The Chicago White Sox are 34-31 in 2026, sitting in the second Wild Card spot, and I cannot believe I have to write this sentence to convince anyone that matters.
I know what you think. You think this is a fluke. You think 41-121 is an identity, not a result — that some teams just are what they are and the numbers from last April through last October are the permanent verdict on a franchise. You have already written the White Sox off for the next three years. You did it in March, when every projection system handed them a 67-95 record and a 1.1% playoff probability, and you have not updated once since. The White Sox turnaround is mathematically real, and you are sitting there pretending it isn’t because updating your priors is uncomfortable and being wrong in public is embarrassing.
Here is what happened Saturday: Chicago beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 6-4. The defending World Series champions. The team that wins everything. The first White Sox series win over the Dodgers since 2014 — twelve years, for anyone keeping score. In the sixth inning, Colson Montgomery hit a home run. Then Antonacci hit a home run. Then Chase Meidroth hit a two-run shot. Six runs in one inning against a Dodgers pitching staff that is supposed to be the standard for the sport.
https://x.com/ABC7Chicago/status/2066272010729087021
And here is the part I need you to sit with: Miguel Vargas hit in that game too. Miguel Vargas, who the Dodgers traded away in July 2024 as a throw-in, is now a 15-homer, 140 wRC+ third baseman for the team that just took a series from his former employer. The guy they discarded helped beat the people who discarded him. The sport cannot write this stuff.
The White Sox were 6-13 in April. Hitting .195/.286/.316 — a 71 wRC+, dead last in the majors, so bad it made the 2024 disaster feel like a preview rather than a one-off. And then something happened that nobody in the rest of baseball wanted to acknowledge. Since mid-April they have gone 28-18. They are hitting .260/.343/.451 — 121 wRC+ — and leading the American League in home runs. Third most in baseball overall. Ninety-six home runs this season. They have won eight consecutive home series.
None of this is luck. Montgomery is hitting at a 121 wRC+ clip with 17 home runs and ranks in the 98th percentile defensively per FanGraphs. Munetaka Murakami — even banged up — is leading the AL in home runs and posting a wRC+ north of 156. The front office, per SI, is planning to be aggressive at the trade deadline. This team is not surviving on vibes and soft scheduling. They are second in the AL Central, 1.5 games behind Cleveland, with an actual lineup that hits the ball out of the yard.
The problem is that nobody wants to say it out loud. The narrative that was written in March — the one where the White Sox are a historical cautionary tale, a punchline about organizational failure, a franchise you mention when you want to describe something as bad — is still the operating assumption. Sports media is terrible at this. We write the story once and then spend the rest of the year defending it. The White Sox turnaround is something that should force some embarrassed re-evaluation, and instead you get the sound of a thousand hot takes published in March being quietly filed away.
Will Venable’s first full season looked like a 60-102 mess in 2025. His second is looking like a playoff run. The White Sox are doing what nobody projected, in a division that should be eating them alive, against the best teams in the sport. On Saturday night they put three home runs in a single inning on the defending champions’ heads and walked off with a series win.
I follow our MLB coverage close enough to know that when a team goes 41-121 one year and 34-31 the next, we don’t call it a turnaround. We call it a small sample. We call it regression waiting to happen. We call it everything except what it is.
It is a turnaround. The White Sox are good now. Say it.
