It was around this point on the calendar that the 2024 White Sox started feeling themselves.
"When we were going through it all, yeah it sucked to lose games, but we were all confident that it was going to turn," said Michael Kopech in the past tense.
"Turning" was an 11-8 record over a 19-game stretch that improved their record to 14-30 on May 15, but after an off day, a brutally tough stretch of games followed, and Tommy Pham sounded like the only White Sox who was aware of how quickly quotes might age. From James' story two years ago:
"We've got a tough schedule coming up, so it’s going to take a lot of good baseball played by us to beat some of these teams," said Pham, who is hitting .319/.365/.464. "Offensively there are a lot of things we have to do to get better. Too many easy outs.
"Usually when you’re swinging at the first pitch, you want to get off your A-swing. Too many first pitch rollovers. It happened to me yesterday, but when you swing at first pitch, man, you're looking to do damage, you're looking to hit balls 95-plus mph. No jam shots, rollovers, stuff like that. You want to be a tough out. That's something we’re trying to improve on as a team."
The White Sox were Pham's eighth MLB team -- he's since added two more -- which both reflects his ability to hit, and his tendency to wear on people. It also meant that he'd seen some stuff, and he struck me as a better judge of whether the Sox were still paddling upstream versus Kopech, Andrew Vaughn, or even Garrett Crochet, who had copious personal reasons for feeling great.
"If you look at what was in the past, I mean ... that's what happened," said Garrett Crochet. "If we just shrink our focus to winning series and winning weeks, I think we're going to look up and be happy at the end of this. We know that we're behind but who gives a fuck? If we win nine out of the next 10 weeks, who knows where we'll be?"
Pham's assessment won out, and with extreme prejudice. The White Sox followed that 11-8 stretch by getting swept in the Bronx and losing 18 of their next 19 games, including the first of two 14-game losing streaks they'd experience that season.
I admit it's a choice to start a post about the most exciting two weeks of White Sox baseball in four years by talking about the worst team our subscribers will ever witness, but there was a Pham on my shoulder entering the just-completed nine-game homestand.
The Mariners, Royals and Cubs all had legitimate, stated postseason ambitions. The White Sox, meanwhile, came home having lost two of three to an Angels team that had lost its previous five series, and still haven't righted the ship, as evidenced by being outscored 31-3 by the Dodgers this past weekend. The Sox had approached .500 before backing off, and given the preseason projections and Chris Getz's unwillingness to verbally aim higher, perhaps they'd flown too close to the sun.
The White Sox instead won all three series, including a sweep of Kansas City and a bruising, inspiring rally against the North Siders. They're now 24-22 with the fifth-best record in a mess of an American League. By the time the 2024 team won 24, they'd lost 62.
It's funny to look back on that stretch of baseball in 2024 as anything beyond mere regression from a 3-22 start. The White Sox might've been 11-8, but they still hit just .247/.289/.388 with 18 homers in 19 games. Even when cherry-picking the White Sox at their most successful, their offense still couldn't escape below-averageness.
After this 7-2 homestand, there are no such present concerns. Over a longer stretch (27 games), and a more successful one (they're 18-9), the White Sox are hitting .264/.351/.476 as a unit, with 50 homers. That's the best offense in baseball, whether by counting stats, rates or adjusted metrics:
- AVG: .264 (1st)
- OBP: .351 (1st)
- SLG: .476 (1st)
- R/G: 5.6 (1st)
- HR: 50 (1st)
- wOBA: .363 (1st)
- wRC+: 130 (1st)
- fWAR: 7.2 (1st)
In the past, the White Sox might be at or near the top of some of these categories over a month-long sample, but they'd suffer in others. Their OBP usually lagged due to a lineup that relied on aggression, and poor defense would eat away at their ability to amass WAR. The White Sox still grade out as a net negative with their gloves, but not enough to prevent them from collecting wins, actual or virtual. The tangible results give some real teeth to the vague reasons for positivity cited before the season began, and a young clubhouse mostly unassociated with 2024's horrors don't have a built-in reason to equivocate.
"The whole fake it 'til you make it thing, it can be true and it can be contagious," said Colson Montgomery after Sunday's rollicking series finale. "Once you start winning, it's like, 'All right, this is real, it's not fake.' I think what we have going on here is real."
They'll now head to Seattle to once again face a Mariners team that just got swept at home by the Padres to fall to 22-26. Perhaps the Mariners will show why they're still given a 66 percent chance of reaching the postseason, or perhaps the Sox will take both series against Seattle and instill yet a little more doubt into the American League's pecking order.
They're going to say they're taking it one game or one series at a time, which is all anybody can do at any point. But for the time being, the White Sox are on the right side of a weak league. There's the emotional component of being an overachiever amid of sea of disappointments, but there's also the unemotional, zero-sum component of it all. Sure, part of the reason the White Sox are better than expected is that the league is weak.
But also, part of the reason the league is weak is that the White Sox are better than expected. Major League Baseball as a whole always finishes .500, so the losses have to come from somewhere, and if the White Sox suddenly aren't supplying them, all sorts of unpredictability can ensue. Maybe the White Sox aren't yet contenders in the classic sense, but they certainly look like hell-raisers, and since they can only benefit from disorder, it's in their interest to keep generating it.
