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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Sox (I’m a Playoff Team)
Vol. 18, No. 95
September 25, 2026
On September 24, 2024, Miguel Vargas hit a solo homer in the sixth inning for the Chicago White Sox, breaking a tie with the Padres. The Sox, though, would blow that lead on their way to their 120th loss, tying the modern record for losses in a season.
On September 24, 2026, Miguel Vargas hit a line-drive single to left in the first inning for the Chicago White Sox, breaking a tie with the Royals. These Sox, however, would tack on two more runs in the first and go on to a 9-1 win, clinching a playoff berth.
We have never seen a team take an arc like the White Sox have over the last two seasons, from 121 losses to a playoff berth. Noting that the standard for being a playoff team has never been lower...
Rebound (Quickest to milestones after losing 115 or more games (since 1900)
L .500 Playoffs
White Sox 2024 121 2 2
Mets 1962 120 7 7
Rockies 2025 119 N/A N/A
Tigers 2003 119 3 3
Athletics 1916 117 9 13
Orioles 2018 115 5 5
Braves 1935 115 2 13
The 1935 Braves were a bit of a fluke, as the team won 83 and 78 games in the two years prior, then 71 and 79 games the two years afterward. (All in 154-game seasons.) The ’35 team was wrecked by owner Emil Fuchs’s gambit, in a desperate attempt to juice attendance, of signing a washed-up Babe Ruth with a promise that Ruth would get a chance to manage. That promise would go unfulfilled, Ruth would retire in June, and Fuchs would be forced out of Braves ownership in July.
The 2003 Tigers, another AL Central team playing in an expanded-playoffs era, are the best comp for these Sox. They went 43-119 in ’03, just missing the record for losses in a season. Those Tigers were on a three-year slide and in fact the 11th straight Tigers team to finish under .500. Owner Mike Ilitch and GM Dave Dombrowski got aggressive after that year, signing Ivan Rodriguez for 2004 and Magglio Ordonez for 2005. Farm system products Curtis Granderson, Jeremy Bonderman, and Justin Verlander would all be part of the AL pennant winners in 2006.
Still, no team has ever come as far as fast as these Sox have. They improved by 19 games a year ago, as the product of the team’s rebuilding trades improved the talent base. Homegrown pitcher Davis Martin stabilized the pitching staff, as did Rule 5 pick Shane Smith and Rays castoff Mike Vasil. Coming into ’26, I saw more improvement on the way (a 72-90 projection) but expected the lack of pitching depth and the Plexiglass Principle -- teams that improve a lot in one year tend to fall back the next -- to limit their upside. Losing just 90 games two years after losing 121 would be no mean feat!
You can see here where I missed on this team, comparing my preseason unit rankings to their actual ranks in certain statistics.
Proj Actual
wRC+ 22nd 4th
Starters fWAR 27th 24th
Relievers fWAR 15th 11th
Outs Above Average 27th 9th
Defensive Runs Saved 27th 20th
As the chart shows, I wasn’t that far off on the quality of this team’s pitching. Will Venable has done a great job getting maximum value from sophomore power arm Grant Taylor and mostly free free agent Sean Newcomb. I expected the Sox to get more from lefties Noah Schultz and Hagen Smith than they have this year. The unexpected in-season pickup of Luis Castillo, which seemed a good idea in the moment, blew up on them. The Sox have survived a late-season pitching collapse, and while being able to cut down their usage tree next week will benefit them a lot, this is still the weak link in the chain.
My big whiff was on their offense. Now, let’s make a point. This is a very strange year for offense in that the top teams at the plate are considerably worse than they’ve been in recent years. (More on this in the playoff coverage next week.) The White Sox’s 105 wRC+ is a good figure, and well above the low-90s I expected from this group, but calling it a “top-five offense” is a little misleading. That 105 wRC+ is closer to 22nd in MLB than it is to first.
That still means the Sox added 20 points of OBP and 30 points of slugging, scoring about 3/4 of a run a game more than they did last year. Vargas, the team’s bridge from 2024 to 2026, is the biggest part of that. The 26-year-old, whom the Sox left alone to get 569 plate appearances a year ago, paid off that development time with a .252/.363/.479 season in which he made the AL All-Star team. Vargas settled in as an average third baseman and even stole 21 bases in 23 attempts.
Across the diamond, there’s Munetaka Murakami, who has just about nailed my Russell Branyan comp with a .204/.348/.467 (128 wRC+) season that is about as good as it can be with a 35% strikeout rate. Murakami front-loaded his productivity, with 20 homers by the end of May, when he strained his right hamstring. Since his return, he’s hit just .174/.323/.390, living off his selectivity and raw power. There will be ongoing debate about what Murakami will be in ’27 and beyond, but the Sox taking advantage of his collapsing market to bring him in on a two-year deal was a key part of their run to the postseason.
The other big thing was depth. Three Sox in their first or second years, coming in via trade and the draft, lengthened the lineup and improved the defense. Chase Meidroth, Tristan Peters, and Sam Antonacci all posted at least a .341 OBP and a 117 wRC+. Colson Montgomery, like Murakami, faltered in the second half, but overall he has a 94 wRC+. Randal Grichuk, added after the Yankees dumped him in May, has a 160 wRC+ and one of the team’s most important hits of the season. Just three Sox, catchers Edgar Quero and Drew Romo, and infielder Luisangel Acuña, got significant playing time as bad hitters.
