In the fourth inning of a ridiculous baseball game — ridiculous even by the standards of the 2024 Chicago White Sox — I wandered out into the stands to meet Beefloaf.
Beefloaf sits in Section 108. I’d noticed him earlier, from across the stadium, because a White Sox home run (a rare thing) had gone sailing past the right field foul pole and landed near his seat. Even in the maelstrom of high fives, Beefloaf stood out: big guy, round shoulders, wearing a tank-top jersey with the number “108” and, in capital letters, “BEEFLOAF.” (Beefloaf is not Beefloaf’s legal name; his 5-year-old daughter chose the nickname, and it stuck.)
I’d heard about Section 108. I’d been told that, even during this shambolic season, as the White Sox slumped toward the 1962 Mets’ seemingly unbreakable record of 120 losses — a mark they tied on Sunday and, with six games left, seem all but certain to break — throughout all that misery, Beefloaf and his friends kept showing up, sitting in Section 108 to argue and cheer and complain. They represented a small, lonely remnant of a mysterious and dwindling species: the Chicago White Sox superfan.
And so I walked out to Section 108, notebook in hand, like a zoologist documenting the last frog pond in the rainforest. I wanted to know many things. What does it feel like to witness, up close, this much losing? How had everything gone so wrong? And why on earth would anyone pay to see it?
“It’s a mental illness,” Beefloaf said, succinctly.
At that moment, Section 108 was actually in a good mood. That was because down on the field, something miraculous was happening: The White Sox were winning. The team that always loses was currently leading the Oakland Athletics, 3-0. As soon as I sat, the superfans started to educate me about the very rich history of their team. They were like a big Greek chorus with a Chicago accent and a lifetime subscription to Baseball Prospectus. They told me about the spiritual differences between the White Sox (South Side, blue-collar, neglected, uncool) and the Cubs (North Side, trendy, rich, beloved). I heard thrilling tales of the 2005 World Series.
But mostly what I learned was how the White Sox had gotten so bad. In grisly forensic detail, the fans told me about organizational dysfunction: the bad trades and wasted draft picks and disastrous hirings. A season like this, they said, was overdue. As a guy named Pete put it: “If they didn’t see it coming, they are so dumb that they’re lucky breathing is an involuntary response.”
Right on cue, down on the field, the White Sox blew their 3-0 lead. Section 108 groaned.
“This is all year,” Beefloaf said.
“This is actually the White Sox experience,” Pete added.
The fans of Section 108 told me that, at this point, they welcomed the all-time loss record. “I hate to put it like this,” Pete said. “But we want them to have to wear it.” Also, the fans wanted to wear it. In the merch section of Beefloaf’s blog, “The View From 108,” you can pre-order a T-shirt that says “WE WITNESSED HISTORY.” It will be filled in, before it’s printed, with all the year’s worst stats.
That night, we were expecting Loss 115. But the White Sox kept surprising us. They strung together a few hits and surged back into the lead. Going into the top of the ninth inning, they led, 6-3. When pitcher Justin Anderson strode to the mound, Section 108 felt optimistic. He was, they said, one of the few relievers who’d recently been throwing well.
Well, not tonight. Anderson walked the first batter, then surrendered a crisp single to left field, then walked another. Bases loaded, no outs.
The next hitter slapped the ball on the ground toward third base — where, unfortunately, it bounced off the fielder’s wrist. Error. Two runs scored.
The crowd started to boo. In a nearby section, a chant started up: “Sell the team! Sell the team!” I will spare you too many details, because even writing them down feels stressful — but the White Sox managed to escape that jam, barely, with the score tied. And in the bottom of the ninth, the fans watched, skeptically, as the most expensive player in franchise history stepped up to the plate: Andrew Benintendi, a man Section 108 likes to refer to as “noodle-arm.” Would he strike out? Pop up? Instead, he did the opposite: Benintendi crushed the ball to deep right field, directly toward us in Section 108 — and Beefloaf, shocked, leaped up and stared at the foul pole, watching to see if the ball would stay fair. Somehow, by inches, it did. Which meant that the White Sox won — their first win at home in more than a month — and everyone in Section 108 exploded into childish joy. I stood there, stunned. I didn’t know so much joy could exist in the middle of so much loss.
