact that White Sox fans really tore into me after I tore into their shitty ballpark in my sports brogging days, so I’ve always had a negative lean in my perception of the Chicago White Sox.

Bahaha, a little bit of live brogging here, I checked the Padres/Sox score just now to make sure that the Sox were still on their way to #119, and I was frightened to see that the Sox had gotten on the board and it was not only 4-2 Padres, but the White Sox had the bases loaded with just one out; a scenario where scoring a run(s) is a positive probability, and nothing short of two strikeouts or a double play is going to prevent that from happening . . . and then Dominic Fletcher promptly grounds into a double play and the Padres are now three outs away from the W, and the Sox are three outs away from tying the worst record in AL history.

But yeah, it’s still incredible to actually be able to witness like real history happening in sport, even if it’s as ironic as crowning a new worst team in history.  It’s not some fake record that the dorks at Elias come up with on a daily basis like most hits on a Thursday evening game with a humidity under 40% with Laz Diaz as home plate umpire after he ate Burger King for lunch, but a solid, concrete historical mark that actually was on a pedestal of being a record that might not be perceived to be possible to break.

I mean, it really is difficult to be this bad; there’s an adage in baseball that every team will win 60 games and lose 60 games every season, and it’s the other 42 games in which a team either becomes a championship caliber squad, or a team tanking on purpose to get optimal draft positioning.  The 2024 White Sox not only won’t get to 60 wins, it’s a very solid possibility that they might not even reach 40.

There was this one statistic I saw a little while ago about how the AL Central has four out of the five teams solidly above .500, but solely on account of the White Sox anchoring them down, the division as a whole is still under .500.  And the hits just keep on coming and coming as far as all the statistical anomalies that have bubbled up about just how bad the White Sox are, and as the kids say these day, I am here for them, all of them.

Like I said, ordinarily I wouldn’t dare tempt fate and write something like this before it happens, but math is a game of probabilities, and a .234 team miraculously going 7-1 down the stretch to avoid becoming the worst team in history isn’t a bet that I would take, and contrarily, in spite of my general phobia against sports betting, I would actually feel comfortable betting my house that the White Sox are going to fulfill their destiny in becoming the worst team in baseball history. 

It’s just a matter of when it’s going to happen, because they still have one more game against the playoff-hopeful Padres, three against the awful Angels who are still 29 wins better than the Sox while simultaneously being 31 games under .500, and then they close out their season with the Detroit Tigers who are very much in the thick of the Wild Card field and will more than likely still be fighting for their playoff lives next week.

But the odds are that it’s going to happen while I’m out of town and away from the keys, so as out of character it would be for me to commemorate before it happens, I just wanted to give a hearty congratulatory shoutout to the 2024 Chicago White Sox, for becoming the worst team in Major League Baseball history.  Y’all deserve it.

EDIT: Unsurprisingly, the Sox would make me sweat, winning 2/3 from the Angels and relying on the still then-unclinched Tigers to actually exert effort to get #121, before dropping the final two games to the Sox, allowing them to finish out the season with “just” 121 losses, one more than the 1962 Mets.  But like the wise Dom Toretto once paraphrased, it doesn’t matter if you lose by an inch or a mile, losing’s losing.