We’ll have to wait to see whether Tim Elko’s game-winning homer Sunday will go down in rebuild lore or just be another White Sox footnote.
But the freshly promoted first baseman slugged his way to the big leagues and has a chance to hit his way into the team’s long-term plans.
In a season just a month and a half old, there have been bright spots that stand as milestones in general manager Chris Getz’s rebuilding effort, chiefly the promotions of catcher Edgar Quero and infielder Chase Meidroth, who had much more prominent places in the long-term project than Elko, a 10th-round pick who doesn’t rank among the organization’s top 30 prospects.
It’s worth mentioning, too, the starting pitchers, four of whom are youngsters with minimal experience that could pitch their way into a long-term conversation currently starring minor leaguers Noah Schultz, Hagen Smith and Grant Taylor.
But with those steps toward a brighter future, it’s impossible to ignore a familiar feeling.
It’s going to be difficult for these Sox to match — or gosh, exceed — the 121 losses they had last year. After all, no team in baseball history had done it before. Coming into this season, logic said it couldn’t get any worse.
But 41 games in, it’s been exactly the same.
At 12-29, these Sox own the same record the 2024 edition did at this point.
Not even a new Sox-fan pope could prevent that.
You’d assume the pope has bigger things on his plate, so the work of turning the Sox around still belongs to Getz’s front office and manager Will Venable’s field staff.
Until this roster has more of the future on it, that’s going to be tough work.
In Year 1, Venable doesn’t need to worry about job security. But his winning percentage looks awfully similar to that of predecessor Pedro Grifol, whose South Side tenure lasted just a year and a half because the losses never stopped coming.
There was a lot of roster turnover in the offseason, and there have been noticeable differences from 2024: better defensive play, a solid starting rotation, more stolen bases.
But the Sox are still cellar-dwellers.
Inside the clubhouse, we’re hearing much the same thing we did last year: This team is losing a lot, but it’s not being dragged down by it, a close-knit group of guys who like being around each other.
“Everybody loves everybody,” utility man Brooks Baldwin told the Sun-Times earlier this month. “Even if you get pinch-hit for or something during the game, you’re still right there with your boys. You want them to do just as good as you want yourself to do. The camaraderie this year is amazing. Everybody’s pulling for everybody.”
Warm feelings are great, especially for an organization looking to establish a strong clubhouse culture as part of its rebuild. But they aren’t equaling wins.
“No one’s happy with the win-loss record,” bench coach Walker McKinven said Sunday. “But underneath the hood, we’re working really hard to reorder some things, build things up, and we like where everything’s headed here.
“The wins haven’t shown up here in the first 40 or so, first quarter of the season. We expect more. And all the things that we’re doing behind the scenes, we do expect those to lead to more wins coming up.”
Venable and his staff can only do so much. This roster wasn’t built to contend, and much of the organization’s top talent is in the minor leagues.
But that doesn’t mean the manager’s job is limited to waiting. He has a comprehensive list of things he wants to improve, that work we heard so much about last year and are hearing about again this year.
That the record is not sterling shouldn’t come as a surprise.
But for a team that would prefer to avoid another summer of negative headlines and unfortunate placement in the record books, it’s all looking — and sounding — rather familiar.