Is it finally time to give up on the 2022 White Sox?

The White Sox just lost last night, 4-3, to the Orioles in a game they clearly should have won. Mistakes were made by everyone on the team, so it’s time to question whether this season is worth saving.

Arguably, a team that can’t beat Kansas City to save their lives, has no clue how to hit anything but singles, and a front office that seems ambivalent to the play on the field, doesn’t really scream “World Series champion.” Sure, the likes of Johnny Cueto, Dylan Cease, and José Abreu have had stellar seasons that are keeping this team alive, but lackluster affairs from Lucas Giolito, Yoán Moncada, and especially Yasmani Grandal have negated those successes.

Yes, the core of this team has been injured for a lot of this season, but they were last year, too, and that team won 93 games. And it’s true that they’re still in the division race, but what does that matter if they’re just going to get their asses handed to them in the playoffs? As much as we want this team to succeed, they don’t really deserve the playoffs.

It’s extremely easy to put this blame on Rick Hahn and Tony La Russa, so I’m going to. Because as much as this is the fault of the players, Hahn and La Russa put the team in some terrible situations. That Hahn made no effort to sign any of the best talent in the offseason is probably the biggest culprit here to start. The money that could have been spent on Carlos Rodón, or Starling Marte was spent on the Craig Kimbrel option (and subsequently traded for AJ Pollock), Leury García, Kendall Graveman, Joe Kelly, and Josh Harrison.

The trade deadline came, we were waiting for Godot and all we got was Jake Diekman. Every move made by Hahn has been, at best, lateral — or actively made this team worse. Want to credit Hahn for Cueto? Of course, but asterisk it with the fact that he signed Vince Velasquez first, with a MLB guarantee to boot, and only nabbed Cueto at the end of spring — and because Lance Lynn got injured.

While it’s hard to win when you can’t augment the talent that you already have, it’s harder to win when the manager of your team has been managing for longer than every White Sox player has been alive.

Tony is a problem in the same way a parasite is: Leave it for too long and it starts to suck the life out of its host. Those 1-2 count intentional walks, playing basically everyone on this team injured (including several guys who clearly should not have been playing at all, most recently Michael Kopech and Luis Robert), and being generally unpleasant, Tony doesn’t add anything to this team. He sucks and sucks and sucks, and now the energy on this once-fun team is gone.

The team, much like La Russa himself, is a walking corpse, lifeless and unable to do anything but the very basics — and it can’t always get the basics right. They trip and fall and lose limbs and guts and get eaten by birds, but they keep on moving. They keep trying, but to no avail, not realizing they are already dead — and nothing and no one is coming to save them. Not this year.