Two numbers, and then the point.
40-120. The 1962 New York Mets, in their first year of existence. For sixty-two years that was the thing you pointed at. The bar for how bad a season could get.
41-121. The 2024 Chicago White Sox. One more loss than the 1962 Mets, passed on September 27th of that year. The most losses in any season in the modern era.
Except — and this is the part the graphic never includes — the Mets played fewer games. New York’s winning percentage was .250. Chicago’s was .253. By the only measure that adjusts for how much baseball you actually had to sit through, the 1962 Mets are still the worst team of the modern era, and they lost the record on a technicality.
Nobody tells you that part, because “most losses ever” fits on a chyron and “second-worst by percentage in a longer schedule” does not.
That was two years ago.
This morning, the Chicago White Sox are 81-76, one game out of first place in the American League Central, and one of their players just became the first man in franchise history to put 30 home runs, 30 doubles, 20 stolen bases and 100 runs in the same season.
We are not going to tell you they are good. Eighty-one and seventy-six is not good. Eighty-one and seventy-six is fine, and fine is an enormous distance from 41-121, and they covered it in twenty-four months.
Here is the part worth sitting with. In the summer of 2024 there was a stretch where that team lost twenty-one games in a row, and every single night somebody went to that ballpark on purpose. Bought a ticket. Parked the car. Watched it happen. Came back.
Those people are having a very good September.
Nobody is going to make a documentary about a team finishing 81-76. That is exactly why we like it. The distance between catastrophe and fine is the longest walk in this sport, nobody claps when you finish it, and somebody on the south side of Chicago just did it in two years.