The Bastards Are Grinding Me Down
I hate to admit it, but I must
Nothing tickles me more than a good turn of phrase, as a former literature major and chronic over-writer. Metaphors and aphorisms abound in my brain, and I have trouble resisting all but the worst puns a conversation might generate.
One of my favorite such turns of phrase goes Illegitimi Non Carborundum. It sounds profound, because it’s in Latin. But it’s not profound. It’s not even a real sentence. Those aren’t actually Latin words. It’s gibberish. A bunch of soldiers made it up during World War II. Which makes plenty of sense, when you account for what it supposedly means: Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
If you ask me, it’s linguistic semiotics at its finest. I love the tongue-in-cheek humor of making up Latin words simply because the language sounds weighty. It gives the impression that it’s communicating a truth universal enough to have been recognized even when people still spoke Latin. But it’s fake, so of course, it’s a little bit funny. If you’re in a situation where you really need to not let the bastards grind you down — the second world war, for example, or post-2021 White Sox fandom — invoking the phrase is in itself a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Just having the wherewithal to inject even a small amount of humor into such a situation is a kind of resistance that is in fact tantamount to not letting the bastards grind you down.
The header here says it all, though. Folks, I can’t lie to you. The bastards are grinding me down.
It’s not the massive amount of losing itself that’s doing me in. Even after 243 of them in a little more than two calendar years, I don’t get particularly bothered when the White Sox lose. Staking day-to-day emotional well-being on a baseball team is a recipe for enjoying a good team way less than you should, and also for letting a bad team get to you way more than is healthy.
I learned that lesson the hard way. Not to sound too judgmental, but if you’re a White Sox fan and you haven’t already made peace with substantial amounts of losing being a part of how you experience baseball, you might want to find another hobby.
So no, it’s not the sheer volume of losses that’s getting to me. It’s their borderline hilarious dedication to racking up those losses in some of the most deflating ways imaginable. I picked this season’s Sox to rebound to somewhere in the vicinity of 100 losses, because I truly believed there was no way they could be as unlucky as they were in 2024. Just about every stat in the book indicated that they reached just about the greatest extreme of Murphy’s Law possible in pro sports during that season. If I had to pick one moment that defined the whole debacle, it would probably be this one. I’m sure you remember it.
So many of the feelings we felt last season are captured in this single play. For just a few moments as that ball hung in the air, it felt like the Sox might have finally caught a break. They had lost five in a row, and having already experienced 10- and 20-game losing streaks, it was as if we all knew if they didn’t get this one, we’d probably have another double-digit streak on our hands.
The crowd rose and began to roar at the prospect of a last-minute, walk-off victory — even in an already long-lost season, because it promised to be one of the few times all year that the game wasn’t virtually over the moment the other team pulled ahead. One of the few times where something actually went right. It seemed like a big deal because things going right simply never happened. The White Sox were one of two teams — the Astros being the other, oddly enough — that didn’t mount a single ninth-inning comeback all season. In that brief instance, it seemed like we might finally have just the tiny smidge of dramatic, late-inning catharsis that even the worst team is entitled to now and then.
Nope. De-nied. An improbable catch, but once it was made, you kicked yourself for expecting anything else. An entire season filled with losses that seemed improbable, yet expected. It was a volume of improbable losses that seemed like it couldn’t repeat itself if it tried, especially with at least a small influx of quasi-exciting farm talent.
And yet, here we were again, just last week. Man did I think this game was about to be so tied.
Of course it was Byron Buxton, too. At least this generation’s incarnation of inexplicable Sox-killer Nick Punto is actually a good baseball player.
The White Sox just can’t wash the stench of impossibly ill fortune off of them, can they? You’d think there’s a limit to just how often the worst possible outcome can occur in a 162 game season. And yet ...
