The Orioles beat the White Sox 13-3 on Monday, lowering the White Sox winning percentage on the season to .223. It was a particularly awful loss. Chicago got off to a 2-0 lead in the top of the first. The Orioles came back with one in the bottom of the inning, then two more in the third, then two more in the fifth. The White Sox would put a man on, but three double plays killed some of those runners. The Baltimore batteed around in the sixth inning, scoring six more runs, and the game was basically over. Some how, that big loss did not move the needle on their Pythagorean projection, as they are still at -7.

That winning percentage is below the .250 winning percentage of the 1962 Mets, the modern record for mediocrity. Time to update the probability of Chicago finishing with no more than 40 wins.

They need to go no better than 9-14 the rest of the way to finish with a worse winning percentage than the Mets. The lowest winning percentage that doesn’t include 30 wins in the 95 percent confidence interval for 139 games is .294. The probability of no more than 9 wins at that level is 0.893. The White Sox are now below the replacement winning percentage of .296, which would give them a ,888 chance of no more than40 wins. I believe that when replacement level becomes the generous team evaluation, a team has gone from the miserable to the horrible. I wonder if they only read books with “death” in the title:

If you are looking for a more optimistic view, the White Sox are -7 wins by the Pythagorean Won-Loss percentage. That would put their 95 percentage confidence interval probability at .348, which reduces their probability of finishing with no more than 40 wins to 0.75, or three in four. I’m dropping my best guess to a 38-124 finish.