A few days ago in the August Month in a Box, we talked about the White Sox's month-to-month decreases in run differential, and whether they signaled a team that's adept at managing a schedule's degrees of difficulty, or a team that's gradually running out of juice.
Being held to five runs over a three-game sweep at home by the Pittsburgh Pirates, a series during which the White Sox never held a lead at any point, makes it easier to indulge the pessimistic perspective. They're hitting .200/.288/.352 as a team in September, and the Orioles are the lone team with a lower OPS this month.
Performances fluctuate over the course of a season, and the White Sox might ride greater extremes than usual, so everything about analyzing September warrants small sample size caveats. It's just that there are only 16 games left in a season and the White Sox lead the AL Central by just 1½ games, so there isn't the comfort of a larger sample balancing out the struggles over the remainder. It's going to feel precarious, and this anxiety is what you missed when the White Sox were losing 100-plus games in each of the last three seasons. Or at least you should try telling yourself that.
A functioning White Sox lineup is a deep White Sox lineup that can generate offense at the bottom of the order. Instead, Tristan Peters is the only regular with an OPS above .700 this month, so while some hitters might be more unwatchable than others, the struggles are truly a team effort.
That said, there are four Sox I'm keeping a closer eye on, just because they've been hitting in the top half of the order for most of the season. That means they're doing less with more right now, but the way they finish 2026 also introduces some questions about how they'll respond for 2027, and what form the White Sox will be projecting into their roster-building plans.
Sam Antonacci
June was Antonacci's strongest month of the year, when he hit .318/.426/.494 with three homers and six doubles, and his best power showing correlated with his best month pulling fastballs.
As that red line has trended downward, so has his bat speed, and his production:
- July: .256/.312/.430 over 94 PA
- August: .226/.351/.312 over 111 PA
- September: .219/.324/.313 over 37 PA
You can see it in the spray chart, where all of his contact in the air is going to left field.
This approach basically takes the homer out of the equation, and even doubles are more reliant on hustling, which is why he has extra-base hits in just three of his last 24 games. He's doing what he can to get on base -- and get around the basepaths -- despite the lack of pop, but that makes the offense more reliant on the guys behind him, and they have their own problems. This is another area where August acquisitions were supposed to help chip in, but Brenton Doyle and Tommy Pham haven't been in positions to do so.
Miguel Vargas
In terms of overall production, Vargas looks fine, but it doesn't align with other cues like off-balance foul balls, helmet slams, and a rest half-day when guys who are having bigger issues making contact continue to be penciled in.
Sure, he's hitting .271/.395/.466 over 36 games since Aug. 1, but all the power was front-loaded in the first half of that sample. Over the last 18 games, he has exactly one extra-base hit (at least it was a homer). He's compensated with 15 walks, which gives him a Rikuu Nishida-like line of .281/.418/.328, pursuing that path even further with five steals in five attempts.
If it's felt worse than that, it's because Vargas has just one hit over his last 13 at-bats with runners in scoring position, and his last three opportunities with the bases loaded have produced a double play, walk, and double play.
Sometimes it seems like he's drawing walks because he's being pitched around. Other times it seems like falls into walks because he missed a pitch he should've driven to extend a plate appearance. The power stroke doesn't look like it's there right now, to the point that it stuck out when he tried to inside-out a pitch through the open hole on the right side in the ninth inning on Thursday. Brandon Lowe thwarted the attempt.
Vargas is the toughest guy to pitch to in the lineup, and I think if Colson Montgomery and Munetaka Murakami were hitting right behind him, I might chalk some of it up to a lack of protection, just because their strikeout issues are so severe. But he's being backed up by the Andrew Benintendi/Randal Grichuk timeshare, so it's not like he's the last resort for putting balls in play.
Speaking of which:
Colson Montgomery and Munetaka Murakami
Mark Reynolds is still holds the record for most strikeouts in an MLB season with 223, which he set in 2009. That's surprising, because the 15 highest leaguewide strikeout rates have occurred in the last 15 years, but individuals keep coming up short.
The record should have lasted only three years, but the White Sox sat Adam Dunn on the final day of the 2012 season, which allowed him to finish the year with 222. James Wood did play the final game of the 2025 season, striking out three times against Shane Smith to finish at 221.
Colson Montgomery is on pace for 224 strikeouts, which would break Dunn's White Sox record. However, that'd only be good for second in MLB history if Kyle Schwarber also maintains his current pace. Montgomery leads the American League with 202 strikeouts, but Schwarber atop the MLB leaderboard at 205, and he's great company to keep if you want to downplay the detriments of a strikeout in the modern age of baseball.
But Murakami is 10th in baseball with 170 strikeouts despite having the fewest plate appearances by far of anybody in the top 16. By strikeout rate, Murakami (35.0) and Montgomery (34.7) are running 1-2, and it's even more severe since the start August. Montgomery leads all of baseball with a 43 percent K rate, and Murakami is two spots behind at 40.2. Esmerlyn Valdez is in between them, and the only other qualified hitter above 36 percent.
When Montgomery and Murakami are both rolling, they produce in the Schwarber vein where you accept the strikeouts as a cost of doing earth-shattering business. When they're both sputtering, as both have been since the start of August...
- Montgomery: .187/.262/.366 over 149 PA
- Murakami: .138/.274/.326 over 164 PA
... it does make me wonder how the White Sox evaluate any cumulative effects of having two extremely strikeout-prone guys in the same lineup every day, and how they might attempt to mitigate it. There's not much they can do about it over the final 17 days of the season, but their offseason efforts will be worth following, and the way these last 16 games unfold will have a lot of say in how these pursuits are framed.