The Sox run isn’t over, either. They go into the weekend a game behind the Guardians and holding the tiebreaker, so if they can make up that game (they host the Rockies, the Guards go to Kansas City), they’ll win the division and earn a bye into the Division Series. With their thin pitching, a week of rest and not having to play games would go a long way towards helping their championship hopes.
No matter what happens this weekend, though, the 2026 White Sox are one of the best stories in baseball history, a rare “nobody believed in us” case that’s actually true.
Friday watch guide:
With some rescheduling due to anticipated poor weather here in the East, there are 17 games today, including a day-night doubleheader in Boston.
1:05 and 6:05: Cubs (Holmes, Peterson) at Red Sox (Gamboa, Bello). The Cubs clinched a playoff spot yesterday and are now playing for seeding, as they could finish anywhere from the #4 to the #6 slot. The first of those hosts the wild-card series, and it may take until Sunday to sort that out.
The weather not only forces today’s doubleheader but may require these two teams to fly to St. Petersburg, and its domed stadium, to complete this series. I cannot imagine the Sox, who are locked into the #5 seed in the AL and have to play in New York Tuesday, are all that happy about having to make a back-and-forth to Florida for a game that means nothing to them. The outcomes today will help determine whether these teams have to make the trip.
This is all fruit of the poisoned tree, the expanded playoffs. MLB has zero wiggle room in its playoff calendar, which means avoiding at all cost games on the Monday after the season ends. (The Mets/Braves doubleheader two years ago is a notable exception created by rainouts in September.)
6:40: Rays (Peralta) at Phillies (Sanchez). This wasn’t supposed to matter, but the Phillies lost ground to the one team they cannot tie with, and now their playoff spot is in jeopardy.
Padres* 89-70 .560
Cubs* 88-71 .553
Phillies 87-72 .547
D’backs 85-74 .535
The Phillies and Diamondbacks split the season series, and the Diamondbacks will win the second tiebreaker, intradivisional record. So the Phillies’ magic number is two.
7:40: Guardians (Williams) at Royals (Cameron)
7:40: Rockies (Sugano) at White Sox (Burke)
The Royals have slipped to 6-15 in September as they play out the string. The Rockies have been even worse, 5-16, so a small edge to the White Sox this weekend. The Sox need to play one game better than the Guardians to skip an entire playoff round. This gets interesting if the division remains in doubt come Sunday, as both of these teams will have to weigh using a top starting pitcher and risk not having that hurler available for the wild-card series.
8:10: Rangers (deGrom) at Twins (Ryan). This is why you invest $187.5 million in five years of Jacob deGrom, in the hopes that you can put an ace on the mound in a must-win game. deGrom has made 30 starts in consecutive seasons for the first time since 2018-19, and while his ERA has spiked to 3.86, he’s actually been better than that, with a 3.11 FIP and a 3.36 expected ERA. The Rangers are tied with the Astros for the AL West lead at 79-80, and lose the tiebreaker.
9:40: Astros (Brown) at Athletics (Lopez). The Astros are still tied for first because after every one of their center fielders back to Michael Bourn hit the IL, they called on a 23-year-old undrafted outfielder named Lucas Spence to fill the gap. Spence, who was up with the Astros for a few weeks in July, entered last night’s game with four career hits, no homers, and a 419 OPS. He ended the game with seven hits, three homers, and a 718 OPS.
Spence hit a three-run homer in the second to give the Astros a 3-0 lead, broke a 4-4 tie in the seventh with his second blast, and hit a third in the ninth to extend the Astros’ lead to 7-5. It wasn’t just three home runs, it was three home runs that the Astros do not win the game without. Spence isn’t that guy; he has a .402 career SLG in the minors, .426 across three levels this year. For one night in Sacramento, though, he put Yordan Alvarez and 26 other teammates on his back. If the Astros win the AL West, Lucas Spence’s career night leads the commemorative video.
9:40: Diamondbacks (Pfaadt) at Padres (TBD). The Padres took two of three at Dodger Stadium to clinch a playoff berth and take most of the drama out of this one. The Diamondbacks need to keep winning and hope the Phillies lose at least one game. The Padres are playing for the right to not have to fly across the country to take on the Braves, Cubs or Phillies. They’re a game up on the Cubs for the #4 seed, but they lose a tiebreaker to the Cubs, so they have to maintain their edge. Home-field advantage hasn’t meant all that much -- teams with it are 7-9 in the first round since 2022 -- and it’s a weak factor in baseball as a whole. In this specific case, the travel involved gives the Padres and Cubs some incentive to fight for the top wild-card slot.
I’m back over the weekend as necessary. For the new readers, note that while I’ll have plenty of playoff coverage heading into the first round and during it, I do not write dedicated series previews for the best-of-three conference quarterfinals, mostly because I don’t think previewing a best-of-three is useful. You won’t miss them.
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For my non-Gen X readers, this explains today’s header.
