Chris Getz didn't make an official prediction for how the White Sox would fare in 2026, but he came closest to a hard number at SoxFest with an off-the-cuff response that sounded more audacious before doing the math.
At the Ramova Theatre at the end of January, a fan asked him what fans should expect after a 19-win improvement in 2026, and Getz responded, "How about 19 more?" Such was the state of the White Sox that a second consecutive 19-win season was both a playfully bold suggestion and a modest goal, because while it represented a steep raising of the bar, it still came up short of a .500 season.
No matter how seriously you took Getz's goal, the White Sox cleared it with their 8-1 victory over the Tigers on Sunday. They improved from 41 wins in 2024 to 60 wins in 2025 to 79 wins in 2026, and now they're at 80 wins with six to play.
Whatever wins they can notch from here on out all pack individual significance -- first a non-losing season, then a winning one, and then you start getting into postseason berth territory, be it the third wild card spot or a division title, and it all continues to be just the damndest thing.
When the season started, PECOTA projected the White Sox to finish 69-93, and ZiPS pegged the Sox for a 72-90 record. Neither felt like a slight, and it once again spoke to the duality of the White Sox's state that non-zero postseason odds were both the faintest of praise and tokens of actual improvement. FanGraphs gave the White Sox a 6.6 percent probability of making the postseason, while PECOTA gave even slimmer odds at 1.5 percent.
The 2026 White Sox are the reason why that line from Dumb and Dumber -- "So you're telling me there's a chance" -- still hits some 32 years after the film's release. Because the algorithms left a sliver of an opportunity over the course of their 1,000 season simulations, they weren't necessarily wrong. There was a way the American League could unfold in such a way that the White Sox could have one of the six best records in the American League, and potentially the top record in their own division -- it would just take an enormous amount of overachieving White Sox, and a specific combination of catastrophic disappointments elsewhere. Somehow, this combination escaped a few cursed spreadsheets and into the realm of a physical, actual 162-game season that counts.
With today being both the last regular season off day and the last day of summer, it's worth taking stock of an entire season -- be it the baseball one or the overall period of an Earth calendar -- spent in a world that made that 1.5 percent probability possible. And once play resumes, it's up to the White Sox to finish authoring one of the most unlikely postseason appearances of all time.
