As the White Sox narrowly avoid loss #121, fans bid farewell to a season to forget

CHICAGO — It couldn't have been a more beautiful day for the final home game of what may yet be the worst season in modern Major League history.

Sunny, 73 degrees, not a cloud in sight: a day so beautiful it was impossible for even the gloomiest of White Sox fans to resist a laugh about their team's plight.

At 39 wins and 120 losses, the Chicago White Sox are on history's doorstep. Since the turn of the 20th century, no other team has ever lost more games. For now, they have tied the record for most losses with the 1962 New York Mets. One more L, and the record's all theirs.

"I wanted it to happen today so we can get it over with, so SportsCenter can leave us alone," joked Kevin Parks, a Chicago native and a lifelong White Sox fan.

Parks was one of more than 15,000 people who turned out Thursday to see the team play its last game in Chicago for the year.

Many were hoping, in a way, for their team to lose, even as they cheered each hit by a White Sox batter and strikeout by a White Sox pitcher. Fans said they wanted the record broken here at home, rather than on the road in Detroit, where a three-game series against the Tigers will bring the season, at long last, to its end.

"I want to see a record, so I am rooting for the final loss at home," Chicago fan Nick Boose admitted, as he bought a beer before the game began. "I got my Sox jersey on. But I am."

But the White Sox didn't play ball, so to speak. The team scored seven runs in the fifth inning — their best inning of the entire season — to cap off a sweep of the Los Angeles Angels.

Now, with only three games left to play, there's a glimmer of hope that the team could maybe, just maybe, stave off the unwanted label of "worst ever."

It won't be easy. To do so, the White Sox will have to best their longest winning streak of the season, a humble four-game run back in May. (Since then, they have posted 14 losing streaks of four games or more, the longest lasting 21 games from mid-July through early August.) And their opponent these next three games, the 85-74 Detroit Tigers, are chasing a playoff spot.

"For us, we have to do everything right," said interim manager Grady Sizemore, who took over in August after the team's original manager, Pedro Grifol, was fired. "We have to play small ball, play fundamentally sound, not make mistakes and take advantage of opportunities."

The key, he said Thursday, will be "putting it together more consistently, day in and day out." Or maybe it'll be Sizemore's lucky shirt: He's worn the same black pullover every day since Tuesday, when the team's winning streak began.

The fans, by contrast, have resigned themselves to what seems to be the team's fate.

Even before the season began, many fans knew it was going to be bleak.

Normally, Kathleen Knack makes the 100-mile drive from her home in Dixon, Ill., to Chicago about twenty times a season, she said. But this year, there was no point: Even during spring training, it was clear they'd be bad, she said.

Instead, she has found joy in watching former White Sox players succeed for other teams — like the pitcher Michael Kopech, who was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in July and has since posted the lowest ERA of his career. "I'm so glad," she said. "I feel like he's my baby or something."

The departure of talented players is one reason why the team has been so bad — but only one, since many things have to go wrong for a team to lose 120 games. At the stadium, fans ticked off some of the other factors: spendthrift ownership, inexperienced management, injuries to key players, clubhouse drama.

And some of it was just plain bad baseball. The White Sox have the fewest hits, the fewest home runs and the worst team batting average in the major leagues this season. Only two teams' pitching staff have a worse ERA.

All of it has culminated in a season to forget, filled with lowlights that ranged from the pedestrian to the indelible.

Just two days ago, four different White Sox players converged on an infield pop-up — the pitcher, the catcher and two infielders — and in the end, none made an attempt to catch it, and the ball hit the ground between them, prompting boos, and even some laughs from the home crowd.

Before this year, the most games the White Sox had ever lost in a season was in 1970, when the team posted 106 losses.

That was the year Ed Nichols became a fan. "I got on at the bottom," he said Thursday.

The first time he ever went to see them play, the Sox lost the second game of a double-header to notch their 100th loss of that season.

"They were so bad, and no one was there," Nichols said. "But the field was green, and it was just an amazing experience that's kept me coming back for 50-plus years."

Since then, Nichols has seen the top, too: the 2005 World Series title, six division titles, two perfect games (the most by any franchise this century), a sitting president throwing out the first pitch of the All-Star Game dressed in White Sox gear.

Now, with the White Sox back on bottom, Nichols is still here. "It seems like a fitting bookend," he said, smiling.