THE WHITE SOX & THE WORLD OF 10+ GAME LOSING STREAKS

HERE is a belated look at the hapless Chicago White Sox and their season in Hell, even as we grapple with the final throes of our wrought-from-hell volume on forgotten French film noir. (Yes, we've been absent for a reason...)

Our way into this sad tale is through the lens of their epic 21-game losing streak, a downward spiral that began with their loss in the second game of a doubleheader against the Minnesota Twins on July 10th. They would not win again until August 6th.

During those twenty-one losses over twenty-six days, the Pale-to-the-point-of-invisibility Hose scored a total of 49 runs, while their pitchers allowed 136. 

There was a premonition that they'd be just this bad: a previous 14-game losing streak, from May 22nd through June 6th, which is a new record for most number of games lost in two same-season losing streaks: 35 (surpassing the performance of the 1916 Philadelphia A's, with 32 (20 + 12) during their 36-117 season (which is the lowest winning percentage for a team in a full season--the other record that the White Sox are chasing...or is that the other way around?)

BUT back to losing streaks in general. As usual, we seek the data no one else provides. First, how many 10+ game losing streaks have occurred in baseball since 1901? That covers a lot of teams over an even greater number of seasons. Our patented TimeGrid™ chart (at right) has the answer, also showing the year-by-year (or, perhaps, blow-by-blow...) results.

That's a total of 395 losing streaks of ten or more games--and when we look across at the decade summaries, we see that these numbers have remained fairly constant over time. What that really means, though, is that there are proportionately fewer long losing streaks during recent seasons, despite the higher raw numbers in the 1990s and 2000s: remember that in these decades there are nearly twice as many teams as was the case in the 1930s. (On the other hand, 2021 set a record with nine 10+ game losing streaks, eclipsing a mark that had held up since 1909.)

Our color-coding here might be a bit confusing: the years with six or more 10+ game losing streaks are shown in various shades of orange, but you'll note some years where the data is shaded in dark blue--these are baseball's expansion years. We wanted to see if those seasons produced more long losing streaks, and the answer is yes: years with first-year teams average a bit more than five per season, as opposed to just a little more than three per season overall. 

What do such losing streaks mean in terms of seasonal performance? That data is not readily available without some cumbersome compilation, but when we eyeballed the full list of 395, we found only one team on the list that managed to make it into the World Series. (We'll withhold the name of that team until the conclusion of the post...)

BUT there is a more rarefied area of futility available to us within this data: that would be the teams who manage to lose fifteen or more consecutive games. How many such streaks have there been? 

At left are all 33 of those extended mini-seasons in Hell. We present them in reverse chronological order so that the forlorn White Sox can be on top of something...

What emerges sharply at the outset is that these are all really bad teams: only four of them exceeded a .400 WPT in the season they had their 15+ game "siesta." 

Also emerging is the fact that virtually all of these teams had execrable pitching while they were in extended winless mode. This will be highly evident when you examine the ERA column for these teams, which shows only nine of the 33 teams posting sub-5.00 ERAs during their "clustered swan dives."

2021 was the first season since 1927 to have two such long losing streaks in a single year. But more notable--in fact, incredibly remarkable--is the fact that those two 2021 "long losers" were quick to rebound from their dismal seasons: the Diamondbacks went to the World Series in 2023, while in the same year the Baltimore Orioles won 101 games. (No such luck for the teams who joined hands in futility during 1906, 1909, and 1927--mostly teams from Boston, by the way.)

Note that our seasonal record for the 2024 White Sox is out of date--we researched this a couple of weeks ago, intending to post it earlier, but...French noir intervened. Their current record is 31-105 (still, somehow, one game better than those 1916 A's, who were 30-106 at the same point in their dismal year).

Just think: these White Sox missed by just one loss during their May-June swoon from being the only team to appear twice on this list in the same year. Of course, there's still time: the Im-paled Hose have yet another losing streak in the works--they are up to eight in a row with their 5-1 loss to the Mets tonight, and there's a chance that they will become only the fourth team to have three 10+ game losing streaks in the same season. (With two more losses in a row, they would join the 1909 Boston Braves, the 1961 Washington Senators, and the 1962 New York Mets.)

NOW, finally: what team lost 10+ games in a season and still made it to the World Series? The 1951 "miracle" New York Giants, that's who. Leo Durocher's boys lost eleven in a row from April 19th to April 29th that year, but still managed to play catch-up with the Brooklyn Dodgers in a playoff series that might still be lodged in your memory banks. Leo the Lip always insisted he was a singular presence in the game: with this factoid, he's definitely got some bragging rights...

[UPDATE 9/1: The White Sox have joined the ranks of "seasonal three-peat 10+ losing streak teams" with their loss today to the Mets. They are now 31-107; to escape sliding under the '62 Mets, they'll need to go 10-14 the rest of the way...stay tuned.]