White Sox Collapse Could Be Historic
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
When discussing the worst collapses in baseball history, there are really only a few teams worthy of a mention.
The first is the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies, who held a 6 1/2 game lead over the Cardinals and Reds going into the last week of the season and ended up tied for second with the Reds, a game back of the Redbirds, after losing seven straight. This is universally regarded as the worst choke-job of all time, and it haunted Dick Allen and Gene Mauch for the rest of their careers.
After that come two other famous collapses – the 1969 Cubs, who led the Mets by 9 1/2 on August 13th and ended up eight out, and the 1951 Dodgers, who led the Giants by 13 1/2 on August 11th and fell in the end to the most famous home run in baseball history, Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world.” The 1995 Angels are probably worthy of a mention here, as they finished out of the playoffs after running up a 13-game lead over the Mariners by August 2, but without black cats, Miracle Mets, or Bobby Thomson involved, this collapse really doesn’t have the glamour of the others mentioned here.
The Chicago White Sox are starting to look like they’re going to add themselves to this list. On August 1, they were up on the Indians by 15 games. Entering last night’s big game they were 21-24 since, while Cleveland had gone 33-11, trimming the Sox’s lead by 12 1/2 games and turning the Central Division into a nail-biter. In Chicago, gloating by South Side fans over their glorious success and yet another miserable season for the Cubs has turned into hair-tearing, shirt-rending panic as everyone has suddenly realized that with a soft schedule featuring seven games against Tampa Bay and Kansas City in front of them, the Indians just might be the favorites here. (The rest of us should root for it to go down to the wire, since the Sox and the Indians finish the season with a three-game set in Cleveland.
Oddly, the Sox haven’t played that badly, scoring 181 runs to their opponents’ 194 since August 1.All but the very best teams will go through an extended stretch of .500-ish baseball, and any team with a 15-game lead at the beginning of August can generally be assured of a playoff spot, assuming they play .500 baseball the rest of the way. The real story here is the Indians. Consider that if they had gone, say, 28-16 over this stretch, they’d have been five games out going into last night, and in a situation where they’d have to win out while the Sox collapsed to have a real shot at the division. This race is much more like that of 1951 – in which the Dodgers went 28-25 down the stretch and just got caught by a team on fire – than the one in 1969, where the Cubs won only nine games in September.
The dramatic closing of the gap between the Indians and White Sox has predictably led to two sorts of reactions. The first is from people who liked the Sox because of their small ball tactics; they have pointed to the injury to leadoff man/stolen base leader Scott Podsednik as the reason the air has gone out of the Sox’ tires. The second is from people who disliked the Sox because of their small-ball tactics; they are laughing and saying they knew all along that this team wasn’t any good.
The Sox are a straight pitching-and-defense team with one of the worst offenses in the majors, the same as they have been all season, but the first reaction may well have some thing to it. Before August 1, the Sox were scoring 4.95 runs per game – not all that impressive, given their hitter-friendly home park. Since then, they’ve scored 3.93 per game, which is atrocious. What’s the difference? Before August 1,the Sox were averaging 1.3 home runs per game, and 2.8 walks; since, those numbers are 1.2 and 2.4, not a huge difference. Notably, though, before their skid started, the Sox were averaging 1.07 steals per game; since, .37. That is a big difference.
Of course, there’s more to the collapse than that – a stolen base per game doesn’t account for the whole run per game that’s the difference between the Sox playing .660 ball and .500. As a proxy for whether manager Ozzie Guillen’s charges have been less aggressive on the bases, though, I think it’s fair, and Sox partisans who have been griping about their team playing with less urgency for the last two months may well have hit upon the root of their malaise.
This is still a race, though, and there’s plenty of time for the Sox to avoid ignominious defeat. If they don’t, I suspect it will be more down to how good the Indians are than how bad they are, but I also suspect that Guillen’s men will, fairly or not, be remembered with the Dodgers and Cubs among the sorriest bunches of saps the game has ever seen.
