Sox Rising
Here's a spicy take: the 2026 Chicago White Sox are going to win the AL Central. We’re 60 games into the season and the White Sox aren’t fading. They’re sitting at 32-27 and one game behind Cleveland.
Right in front of them: The Guardians are good, the expected front-runners after winning the AL Central in 2024 and 2025. But the Twins have cratered to 27-33, the Royals are 22-37, and the Tigers are a game worse than that. In a healthy division race, Cleveland runs away. In this one, a team playing .550 baseball could absolutely win it. The White Sox are currently playing .542.
Ahead of schedule: This was supposed to be a rebuild-in-progress. The White Sox entered 2026 with a young offensive core (Miguel Vargas, Sam Antonacci, Chase Meidroth, Colson Montgomery), an unknown signing from Japan, and a rotation that wasn't supposed to be anything yet. Instead, they spent most of May winning series they weren't supposed to win, including three out of four against the Minnesota Twins. The argument isn't that they're a great team. It's that the AL Central is offering a genuine opening, and this White Sox group is competitive enough to take it.
The Murakami problem: There's a wrinkle. Munetaka Murakami — 20 home runs, .240/.378/.560, the team's best bat — exited a game on Saturday with a Grade 2 hamstring strain. He'll miss four to six weeks. The White Sox called up Jacob Gonzalez, who has been excellent in Triple-A (.317/.419/.668, 19 HR in 52 games), but the gap between Murakami and a prospect getting his first real MLB look is real. The rest of Chicago's left-handed bats had 24 home runs combined in nearly 1,000 plate appearances when Murakami had 20 in 246. He matters that much.
Don’t count them out: Even accounting for the injury, the math holds. The White Sox have a four-to-six-week window where they're playing without their best hitter — but so is every team playing a long season with its own injury list. If Gonzalez's Triple-A form carries over even partially, and the rotation holds, Chicago stays in the hunt. Murakami returns around the All-Star break. The second half of the season opens with the White Sox healthy and right in the middle of a race nobody expected them to be in.
