Gamethread: White Sox at Tigers

Our long, local nightmare is at an end ... for six months, anyway

Welcome to our final gamethread of 2024. I’d say I’ll miss this season, but I’d be lying. You would, too.

But we have a month-plus of exciting, mostly good baseball to come, in the postseason.

With the decision SBN made to reduce the resources put toward South Side Sox, we will be operating a little differently this offseason. Year of the Hamster will have a post to outline what’s to come.

In the past we’ve always done playoff gamethreads, but those won’t appear this year. Heck, last year we had daily (? or close to) playoff recaps, and despite how bitter seeing how flourishing teams were doing in the shadow of our 101-loss season, they were very well done. But not this year.

Broadly speaking, we’ll have daily updated history posts, and as early as November we will again be running out our Top Prospect Vote, where you get to choose the Top 50 (30? 25? we’ll see how far we get and how much participation there is) White Sox prospects. We’ll also have a round of Hall of Fame votes: the 2025 Cooperstown Class, our next White Sox Hall of Fame vote, maybe even a veteran’s vote or movie tournament or some other nonsense that doesn’t prove too taxing.

But for the first of I hope many times before and since our site has gotten a little thinner, thank you for being here. For those of you who regularly participate in our community, extra thanks — it’s not required, but much appreciated. You give us story ideas, history reminders, fodder for debate. Without you, we have no purpose.

And speaking of purposeless, the White Sox take the field for the last time this season, hoping to steer away from loss No. 122. They have broken many records thought unbreakable this season, but stopped short of a couple, at least. Of course, one is most losses ever, that is permanently the Cleveland Spiders domain. The Sox fell short of being the worst team since the Spiders, though, by finishing just ahead of the 1916 Philadelphia A’s. The White Sox also did “poorly” with run differential, in that to be this bad they SHOULD have had fewer close games; by Pythagorean (run differential) record, this club should have seven more wins.

Anyway, here they are!

Whatever your feelings about Yoán Moncada, it’s utter bullshit he was called up for the last week-10 days of the season to sit. Especially after he himself said that if he knew he’d be benched he would have finished out the season in Charlotte, at least to stay active. (So again, the White Sox are being at best duplicitous in their dealings with players, even well-paid and longtime veterans.) Ultimately Moncada will be a disappointing memory for White Sox fans and a permanent roster member on the What Could Have Been team, but he grinded through Covid and put up some star numbers for the White Sox, too briefly or no. He deserved better.

And Miguel Vargas doesn’t need one final game to show he’s a terrible choice at leadoff and a replacement-level player. But hey, Grady For Manager right?

Here’s the lineup of the team that has permanent Little Brother Syndrome when it comes to their “rivalry” with us. This seems like a B-game lineup, but then I couldn’t care less about the Bengals, so maybe this is their ALDS Game 1 lineup, I dunno:

It’s also the last game ever on NBCSCH. As a former employee with plenty of thoughts on what Comcast/NBC did wrong over the years, as the lights go out there it’s fair to acknowledge they did try their hardest to cover, even over-cover, our Chicago teams.

Game’s on, as every game is on this final day Sunday, at 2:10 p.m. CT.