The Chicago White Sox—YOUR Chicago White Sox—have finally become the stuff of what we like to call a Daily Thing. That is, the sort of topic, concept or gathering of mammals who must be monitored every day because the things they are doing (and more specifically not doing) are creating their own momentum.
The tipping point was yesterday when it was pointed out that the White Sox, whom we already know consume metric tons of ass each day as an episodic homage to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, just broke another record, a record we believe nobody had ever considered until just now. It was for starting pitcher Chris Flexen, who now has twenty consecutive starts without his team winning. Not him. The people around him.
This is a stretch, pure and simple. The White Sox are giving us a level of comprehensive failure, so seeking out a record like "most consecutive starts without his teammates being worth a damn" is almost missing the point. This is a team that since its high-water mark on May 15 (14-30) is 17-78, which is and of itself is mind-shattering. No team since the Spiders folded have played what we consider a full season (154 games) with such poor results, and in every other metric the other teams that are in the White Sox' class were either part of the Nineteenth Century, the First Dead Ball Era (pre-Ruth), World War II, the Expansion Era (1961 onward) and the Designated Hitter Era (1973 onward).
In all those calamitous times for the game as entertainment, the game changed out of desperation. They invented Babe Ruth and legalized swinging from one's arse. They fought and defeated Hitler (albeit an ancillary benefit). They expanded the league five times, lowered the mound, shrunk the strike zone, livelied the ball, allowed, profited from and then pretended to ban performance enhancing drugs, timed the at-bats, invented the faux runner and in every other conceivable way changed the nature of the sport so that things like the White Sox (or their less charismatic brethren in Denver, Miami, Washington DC, Oakland/West Sacramento or Anaheim) cannot happen.
And yet they do, and almost never quite like the White Sox, or as we know them, Spiders 2.0.
There are still a myriad of ways to explain how unutterably shit they are, but Chris Flexen isn't it. Indeed, the true measure of this team will be in what rules and procedure changes MLB introduces next year in response to these magnificent White Sox. Titanium bats. Exploding balls. Trampoline bases. Pedro Grifol introduced as the next Dodgers managers against the franchise's will. Nashville. The options are nearly unlimited, and the White Sox Rules, whatever they end up being, will be glorious. That is the context in which we will be able to place this team with both confidence and turboscorn.
In other words, free Chris Flexen. Sure, he seems a lot like Patrick Corbin, the gold standard in tin, but he's not the reason for the White Sox—just a hell of a symptom.
- Ray Ratto
