April 29, 2025: The White Sox yank struggling White Sox shortstop prospect Colson Montgomery from Triple-A Charlotte and send him to their Arizona training complex to retool his swing, an ominous exclamation point on a horrendous 5-21 month of April for the big-league team.
April 29, 2026: The heart-of-the-order slugger Montgomery swats a walk-off RBI single in the bottom of the 10th inning to seal a series sweep and a surprisingly respectable 13-13 first full calendar month of the season.
What a difference a year makes for a rebuilding club finally showing the first signs of significant progress in the win column early in Year 3 of general manager Chris Getz’s overhaul.
“All of us have expectations for ourselves and for the team,” Montgomery said after his game-winning hit. “I feel like right now we are just laying a brick every single day and building every single day and just playing really good ball right now.”
After laying eggs for three straight triple-digit-loss seasons, that’s cause for celebration on the South Side, where the Sox’ 14-17 start has them sitting within a game and a half of first place in a wide-open American League Central.
It looked like the Sox were destined for more of the same when they fell on their faces out of the gate, getting swept out of Milwaukee in about as ugly a fashion as imaginable, from a 12-run blowout to a late-inning cough-up by big-money closer Seranthony Dominguez.
Instead, they rebounded for their first .500 full calendar month of the Getz era, a high-water mark of mediocrity previously unmet since June 2023.
Their early successes have come against no slouches — at least not on paper, a month into the season — with series wins over the defending AL champion Blue Jays, plus potent Athletics and Diamondbacks lineups.
“I think after Milwaukee, we’ve been playing really good ball,” said starter Erick Fedde, who was around for some of the worst ball of all time during his first stint with the Sox on their historically bad 2024 squad.
“We’ve been in a lot of games, even ones where we don’t win, where it still feels like we had a real shot at it,” Fedde said. “There’s a lot of belief in this clubhouse that if we start sniffing .500 and then get above it, there’s no turning back.”
They’re sniffing it out so far with surprisingly good starting pitching from Fedde and long-suffering Sox workhorse Davis Martin, who has flashed the early makings of a big breakout season.
And they’re doing it with the long ball, courtesy of Montgomery, Miguel Vargas and Japanese phenom Munetaka Murakami, who has made himself a national household name by clubbing 12 tape-measure homers, tied with Aaron Judge for most in MLB.
“This guy has been amazing,” said second-year manager Will Venable, whose team was effectively out of contention by the end of last April at 7-23. “As good a first month as you can have in the big leagues.”
Add in a steady of stream of promising rookies — hello, Aurora native Noah Schultz — and suddenly the Sox are worth watching again.
“We’ve been pretty adamant on the way we’re starting to establish ourselves, and that goes into the way we run the bases, the way we prepare ourselves before games,” Springfield-born grinder Sam Antonacci said after keeping his team alive with a two-out RBI triple in the bottom of the ninth inning en route to Wednesday’s win over the Angels.
So what’ll it take to lock down the club’s first winning month since May 2023? Venable and Getz are ever-reluctant to put an exact figure on target win totals, but suffice to say it’ll take more of the same.
”Regardless of yesterday’s results, they’re coming to the ballpark focused and energized to go out there and play, and it’s coming from everyone on the roster,” Venable said. “After a tough first couple of series, it feels like we’ve found different ways to win some of these ballgames that maybe last year we wouldn’t have won, or maybe even earlier in the year we wouldn’t have won.”