When the 27th of their 28th win slotted into the glove of Andrew Benintendi (Arkansas Razorbacks) late Tuesday night, the Chicago White Sox had avoided making history rather than making it.

Their 5–1 win over the Oakland Athletics meant they would not have to suffer an American League-record 22-game losing streak, and they would not have to worry about losing two more games, which would have tied the modern-era major league record for consecutive losses at 23.

And it meant they wouldn’t have to worry about what would happen if the series were still on the line when they play the Cubs this weekend, which would have forced them to fend off their crosstown rivals to avoid unprecedented embarrassment.

Even at just 21 games, the White Sox’s streak was memorable. The last time they won, on July 10, the Democratic vice presidential candidate was a San Francisco Giants fan, not a Minnesota Twins fan. Mike Trout had a chance to return this season. Erick Fedde, Tommy Pham and Michael Kopech were all still on the team, having been traded to either the St. Louis Cardinals or the Los Angeles Dodgers. Starter Garrett Crochet, who was not traded at the deadline, appeared likely to leave.

“Every time you win, it’s great. When you lose 21 games in a row, every time you win, it makes you feel better,” White Sox manager Pedro Grifol said Tuesday. “I’m proud of these guys. They keep coming to the stadium every day to play hard. They care.”

If “coming to the stadium every day” and “taking care” is the bare minimum rather than something to be commended, that’s the reality of this White Sox season, a season so bad it reads like an insult.

Tuesday night’s win means the White Sox enter Wednesday afternoon’s series finale in Oakland with a . 241 winning percentage. In 162 games, that’s a 39-123 record. The single-season losing record is set by the 1962 New York Mets, who lost 120 games in their inaugural season.

According to FanGraphs’ calculations, no position player on their roster has achieved a full Wins Above Replacement. The closest player with 0.9 fWAR is Paul DeJong, who they traded to the Kansas City Royals last week.

Their offense has a collective WAR of -5.8, making them the only team in baseball statistically worse than what FanGraphs ranks as the average replacement-level player. Since 1962, only 22 teams have finished with a negative total fWAR. Only two, the 1977 Atlanta Braves and the 1979 Athletics, finished the season with a WAR worse than negative five.

The White Sox have scored 358 home runs this season, the fewest in baseball by 55 points. Their .617 OPS would be the lowest by any team since 1981. Their .216 team batting average would be the fourth-worst by a team since 1962.

Chicago’s pitching has been only slightly better, thanks largely to the soon-to-be-shutout Crochet and the now-departed Fedde. Their collective ERA of 4.84 is second only to the geographically challenged Colorado Rockies for MLB’s worst. The White Sox are giving up four more walks per nine innings, a quarter more batters per day than the next closest team.

“It’s ugly from the outside. That’s the truth,” Fedde said when he joined the Cardinals last week. “But we had a lot of young guys. We had a ton of potential. That’s something I tried to pride myself on, helping out as much as I could.”

Fedde, 31, whose deal with the White Sox has allowed him to revive his career, is apt to be gracious. He’s right that the White Sox are loaded with young players with potential; as should any team that has been in a rebuilding phase for most of the last decade. But from top to bottom, the organization has shown something between an inability and an unwillingness to develop that.

White Sox Owner Jerry Reinsdorf remains one of the game’s most prominent owners, an influential voice on league issues and has occasionally invested in his roster in recent years. For example, the White Sox finished the last two seasons with a payroll of over $200 million. Still, with his team sinking to new lows, the effort to build the White Sox a new stadium partially paid for with public funds felt like bad timing at best.

The transition away from beleaguered VP Ken Williams and GM Rick Hahn was slow, culminating in two brief postseason appearances last season as part of a lengthy rebuild punctuated by poor decisions including the hiring of veteran manager Tony La Russa. Questions about organizational and club culture grew under Hahn and Williams, who turned them over to Grifol last season and allowed new GM Chris Getz to take over before that. Those questions haven’t gone away, in part because Grifol emphasizes player responsibility and seems rigid when it comes to day-to-day expectations.

In fact, questions about Grifol’s handling of the clubhouse this year have only grown louder in recent weeks. According to a report from 670 the Score, Grifol told his players that they were solely responsible for the White Sox’s struggles and for mandatory practices, such as pregame jogging, that are usually left to the players. Grifol declined to elaborate on that message, but acknowledged that he was sending a message.

“My mindset and the way I look at things is that we’re all in this together and I’m the one who takes the first blame for everything that happens on this team,” Grifol told reporters, including the Sox Machine. “I’m the manager, right? And I’ve been doing that since Day 1. I did it last year. I’m going to do it this year. I’m not hiding from blame. That’s what blame is. I have the position, the office. That’s the president. I would never blame our players for this season. That’s not my makeup. But I had a meeting with the players. And I said the one thing we don’t want to do as an organization is go down in history as the worst record in baseball.”

Reports from ESPN and others suggest that Grifol, whose managerial record has fallen 100 games under . 500 in less than two full seasons, is likely to be let go soon. Of course, he’s not the only problem. Getz’s trade deadline dealing of his top talent also raised eyebrows in the sports world, especially when he traded Fedde, Kopech and Pham in a three-team deal that gave the White Sox just three prospects — none of whom are ranked in Baseball America’s top 100.

The most major-league ready of that group, former Dodgers infielder Miguel Vargas, appeared shocked as television cameras captured him sitting alone in the end of the White Sox dugout after Monday night’s 21st straight loss. Who could blame him? The well-oiled organization he left and the dilapidated state of the organization he joined would certainly be jarring.

If there’s any good news for the White Sox, it’s that they’ve amassed plenty of young talent like Vargas over the last few years to beat out potential contenders. The question, as it has for years, is whether the people running the organization know what to do with it. Getz hasn’t been in the job long. Progress is possible. But as distant as their last win before Tuesday night felt, memories of true success on the South Side are even harder to recall. The last time the White Sox won a playoff series was nearly two decades ago. Ending a series is tough enough.