And just like that, the White Sox’s 21-game losing streak, which tied an American League record, ended, and a manager who had failed to move the team an inch in the right direction was finally fired. The two stories that made the 2024 Sox truly interesting for a few strange, twisted weeks went “poof” in the middle of the night, like a home run hit by a rag-armed Sox reliever.

For the Sox, it’s been overshadowed, and their efforts to match baseball’s modern-era record for most shutouts in a season — 120 — may come back to haunt us in late September. Until then? They have an interim manager, Grady Sizemore, whose work on the road probably won’t matter because he’s so hard to even consider for the permanent job. They have a roster full of players whose individual progress doesn’t really matter, since few of them will still be in a Sox uniform when the arrow starts pointing up again, if ever. Nothing to see here, folks.

That is, unless you count the image of owner Jerry Reinsdorf pacing the batting cage before Friday’s game against the Cubs. The old man patted the new coaches who replaced the fired Pedro Grifol on the shoulders. He hugged Ozzie Guillen and walked side by side with Harold Baines. He avoided eye contact with reporters, as usual. There went Reinsdorf — master of everything he covered, especially the worst team on the planet with a frustrating 28-89 record. But enough about that.

It’s a good time to turn our collective baseball attention — and the negative attention — back to the city’s other major league team. Did you almost forget there’s another one? That means the Cubs, who are 100 times better than the Sox but haven’t exactly been great themselves. And that means manager Craig Counsell, who is far from a Grifol-like dead man but hasn’t exactly been successful in his first season with the North Siders.

In terms of tension and excitement, this Crosstown series is way down the historical list. But its timing is certainly good. The Sox have regressed into meaningless oblivion, but we can look across the field and start to properly disfigure why the Cubs (still under . 500 at 57-60 as the series began) aren’t any better.

You could even argue that the Cubs had the city’s worst baseball season, because theirs should have been promising. Everyone knew the rebuilding Sox would be a losing team. Many of us thought the Cubs had an excellent shot at playing in October — after adding Counsell to a team that missed the playoffs by one game in 2023.

But these Cubs, while they’ve picked up offensively of late, are still mediocre in too many areas. They have the third-lowest team batting average in the National League, the fourth-lowest OPS, the fifth-fewest home runs, the sixth-fewest home runs. There are no superstars in their lineup; far from it. And getting tight games out of a bullpen that has blown 21 saves — even if the number hasn’t improved much in recent weeks — remains a risky proposition.

The playoffs seem nearly impossible when looking at the wild-card standings. Seven non-division leaders are ahead of the Cubs, who will have to get past five of them to clinch the final wild-card spot. There’s no argument, within the realm of logic, why that should happen. Is it possible? Of course. But it’s hard to believe even the meager 6.7 percent chance FanGraphs gives the Cubs of making the playoffs. Who’s running these numbers, Pollyanna?

A question for fans of both teams: Which is worse: your team being completely terrible, or your team being good enough to compete with the teams at the bottom of the league but not talented enough to compete with the big teams?

The fact that Sizemore had never managed at any level before and Counsell was the game’s highest-paid captain at $8 million a year was a hell of a contrast to the other. Talk about representing opposite ends of the management spectrum. Counsell doesn’t know Sizemore personally, but he did offer some advice from afar.

“Look, we don’t know what’s going to happen, that’s the great thing about sports,” he said. “He has a great opportunity to be himself and give it his all. Who knows what’s going to happen?”

With the Sox? Probably not a big deal unless they hit 120.

With the Cubs? Unless they make a major change to the lineup, Counsell will be the manager people around here complain about and make fun of. That’s the way it goes.