As big of a White Sox fan as I am, I very rarely tune into spring training baseball. To me, it’s not real baseball, it’s a glorified practice and in general just isn’t something meaningful to me to ingest. This time of year is BUSY AF for the 108ers, we have the #108Tourney coming in hot, a LIVE SHOW we are trying to sell tickets for and of course podcasts and blogs and general 108 content. We busy yo’.
Anyways, today was different as it was the debut of John Schriffen the White Sox new play by play guy. Schriffen is replacing the obsessively loved Jason Benetti, so I wanted an initial look, although it’ll be months before I can have a real opinion. The game started off in typical White Sox fashion (of late) giving up six runs in the first inning and never really putting up a serious threat. Somewhere during the game, Schriffen asked Stone about what the team is trying to do and he remarked that he thought the White Sox would win at least 10 games more this year. The reactions were about as you might think.
It got me thinking…is this a totally insane thought process? Steve knows more baseball than just about anyone walking the planet, but he’s also a company man, so I wasn’t sure what to believe. Maybe my best tract is to check some historical comps and see how likely it is a team of the 2023 White Sox ilk (real bad) actually wins “AT LEAST” 10 more games than the year before….TO THE INTERNET!
I Ran The Numbers
I decided to take the parameters as such. Any team since 1978 that had at least 100 losses in a season AND played a full season the next year (so I had to eliminate 1980, 1993 and 2019, as all of those seasons saw partial seasons follow them). I also obviously had to exclude 2023, as the 2024 season is the one we are basing this on and it hasn’t played out yet. I would take that pool and then see how they fared the next year and try to determine how likely a proclamation like that of our fearless baseball analyst made.
There are 51 such teams in the last 45 years (my lifetime, basically). Those teams won a net 609 MORE times the following year. That calculates out to an average of almost 12 MORE WINS per season, after their 100 loss campaign. Now averages can lie and in this case, it’s especially likely to lie, because 100 losses approaches the lower bound of futility that an MLB team is capable of, so I figured I should take a look at it a bit differently.
The Median amount of ADDITIONAL WINS per season after the 100 loss campaign was still 11, so not much different than the average. Last, but not least, we might as well see how many of these 51 teams were successful in winning at least 10 more times than the prior year. 31 of the 51 teams or 61% of these teams were successful in winning at least 10 more times the year after their 100 loss season. Raw data is below (and pretty small, I apologize for that).
So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance
So whether or not you think Steve Stone is simply being a “company man” or “carrying water”, his proclamation of the White Sox winning at least 10 more times this season seems not only possible, but well within the normal historical dead cat bounce that a baaaaaad team gets. The White Sox are not likely to be contenders, but their chances of out pacing current public sentiments seem totally reasonable, let’s hope they do.
-BeefLoaf
Come out and support us and Sox Machine at the Ramova for Opening Day Eve! March 27th at 7pm. Good beer and good bullshit. Tickets are available now and we will sell out! Buy yours today!
