With 16 games left and a 1½-game lead in the AL Central, the White Sox don’t have much margin for comfort. A three-game home sweep by the Pirates, during which Chicago never led, only sharpened the unease. The Sox scored five runs in that series and are hitting .200/.288/.352 in September, with only the Orioles carrying a worse OPS this month.
That kind of stretch makes it hard to lean too heavily on small-sample warnings. Over a full season, cold spells can get washed away. With this much of the schedule gone and so little separation in the standings, the recent slide has a way of hanging over everything.
The larger problem is that the offense has become shallow. A healthy White Sox lineup is supposed to create damage all the way down the order, but right now Tristan Peters is the only regular with an OPS above .700 in September. The issues are spread everywhere, which is its own kind of mess.
Still, a few hitters stand out because of where they usually bat and what the club will be asking from them the rest of the way.
Sam Antonacci had his best month in June, when he hit .318/.426/.494 with three homers and six doubles. That was also the month when he did his best work pulling fastballs. Since then, the trend line has gone the other way along with his bat speed.
His numbers have slid month by month: .256/.312/.430 in July over 94 plate appearances, .226/.351/.312 in August over 111 plate appearances, and .219/.324/.313 in September over 37 plate appearances. The spray chart tells the same story, with his airborne contact drifting to left field.
That approach has stripped away most of the power, and even doubles now depend more on hustle than force. He has extra-base hits in only three of his last 24 games.
He’s still finding ways to reach base and move himself around, but the lack of pop makes the lineup lean harder on the hitters behind him - and they haven’t been answering. The August additions were supposed to help with that, though Brenton Doyle and Tommy Pham and Brenton Doyle haven’t been in positions to do so.
Miguel Vargas has looked better in the aggregate than he sometimes feels in real time. Since Aug. 1, he’s hit .271/.395/.466 over 36 games, but the power was concentrated early in that run.
Over his last 18 games, he has only one extra-base hit, and it was a homer. The walks have carried him; he has 15 of them in that span, and his line has settled into .281/.418/.328, along with five steals in five attempts.
Even so, the at-bats have had a different feel lately. There have been off-balance foul balls, helmet slams, and even a half-day of rest while other hitters with bigger contact issues stay in the lineup. Vargas has one hit in his last 13 at-bats with runners in scoring position, and his last three chances with the bases loaded have ended in a double play, a walk, and another double play.
There are times when he looks like he’s being worked around. Other times, it looks like he’s walking because he missed a pitch he should have driven.
The power stroke doesn’t seem to be there right now, and it stood out in the ninth inning Thursday when he tried to inside-out a pitch through the open hole on the right side. Brandon Lowe stopped it.
Even with that, Vargas is still the toughest hitter in the lineup to navigate. If Colson Montgomery and Munetaka Murakami were the bats hitting behind him, maybe there’d be a cleaner explanation for some of it. But the White Sox are backing him with the Andrew Benintendi/Randal Grichuk timeshare, so this isn’t exactly a case of being stranded behind helpless contact hitters.
That brings the focus to Montgomery and Murakami, whose strikeout totals have become impossible to ignore. Mark Reynolds still owns the MLB single-season record with 223 strikeouts, set in 2009.
Adam Dunn came one short in 2012 after the White Sox sat him on the final day of the season. James Wood struck out three times against Shane Smith in the final game of the 2025 season to finish at 221.
Montgomery is on pace for 224 strikeouts, which would top Dunn’s White Sox mark. If Kyle Schwarber keeps going at his current pace, that would still only be second in MLB history. Montgomery leads the American League with 202 strikeouts, while Schwarber sits atop the major-league leaderboard at 205.
Murakami is right there in the same neighborhood, even though he has far fewer plate appearances than anyone else in the top 16. He’s 10th in baseball with 170 strikeouts.
By strikeout rate, Murakami and Montgomery are running 1-2 at 35.0 and 34.7, respectively. Since the start of August, the numbers have only gotten worse: Montgomery leads all of baseball with a 43 percent strikeout rate, and Murakami is two spots behind at 40.2.
Esmerlyn Valdez is between them, and he’s the only other qualified hitter above 36 percent.
When Montgomery and Murakami are both going, the strikeouts are the tradeoff for massive production. But when they’re both stuck, as they have been since the start of August, the cost becomes harder to overlook.
That’s why the final 16 games matter beyond the standings. They’ll shape how the White Sox think about the cumulative effect of running two extreme strikeout bats through the same lineup every day, and they’ll help frame whatever comes next in the offseason.
In Other News...
White Sox Just Lost A Key Voice In Their Draft Pipeline
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For a team trying to keep building a stronger pipeline, the timing matters because Shirley was directly involved in those strategy conversations and selections. The club has not offered any further detail on the resignation, and Shirley has not commented, leaving one more important front-office transition hanging over a development system that has already been under a microscope. [Read more 🡒]
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White Sox Try To Seal Cardinals Series With A New Wrinkle Sunday
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Sandlins call-up has become part of the story here, and the White Sox have also moved Schweitzer off the roster as they continue sorting out the pitching side of things. For a club trying to stack wins and keep momentum in a tough spot on the schedule, the series finale is less about ceremony than seeing whether the new pieces can hold up long enough to finish the job in St. Louis. [Read more 🡒]