Baseball is a cruel game. Other sports cap your suffering at a reasonable number. In the N.F.L., the most games you could ever lose in a season is 17. In the N.B.A., you could theoretically lose 82. (The record is 73.) But baseball’s season is relentless: 162 games long. There is no safety net. If you lose your grip, as the White Sox did immediately, starting the year 3-22, you can fall through an eternal void of losing. And every day, in the middle of that falling, reporters will stick microphones in your face to ask you how it feels to be plunging through the eternal void.
Over the course of the 2024 season, the White Sox have explored the full spectrum of losing the way a great actor uses every corner of the stage, the way a jazz saxophonist probes every note in a scale. They have lost nobly, tragically, cleverly, inspiringly and deflatingly. They have lost late at night and early in the afternoon, in soggy rain and on crisp sunny days. I have seen perfectly professional losses that could have gone either way — but of course didn’t — and games that should have been stopped, for cruelty, in the fourth inning. I have seen the White Sox lose in front of huge roaring crowds at Fenway Park and also, back home, in their own nearly empty stadium. (On a sunny Tuesday, just before game time, I once counted 199 people sitting in the vast sea of outfield seats — and when the announcer finally said “Play ball!” the applause sounded like someone had just done a magic trick at a church picnic.) I have seen the White Sox hit their catcher in the groin with the baseball three separate times in a single inning. I have seen the White Sox lose because three fielders ran into each other like clowns. I have watched a bloop single flutter and fall, like the first leaf of autumn, delicately onto the outfield grass, at the most devastating possible moment. I have seen games in which Chicago’s hitters looked like All-Stars but their pitchers looked like impostors, and games where it was vice versa, and games in which they all played great but the ball just bounced the wrong way.
What was their worst loss? It depends on your definition of “worst.” There are dozens of candidates. Consider, for instance, Loss 103, back in late August, when the White Sox, in front of their home fans, were robbed of what should have been a triumphant comeback win in the bottom of the ninth: As the game-winning home run went sailing over the wall, the Texas Rangers left fielder leaped up and, arm fully extended, ripped it back — a preposterous catch. (Beefloaf and his friends told me that they had a perfect view of the play from Section 108, and that it had looked, in real time, as if it was happening in slow motion, but they couldn’t even be mad because it was such a beautiful catch.)
Or maybe the worst was Loss 117, with the record breathing down their necks, in which they led in the eighth inning, and then again in the 10th and 11th — but somehow managed to lose in the bottom of the 13th. Or the very next game, Loss 118, when they came back with a stunning two-run homer in the ninth — and then, anticlimactically, lost on their second pitch in the 10th.
There is too much losing to choose from. Besides, it’s not any one loss that makes this season historic — it’s the sheer industrial-scale quantity of them. Whether you’re talking about sandwiches or bicycles or turtles or losses, 120 is a lot of something. Whatever number the White Sox reach this year — 121, 123, 126 — will immediately become baseball history. It will join such Great Baseball Numbers as the career batting average of Babe Ruth (.342) and the earned run average of Cy Young (2.63) and the total stolen bases of Rickey Henderson (1,406). This is what makes baseball so special, what it still does better than any other sport: it generates numbers. Baseball is a sort of extractive industry that allows us to mine the precious ore of statistics — to translate the vast unruliness of reality into certainty. And in baseball, numbers live forever.We will pass these numbers down to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, who will savor them and enrich them with their own baseball numbers, forming new links in the unbroken numerical chain that will stretch on to the end of time or America, whichever comes first.
And so when one of the Great Baseball Numbers falls, it means something. Its falling echoes, rumbling, through the whole past and present and future. It is epochal. And those of us who happen to be living, at this one moment in the great chain of baseball history, have a solemn duty to witness it.