Take Andrew Vaughn, for example. Like everyone else, I’m fully off of the bandwagon now. The least bold of my preseason bold predictions was that he’d wind up non-tendered come November. With a .157/.202/.275 (38 OPS+) line thus far, he’s well on the way. So imagine my surprise when I took a gander at his Baseball Savant page and discovered that his underlying metrics ... aren’t actually that bad? They’re not good, by any means, but his exit velocities, bat speed, walk and strikeout rates, all that jazz? They’re basically identical to what he’s done the last four seasons. If anything, it looks like he’s hitting the ball better than ever. His expected stats are the best of his career, he’s squaring it up a ton, and he’s barreling the ball at more than double the MLB average.
None of that matters. It’s the White Sox. Why would it? The expected stats are fine, but he’s got one of the biggest gulfs between expected and actual stats that I’ve ever seen. As in, there’s a 119 point difference between his wOBA and his expected wOBA. Salvador Pérez is the only other hitter within even 30 points of that gap. Last year, nobody with 250+ PAs produced anything more than 42 points less than their expected wOBA.
There’s more! As of this writing, Vaughn’s BABIP is .169. No need to check, you read that right. It’s not a case where a slow first baseman is pounding the ball into the ground a ton and getting thrown out, or putting up a bunch of easy infield flies, because Vaughn’s grounder and pop-up rates are right where they usually are. There’s little explanation for it beyond some of the most profoundly bad luck I’ve ever seen in my life.
The same goes for Luis Robert Jr., who’s caught plenty of flak for a 61 wRC+ and -0.2 fWAR through a month’s play. His peripherals don’t suggest he should be filling up the stat sheet, but he also shouldn’t be nearly this bad, either. He’s right at his career barrel rate. The bat speed is still elite. For once, he’s making great use of his great speed, leading the league with 11 steals, so it seems like health isn’t an issue. And after years, he’s finally figured out how to take a free pass, running a 14% walk rate that damn near triples what he’s done in the past.
Robert isn’t quite at Vaughn’s level. He’s only got expected numbers 53 points better than his actual ones. Still, Robert’s .200 BABIP and 2.6% home run rate are just gross, a fraction of his career norms. I’m sure there’s a rational, mechanics-based explanation for it somewhere; I just can’t tell you what it is. Again, it’s some of the worst collective luck I’ve ever seen, for more than a year running.
The way the White Sox continue to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory makes Matt Eberflus blush. Like one-score football games, one-run baseball games tend to be pretty random, in that a team’s record in them doesn’t tell you a whole lot about how good they actually are. You could’ve guessed that the Sox were dead last in such games in 2024 (13-28), but half of the bottom 10 league-wide finished better than .500 overall, and the 2023 World Series champion Texas Rangers finished 28th of 30 in one-runners that season. It’s the definition of a stat that almost always reverts to the mean, sooner or later.
So far in 2025, the Sox are 1-8 in one-run games. They’ve lost both of their extra-inning contests. They’re already four games worse than their Pythagorean win-loss, after checking in seven wins below it for all of last year. Coming off a season in which they set a postwar record by blowing a full 64% of their save opportunities, the 2025 White Sox already have dropped 75% of them this year. Though to be fair, they’re so inept that they’ve only had four total opportunities, more than a month into the season. You just gotta laugh.
Losing a ton of games is one thing. But when such an inordinate number of those losses come in what seems to be the most excruciating manner possible? That’s tough to swallow, even for the most zen of observers. So many outcomes in baseball amount to a coin flip, and this is a team that does nothing but call tails on a two-headed nickel. Exhausting doesn’t do it justice.
A few weeks ago on Sox Populi, we looked at the team’s gauntlet of an April schedule and predicted our worst. At the time, I said that I thought this season would have a similar shape as the 2018 campaign, which was also the second season of a full-teardown rebuild. That squad got off to a horrid 9-27 start — a 121-loss pace, funnily enough — before the schedule lightened up and some of the young players showed signs of life. From then on, they played at a much more pedestrian 90-loss pace, a hint at their then-promising 2019 output. Bad, but not as hopeless as it initially seemed.
I still suspect that’s the way things will play out this year. But the road to get there has undeniably been an order of magnitude more painful than that 2016-18 highway to hell.
I hate to say it, but the bastards are grinding me down. All we can do is hope that it makes whatever light there may be at the end of the tunnel all the more sweet.