4 overreactions to White Sox’s historically incompetent start to season

Rick Hahn’s tenure as White Sox general manager is generally regarded as an utter failure. From 2012, when Hahn was hired until his firing in August 2023, the White Sox made exactly one playoff appearance in a full-length season, the red herring 2021 season that led to no sustained success. So who thought it made any sense, mired in a 101-loss season, to fire the architect of the team, but promote his right-hand man to the leading role?

And although it isn’t although expectations were high for Chris Getz in year one, the early results of the transactions he’s made have been horrific. Michael Soroka, acquired as a reclamation project in a trade with the Atlanta Braves, has the second-worst ERA among all qualified pitchers (7.50). Martín Maldonado is statistically the worst hitter in all of baseball and won’t even net them a return at the trade deadline if he keeps hitting under .100.

Each and every move has been a total flop. And because Getz is technically brand new to the GM role, he’s going to get time to make more mistakes. First manager Pedro Grifol will be the fall guy for all the failures of the current roster, then at least one more manager is likely to come and go before Getz enters the crosshairs. But the White Sox are already working with a proven losing formula and each season that formula remains unchanged is just a total waste of the most valuable resource in the world: precious time.

The moves White Sox have made have been inexplicable

This is sort of an odds and ends section of the column, because it’s just mind-boggling how the White Sox have managed to bungle so many things in just the past few seasons alone.

Hiring Tony La Russa as manager before the 2021 season was such an obvious misfire that no one could be at all surprised that it panned out horifically. The way La Russa handled the Yermín Mercedes home run controversy should have been a signal to everyone that the team was being run by an out-of-touch lunatic, and that’s before you factor in La Russa’s DUI prior to the season.

Benintendi’s extension was both a disaster and an embarrassment. Giving him five years and $75 million when he’d shown an alarming decrease in power at the plate and an arm that was unplayable in the outfield was unconscionable. But it’s made even worse because the White Sox are so cheap, that contract was the richest they’ve ever handed out to any player in franchise history.

One of the few bright spots on the 2023 White Sox was Jake Burger. A 2017 first round pick who struggled to live up to his draft billing in the minors, Burger broke out with Chicago as a 27-year-old and hit 25 homers in 88 games. So what did the White Sox do? Traded him straight up for Jake Eder, a left-handed pitching prospect who now has an ERA of 6.08 as a 25-year-old in AA.

It’s just comical how at every twist and turn, the Sox have done precisely the wrong thing at the worst possible time. We haven’t even brought up how the team handled the tenures of Dylan Cease, Tim Anderson or Yasmani Grandal. But suffice it to say that it’s hard to trust the next moves during what appears to be a long rebuild ahead will be the right ones.

The White Sox have lost their fanbase

It’s probably of no surprise, but people on the south side of Chicago aren’t too happy about the state of their team right now. Nothing exemplifies this more than a call into ESPN 1000 in Chicago from last season. A die-hard fan named Berto unleashed on the entire franchise for seven minutes, sending hosts Marc Silverman and Tom Waddle into a fit of giggles.

In general, it’s a sad story when a team drives even its most passionate of fans into a mix of anger, heartbreak and disassociation. The White Sox are bound for a bottom-three attendance record this season, don’t have much hope for the next half-decade and are increasingly becoming members of the “Sell the Team” chant brigade in professional sports.

Basically, everything that could go wrong, has for the White Sox in 2024 and for many, many years prior. Can anything improve for the remainder of the season? We’re not holding our breath.