Sports fans, of course, like to laugh at the White Sox. They call them the White Sux. And, yes, the numbers are the numbers. But let’s also remember that, by normal human standards, these players are 99.99th-percentile superathletes and professionals and baseball geniuses. You have to be, to make it to this level. And so, as the losses piled up, I just kept wondering: How did it feel to be doing so terribly at something that you are so good at?
In early September, I spent a week hanging around the White Sox. The clubhouse was, most of the time, surprisingly pleasant. Before and after games, the players milled around at their lockers. They were perfectly willing to talk. But no one quite knew what to say. The losing had to be acknowledged, but there was no way to ask anything that everyone hadn’t already answered 34 million times every single day for four months. At a certain point, language fails. Mention the L-word, and players would disappear behind a squid-ink cloud of clichés. One day at a time. Game by game. Focus on the present. You can’t get too high or too low.
One day I spoke with Davis Martin, a 27-year-old pitcher who has had awful luck all season. He has yet to pitch in a win, and in a recent start (Loss 114) it looked as though he was on some kind of prank show, as if the ball was being remote-controlled to make Chicago’s infielders look silly. The morning after that game, I approached him at his locker. Isn’t it hard, I asked, in the midst of that kind of disaster, to stick with all the positive thinking?
Martin laughed. Baseball, he explained, isn’t like most sports. It is, he said, “a game of failure.” It’s a game of perpetual losing. You can drop nearly half your games and still be in first place. A hitter can go to the plate 10 times and lose seven of those battles — and he’s not a failure, he’s an All-Star. A negative thinker would never survive.
In a way, then, these White Sox are the purest possible expression of the spirit of baseball. In the sport of loss, they are the masters of losing.
And their futility has resonated far beyond their clubhouse, or their stadium, or Chicago. Because loss is universal. To live is to lose, in all the many senses of that word — to lose socks, friends, arguments, opportunities, brain cells and everything else. And while we can all agree that losing is basically the absolute worst, we must also acknowledge that it is underrated. Losing, obviously, makes winning possible; it is the negative space in which success exists. But its virtues go far beyond that. To lose is to acknowledge that, in spite of all your hopes and efforts, things have not gone your way — and so, to maintain the peace, you will walk away. It is a civic miracle that keeps us from tearing each other’s heads off. To lose, and to deal with loss, is one of the most profound things a human can do.
Watching the White Sox players lose, game after game, and yet still show up to talk about that losing, and then to stride forward into the next potential loss — I found it admirable. In the clubhouse, even in the middle of that doomed black cloud, it wasn’t hard to find little flares of joy. The young pitcher who, after throwing his first major-league innings, told us it was definitely the best day of his life. (Chicago lost 5-0.) The shortstop sitting at his corner locker, grinning as he remembered aloud how he got the call that he’d been traded to the White Sox, his hometown team, the day before his wedding
Much of the positivity stems from the team’s interim manager, Grady Sizemore, a 42-year-old former player who took over partway through the season, after a 21-game losing streak. Although Sizemore’s record has not been any better than his predecessor’s, the players love him. During batting practice, they wear Grady Sizemore T-shirts. Sizemore’s positivity is a kind of superpower; whatever is happening, he finds the good. “If you’re only focused on the negatives,” he told us one day in the dugout, after a particularly demoralizing loss, “you’re only going to have negative outcomes.”
One day, before a game, I sat with Sizemore in his office. I asked him, in the spirit of positivity, for his happiest memory from this very bleak year. He thought for a second. It was, he said, his first game as manager — when the team, in the middle of its worst stretch of the season, made a spirited comeback against the Cubs. They still lost. But the way they fought back, the way they almost won. It still made him happy. “It was just a different energy in that dugout,” he told me. “We went down big, and they clawed back into it. I think that’s what I’ll remember probably more than anything. Just fighting back and staying alive.”
The next morning, after I watched that triumphant win with Beefloaf in Section 108 — after that rare moment of White Sox joy, I asked Sizemore if he had a new happiest memory from the season. This, after all, wasn’t a moral victory — it was an actual victory.
No, he said. He would stick with that failed comeback against the Cubs. The loss still won.
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