HERE’S THIS COLUMN’S first foray into baseball, the grassy wallpaper of American life.
Because baseball, it seems, is Always On. Flick around American TV channels any time during the season and you’ll eventually alight on footage of a man standing up to pose and to posture before reacting poorly to any kind of curveball. The closest Irish equivalent to this is Oireachtas TV.
The sheer weight of a baseball season is difficult to compute: 30 teams play 162 regular season games each, totalling 2,430 games. That total doesn’t include the post-season play-offs, which continue until one team is left standing as the World Champions of America.
But even in a sport used to supersized numbers, baseball is currently in awe of those just posted by the Chicago White Sox.
The White Sox have just completed the most miserable Major League Baseball season in modern times, posting the worst season record the sport has seen since 1899.
Of their 162 regular season games in 2024, the White Sox lost 121 of them. One-hundred-and-twenty-one. That record doesn’t just stick out on paper, it sticks out on the city landscape; it looms above everything in such a brutal, ungainly way that Donald Trump would stick his name on it and call it a hotel.
The team’s official social media channels stopped posting results; interim manager Grady Sizemore said with exquisite understatement that “it wasn’t the year we wanted”.
American sports reporters flocked to this losing record like moths to a flame. They performed their respective deep dives and retrieved the usual emblems: poor injury record; lousy recruitment; a coach out of his depth; a toxic locker room atmosphere.
ESPN reported that locker room veterans had to be talked into attending a comeback press conference in support of a team-mate who was making a return after cancer treatment, while The Athletic pointed fingers at 88-year-old owner Jerry Reinsdorf, whose love of baseball was deep-rooted but old-fashioned, and so made a cold and half-hearted embrace of data. Nowadays, a baseball owner disregarding stats and analytics is the equivalent of a fish being sceptical about the prospect of immersing itself in water.
These insider accounts were gossipy and mordant and compelling reading, but more interesting is life on the fringes.
Imagine supporting the team that lost 121 times this year?
In percentage terms, we have occasionally seen seasons as bad as the White Sox on this side of the Atlantic. The infamously putrid Derby County team of the 2007/08 Premier League season lost 76% of their games that season, where the White Sox lost 75% of theirs this year.
But the absolute figures are more interesting. 121 defeats!
121 defeats means 121 separate days either marred or ruined; 121 separate blows to the sports fan’s creed of hope that the next game will be better than the previous game.
The White Sox’s season ran from the end of March to the end of September, meaning they lost 121 games in the space of 186 days. Average it out and the White Sox lost a game roughly every 36 hours this season. This requires a metabolism for misery with which a European fan cannot keep pace.
The record books show that the White Sox season is the worst since the Cleveland Spiders lost 134 games in 1899, but the footnotes draw an even uglier picture.
That Spiders season was ruined by an early adopter of Larry David’s Spite Store, as team owner Frank Robison rebelled at a state law forbidding the team from playing on Sundays, which limited his ticket sales.
In riposte, Robison bought the St. Louis Browns – now Cardinals – to whom he moved all of the Spiders’ best players, and then, in a final and delightfully spiteful flourish, renamed the Browns the ‘Perfectos’. The winnowed Spiders therefore slumped and folded at the end of their historically bad season.
So the White Sox’s 121-loss season can really be considered the worst of all time, given their owner actually tried to succeed.
American media has been filled with pieces talking to White Sox fans about their team’s plight, and while some fans have leaned into the bleak humour of turning up to watch in anticipation of the defeat that would break the modern record – “If we’re here, we might as well see history”, one fan told NBC – the general tenor among fans has been a mingling of anger and resignation.
But this baseball season has raised an interesting question of philosophy. Is it better to lose and lose and lose rather than lose the opportunity to lose?
Another fact of American sport difficult for us Europeans to understand is the franchising of professional teams, meaning they can float freely from one city to another.
The latest to take leave of their loyal fans are the Athletics of Oakland, who have been playing out of the Californian city since 1968. Now, however, they are off, and are going to a kind of mezzanine existence in Sacramento for a couple of years before moving permanently to Las Vegas. Oakland’s NFL team, the Raiders, have already upped and moved to Vegas.
The Athletics spent years and years agitating for a new stadium to replace the crumbling Oakland Coliseum, but the saga appeared to at an end in 2011, when the city proposed a new baseball stadium would be built by the city port.
But as the project dragged on, Athletics owner John Fisher pursued a move to Las Vegas, either in negotiation or in earnest.
Either way, the city of Oakland didn’t budge and now the team’s lease in Oakland is up and they will play temporarily in Sacramento as they wait for their new Vegas ballpark to be built, where Fisher will have to somehow sell the appeal of the slow-releasing pleasure of baseball in a city built on the principle of instant gratification.
Oakland fans held the funeral for their baseball team during the final home game of the season, dusting off old memories and lamenting the end of old match-day rituals and the sudden vanishing of familiar faces.
Tens of thousands of Oakland suddenly no longer have their team but, crucially, the ritual of going to the ball game, which really just survives as an American solvent for friendship, family, conversation, and memory.
The record books will show the White Sox were the biggest losers of the 2024 season, but reality tells you it’s the baseball fans of Oakland.
