Considering expectations and perceived contention windows, the Chicago White Sox may be off to the worst start in Major League Baseball in the early going of the 2023 season. The White Sox entered the season with American League Central division title hopes; FanGraphs’ preseason projections had them within three games of the Minnesota Twins for first place. Chicago won the AL Central crown as a 93-win team in 2021 and was expected to be a championship contender for years to come.
The White Sox are currently 7-16 with a -33 run differential. Their record is better than only the Oakland A’s, Kansas City Royals, and Colorado Rockies. They’re six games behind the first-place Twins and six games back in the AL Wild Card race. They’ve lost five games in a row; no other MLB team has a losing streak over two games.
So, it’s going quite poorly. And executive vice president Ken Williams is not happy.
Williams — Chicago’s general manager from 2000-12 and the executive VP since; Rick Hahn is the current GM — told the Chicago Sun-Times on Tuesday that he’s “not in a good place right now,” and that he’d be “lying if [he] weren’t concerned.”
“You have to know I’m not in a good place right now,” the White Sox’ executive vice president told the Sun-Times Tuesday. “I’d be lying if I said I weren’t concerned.”
He added that he’s “not so pleasant to be around right now.”
“But this is where we are,” he said, speaking by phone from his office in Chicago. “And I’m not so pleasant to be around right now, but you try to gain perspective. We have [139] games and five and a half months left to make up six games [behind AL Central leader Minnesota]. If we are who we think we are we’ll look back on this as a good test of character and drive.”
Now, as Williams alludes to, there are still 139 games to go. There’s plenty of time for Chicago to turn it around.
But the White Sox have already entered dangerous territory and are trending in a bad direction with five straight losses. Additionally, their schedule doesn’t make things easier, with road games against the Toronto Blue Jays on Tuesday and Wednesday (Toronto won Game 1 of the series), followed by a four-game home series against the Tampa Bay Rays (an MLB-best 20-3; swept the White Sox in Tampa Bay), and then a very important three-game home series against the Twins.
It’s still early, but it could get get late quickly if the White Sox don’t start playing better baseball.
And if the bad performance continues over the coming weeks and months, Williams said, “then changes have to be made, it’s as simple as that.”
