ST. LOUIS, Mo. — From a detached, outsider perspective, the 2026 White Sox have been doing backstrokes in an infinity pool full of house money all year. To have 75 wins at all, let alone with 16 games remaining, is already beating most of their preseason projections.
From a clubhouse perspective, seeing their lead in the American League Central shrink to 1.5 games ahead of a crucial six-day road trip that ends with three matchups against the second-place Cleveland Guardians means they’re at risk of upsetting what should be the natural order.
“We want to win the division because we feel like we are the best team in the division–that’s what should happen,” said infielder Colson Montgomery. “Nobody is going to let us run off and have all this stuff. We have to earn all this and we are all well aware of that. We just sit back and see what we are made of.”
“Sit back and see,” might be the crucial phrase. The Sox have lost eight of their last 11 entering FRiday, were just swept by the fourth-place Pirates, and are a game under .500 since the end of May. As a club defined by charming dugout buffoonery and–in Montgomery’s words–a “we don’t know what we don’t know” innocence, they would rather harken back to the relaxed approach of their first half than lock into some new mode of hyper-seriousness for a decisive final stretch.
“We don’t need to do anything more than be what we are,” said Sean Burke, who will start the series opener on Monday in Cleveland. “We cared just as much in May as we do right now. An added ‘Oh we really care about these games’ is kind of counterintuitive for us.”
Speaking of counterintuitive, Burke’s 156 innings pitched this year are a career-high and two of the worst starts of his young career have come in his last three outings. That’s led to questions about fatigue, but he’s actually re-installed some elements of his routine, like long toss, that he had been cutting out for the sake of “saving bullets.”
The larger lesson in there is that what got the Sox to this point, should be good enough to bring home an AL Central title. Similarly, they can fret about losing ground the past two weeks, but entering their final five series up two games in the loss column over Cleveland and needing just one head-to-head win to clinch the season series and claim the tiebreaker, is clearly the best spot to be in.
“We’re not hitting the panic button,” said ace reliever Grant Taylor. “The fact that we’re coming near the end of the season doesn’t change the way we’ve been playing. We’ve had success with how we’ve been playing.”
That said, as young as Will Venable might look for a manager, part of his appeal is his time with the 2023 Rangers means he can draw from World Series experience. And the feasibility of treating the end of a division race like normal games might be one of those things his young team doesn’t know that they don’t know.
“You want to keep it as normal, because normal has got us into this position,” Venable said. “But there’s just a lot of things working against you to keep things normal. For us it’s just acknowledging those things, being aware of them and just also understanding that we’re in a great spot.”
In baseball, part of being in a great spot is that the games at the end mean enough to be anxiety-inducing. The Sox might be about to get a lesson in such matters. But for the moment, they present like they could be immune.
“If you told fans and everyone we are in the position we are in right now, they would probably be pretty happy,” Montgomery said. “We’ve had a couple of series where it’s been a little shaky. Gotta be patient. We know things are going to pass.”