Reminder: The 2023 White Sox season could’ve been even longer

If you want to feel better about the 2023 White Sox, realize that if franchise collapsed under the weight of their special blend of hubris and stasis a year earlier, it would’ve taken, at a minimum, an extra three days off your life because the pitch clock wasn’t around.

Here’s the simple math: In 2022, the average White Sox game required 3 hours and 8 minutes to complete. Major League Baseball’s pace-of-play measures shaved it down to 2 hours and 41 minutes. That’s 27 minutes over the course of 162 games, or 72 hours and 54 minutes you might’ve devoted to the White Sox, but ultimately didn’t have to.

And that’s a conservative estimate when considering the 2023 White Sox faced 156 more batters and issued 121 more walks, and allowed far more runs over the final two months of the season. Despite all the blood, the hemorrhaging was remarkably contained, by evidence of this simple chart:

Nine-inning White Sox games lasting 3½ hours or longer:

• 2022: 16
• 2023: 0

That’s about the nicest thing you could say about the White Sox: They were awful, and the portions were smaller.

It has a Katie Ledecky-sized lead over the second-nicest thing you could say about the 2023 White Sox, which is that they were bad enough to finally cost Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn their jobs. The duo could’ve been let go in 2011, and they should’ve been escorted off the premises in 2016, but Reinsdorf gave them an extra seven years because he has no standards and doesn’t care.

Reinsdorf laid that reality bare in just 13 hours. The morning after he dismissed Williams and Hahn, he already tabbed Chris Getz as their replacement without considering anybody else. In one flash of lazy arrogance or arrogant laziness, the best opportunity for meaningful change went by the boards. Maybe Getz will represent an improvement because the decision-making up top won’t be so tangled, but that was the chief selling point for Pedro Grifol after Tony La Russa, and it turns out that Grifol’s only attribute is a knack for lavishing praise on people who maintain his employment.

At the Winter Meetings last December, Hahn said that after the team’s previous disaster of 2022, “We’re still going to have to earn back that trust. We’re still going to have to earn that faith. And that’s only going to happen once we’re on the field and we’re showing what this team is about and what they’re capable of doing and in the end, winning ballgames.”

As the White Sox dragged themselves toward the finish line of their first 101-loss season in 53 years, Grifol said, “Nobody wants to hear the talk anymore. Everybody just wants to see us win baseball games. I’m not going to sit here and promise anything. They’ve heard it for a long, long time. It’s about us winning baseball games.”

If so, then that quote will age just as poorly as everything else in the White Sox clubhouse, not because they’re going to project as one of the worst teams in baseball, but because it’s never really been about winning baseball games. If it were, Reinsdorf would realize he doesn’t know how to do that, and 40 years of failures would provide enough evidence to get out of the way. As long as he’s intent of meddling, White Sox fans are stuck.

Or so he thinks.

They’re not stuck, actually. They can choose to not go to games, watch something else on TV, listen to Spotify instead of the radio, follow other teams, or maybe just watch good baseball for good baseball’s sake. Or they can turn away from baseball altogether and pick other things to do with their summer. As long as the White Sox treat the idea of a captive audience literally, fans are going to opt out of being taken hostage.

That’s not the preferred course, as simple as it sounds. It’s far more fulfilling to follow an entire arc of a team with like-minded people, absorbing and processing successes, failures and the moments in between into a collective experience and shared language. If it weren’t so rewarding, the phenomenon of team-based fandom wouldn’t possess such a pull.

But in order for it to be rewarding, there has to be promise for a reward. The White Sox asked fans to endure three years of intentional losing for a greater payoff, and they could only produce one quality season fans could witness in person before the losing resumed. Somehow a half-decade of allegedly careful planning resulted in a far worse season than years where they weren’t actually trying.

That’s the disaster Getz is now overseeing, but there’s no reason to feel sorry for him. He was the director of player development for an organization that didn’t develop players, and now he’s the general manager of the only team that would give him that title, with a commensurate bump in pay. He has the luxury of weighing benefits against negatives. White Sox fans see far too few pros, and one big con.

Now, you may read all that and wonder why we bother covering the White Sox, but the answer to that is three paragraphs up. There’s edification in building an institutional memory, even for a franchise that should be institutionalized. As the old slogan goes, we watch the White Sox so you don’t have to, which means we’re here for the decay.

You, on the other hand, are not obligated to bear witness, which makes us all the more thankful that you continue to follow, read, listen to and participate in our White Sox coverage during a season in which the team did everything in its power to kill your interest. (That’s a sentence that may grow increasingly literal depending on what else turns up during further investigation into the bullets in the stands.)

We’re especially grateful for those who support us on Patreon, because that’s the backbone to our existence. Consider a membership today, because I’ll be rolling out plenty of Patreon-exclusive posts now that the schedule has mercifully come to a close.

I”d like to thank Josh for all of his hard work producing the Sox Machine Podcast and for being somebody as driven to cover smoldering wreckage as me. I’d also like to thank Ted for his boundless curiosity within the constraints of the Sporcle quiz (even if I’m absolutely dreading next Saturday’s), Pnoles for well-timed truthbombs that end up resonating on our most-read lists, Bennett for his help on White Sox Wake-Up Calls, and the FutureSox crew for their contributions during our partnership.

Outside the confines of Sox Machine, here’s a shoutout to From The 108 for being terrific teammates in travel, tailgating and TV (live-streaming, actually, but that’s not alliterative). I’d like to express immense appreciation for everybody at Bernstein & Holmes on 670 The Score for carving time out of their Friday schedules for me and Josh to offer previous few reasons for optimism. Also, here’s a salute to everybody covering the White Sox beat, especially James Fegan, whose daily byline I sorely miss, although I can recognize his work at the Sun-Times before I scroll up to check who wrote it.

If this was your first year reading or listening to Sox Machine, here’s a sincere apology a reminder that our daily coverage of this cursed enterprise will continue over the entirety of the offseason. Beyond reactions to news as it happens, I’ll be finishing up the minor league affiliate recaps and reviewing all sorts of aspects of the 2023 season before launching the Offseason Plan Project. Once the postseason ends, the hot stove season begins, and we’ll be on top of that, especially since the Winter Meetings are in my backyard this December.

This is all to say the best time to join the fray at Sox Machine was yesterday. The second-best time is today. As for the best time to follow the White Sox, you’ll want Time Machine.

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