The Chicago White Sox are currently finishing what will likely be remembered as the worst season in MLB history, and they don’t offer much reason to believe 2025 will be any different.

Speaking to reporters before the team begins its final, miserable home stretch, White Sox general manager Chris Getz was asked about the team’s plans for free agency this winter. His answer was expected, but demoralizing nonetheless.

Basically, don’t expect the White Sox to compete for any of the top free agents, although they will be on the lookout for some bargains that could be traded at the 2025 trade deadline. That’s in line with what Getz said last week when he admitted his team “won’t put a lot of work into free agency.”

There are many ways to respond to such statements, but the most apt response is probably a simple statement: The White Sox followed exactly this strategy last year.

The Sox weren’t expected to do well this season, and that was true in their previous offseason. Erick Fedde, a former flop who turned his career around in South Korea, was their biggest expense at two years and $15 million. They never signed anyone for more than a year or $6 million after that.

Fedde was traded along with former top prospect Michael Kopech at the deadline this season. In return, major league player Miguel Vargas and talents Jeral Perez and Alexander Albertus, who are currently ranked 13th and 14th on Chicago’s MLB Pipeline list, returned.

It sounds like the White Sox, after doing the bare minimum and losing at least 120 games in what is an all-time franchise humiliation, will go back to doing the bare minimum and…see what happens. And they’ll do so while potentially trading away their best remaining player, starting pitcher Garrett Crochet.

That may sound like a reasonable course of action for a struggling team, but it’s worth asking now whether the White Sox should even be treated as if they were implementing a rebuilding plan. The team seemed to have rebuilt in 2021, when it won the AL Central for three seasons after losing 100 games, but it has lost an average of more than 100 games per year since then.

Nearly every player who made the 2021 team good is now gone, and the players the White Sox received in exchange for the players they traded away couldn’t prevent the disaster that is 2024. The White Sox, who should be at the absolute bottom of a rebuilding cycle, have the No. 11 farm system in MLB Pipeline’s rankings. That could improve if they trade Crochet, but what won’t help is the fact that the best they can get in next year’s draft is the No. 10 pick due to MLB’s lottery rules.

All kidding aside, there will definitely be long-term plans in the White Sox front office, but the bigger issue is more on the surface. Fans will remember what happened in 2024, and the memories will be even more vivid when the team does the same thing in 2025. We like to praise fans for their loyalty, but what reason would any of them have to remain loyal when their owner is willing to subject them to this kind of embarrassment repeatedly?

Teams often promise that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel if they do what the White Sox say they’re going to do, but it’s been three years now since the White Sox went through the same process and let go — or even encouraged — all the people who got them there. Successful regrouping teams spend money when they start winning, but White Sox team owner Jerry Reinsdorf didn’t, and now he’s asking fans to follow him for another round — and give this team a billion dollars for a new stadium.

Why would any fan believe at this point that all of this is being done in good faith?