There's nothing surprising about the White Sox' awful start — not the losses, not the injuries

Did no one think to tell hit-starved, run-famished White Sox players to stare at the eclipse without sunglasses? It only could have improved their vision at the plate.

The Sox are the butt of a lot of bad jokes these days because they’re butt ugly as a baseball team. Everyone knew they were going to be feeble this season, but few people expected them to be this feeble, which explains the level of anger around town.

Heading into their game against the Guardians on Wednesday night, the Sox were no higher than 28th (out of 30 teams) in many of the major offensive statistics in baseball. Philosophical question: If a team starts the season 2-9, can it be called “slumping’’? Rounded shoulders would appear to be its natural posture.

General manager Chris Getz took aim at the lack of offense the other day and conveniently found a way to mention injuries to Luis Robert Jr. and Eloy Jimenez.

“The quality at-bats haven’t been there,” Getz said. “You look at the lineup going into the year, to lose [Robert] and Eloy early on is a serious blow to the offense. We knew it was an offense that really had to put together consistent at-bats and be focused on a regular basis, there wasn’t a lot of room for error. Unfortunately, it’s shown some weaknesses here.’’

Lamenting injuries to Robert and Jimenez is like lamenting stripes on zebras. Their careers have been marked by physical woes. Robert has a hip flexor strain and will miss at least six weeks. Jimenez has an adductor strain and likely will be out an extended period. Adding injury to insult, third basemanYoan Moncada suffered an adductor strain Tuesday against Cleveland. He’ll be out three to six months.

What are these guys playing, baseball or Twister?

The Sox were going to struggle with or without their three best hitters this season. They traded Dylan Cease, their best pitcher, during spring training. The only entertainment value was in seeing if Robert, Jimenez and Moncada would provide enough offense to give the fan base a reason to live and in predicting when they would get hurt.

And now there’s nothing, other than Sox pitcher Garrett Crochet, who is exciting. Any guesstimates on when his arm will fall off?

You have a manager, Pedro Grifol, who is so single-minded he said he didn’t care about seeing the eclipse Monday. At least dull-as-dirt Bill Belichick had good players.

You have Getz, who was chairman Jerry Reinsdorf’s quick, cheap solution to replacing Ken Williams and Rick Hahn last year.

And you have Reinsdorf, which is why Sox fans stare at the sky and ask what they did to deserve such a fate. How many of them seriously considered burning their retinas on eclipse day?

Reinsdorf doesn’t care that fans are fed up. He has ignored their fed-up-ness for decades. He figures they’ll accept their bowl of despair, the way they always do. I’m not sure why he’s still in it. To get a new ballpark at taxpayers’ expense, of course, here or somewhere else. But there’s always the feeling that a victory for him is not in building a good team but in telling his partners how much money he has made for them.

It’s built into the equation that more misery figures to follow this season, but in a big-picture sense, it really can’t get any worse. The Sox have an 88-year-old owner who listens to no one’s counsel but his own on important matters, such as how to win in professional sports. I don’t even know what to call what’s going on here. Failed Rebuild II? It feels like one, big holding pattern of dreadfulness.

Getz ventured into very dark territory the other day, telling reporters, “I know our guys; they’re not going to stop working.’’ That’s not a high bar, considering it’s April and considering players get paid handsomely to work. And it sounded frighteningly like former Bears coach Matt Nagy, who used to wax poetic about how hard his players practiced the week of a game — especially quarterback Mitch Trubisky, who apparently was Joe Montana from Monday through Saturday.

We’re talking about a hardworking bad Sox team only a few weeks into the season, which, loosely translated, means, “Yikes!” As mentioned earlier, they were a bad team before they traded Cease to the Padres. They were a bad team before Robert, Jimenez and Moncada got injured. Now they’re no-name bad.

To stick with our eclipse theme, Sox fans are on the Path of a Total Waste of Time.