The Chicago White Sox are expected to lose 100 games or more for the third straight season. The hope is the losses do not reach a historic amount like with what happened in 2024.
Losing a lot in 2025 is a reasonable expectation considering the Sox payroll is projected to be in the league's bottom five after the Sox have cut $67 million off their payroll from 2024.
Flirting with breaking a record the Sox just set does not seem to be in the cards at least according to one projection.
The latest ZiPS forecast has the Sox winning at least 20 more games.
Before you starting to get hopeful (not sure why), that means the Sox will finish 61-101. Plus, ZiPS is projecting a lot of non-value seasons out of players on the current roster.
2025 ZiPS Projections - Chicago #WhiteSox, now LIVE at @FanGraphs.#ZiPS25https://t.co/UmJdh0kX8Z
— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) January 13, 2025
There is still a chance the Sox flirt with losing more than 110 games. Remember, Dan Szymborski of FanGraphs projected the Sox winning 65-70 games in 2024. However, Szymborski also cautioned the win total would be a lot less if Dylan Cease was traded.
The reason ZiPS projects the Sox winning more games is not because of the talent the Sox will send onto the field. No, it will be because of happenstance as Szymborski described...
If there’s good news about 2025, the team is likely to win more games — and probably quite a few more — if merely by happenstance. For a major league team to lose 120-plus games, something magical has to happen, with so much more going very, very wrong than the fates suggested was in order. I’m fairly confident the White Sox will win more games this year than last, and ZiPS projects a 20-win improvement, which would be quite impressive for most teams.
Still hard to see that big of a jump in wins when the payroll has been cut to where the Sox might get barely above replacement-level play out of every position except centerfield and rightfield
The moves have at least hopefully reset the White Sox roster back to MLB factory settings meaning you can actually apply the old standard of teams are guaranteed to win 60 games, lose 60 games, and then what they do with the 42 games will decide the fate of where a team finishes.
Hey, maybe Lenyn Sosa's strong finish to 2024 carries over. Stud prospects Kyle Teel and Edgar Quero could hit the ground running. Plus, Miguel Vargas cannot be that bad.
Still, it will be hard to see the Sox making a 20-win jump with a bullpen projected to finish with a -1.6 fWAR. That is not being any better than 2024's bullpen that helped contribute to those historic 121 defeats.
Plus, signing all these relievers off the scrap heap has come with the hope that some of these guys can revive their careers and be flipped at the deadline. If things go to chalk as what is being projected with the bullpen's total fWAR is in the negative, it could mean that the hope of reaping the benefits of trade deadline market that is kind to bullpen arms will not benefit the rebuild.
ZiPS is considered one of the most accurate predictors in the projection industry. Hopefully, not flirting with another record number of defeats comes to fruition even if the roster is going to be made up of mostly replacement-level players.