CHICAGO - The White Sox are winning, and somehow the loudest thing about them is how little they seem to be bothered by the noise around it.
That showed up again Monday at Globe Life Field, when Sean Burke learned his club was only four games back of the Rays for the American League’s No. 1 seed. Burke, the rising arm in the White Sox rotation, hadn’t even been tracking that race.
“I didn’t even know about the top spot until you said that,” he said.
Later that same day, after Chicago rolled to a 10-3 win over the Rangers, Colson Montgomery was told the White Sox had climbed to a season-best seven games over .500. He had missed that too, while dealing with the pain of fouling a pitch off his right shin/calf area.
“I didn’t even know we were really seven over,” Montgomery said.
That’s not apathy. It’s part of what makes this team so easy to watch.
The White Sox aren’t carrying themselves like a club trying to survive the moment. They’re playing like a group that expects the day’s work to be enough, and that the fun comes from the results.
“Oh, yeah. It’s the best part,” Mike Vasil said when asked about the team’s enjoyment.
“We are playing baseball for a living. It’s supposed to be fun.”
Vasil has been one of the clearest examples of that tone all season. He went from being a useful reliever in ’25 to dealing with Tommy John surgery in Spring Training, and then somehow turned into the guy with the Amazon-bought $20 wand and wizard’s hat, not to mention the emcee for three White Sox All-Star announcements. That kind of loose, self-aware energy has spread through the clubhouse.
The celebrations have gotten their own identity, too. Since the All-Star break, the outfielders have been breaking out a double Dutch jump rope routine after victories. It fits this group.
The results have started to make the whole thing feel less like a cute run and more like something real. Chicago left Texas with a second straight road series win after the break, matched a season high at 54-47, and sits one game ahead of the Guardians in the American League Central with 61 games left.
If the playoffs started today, the White Sox would own the No. 2 seed in the AL. They trail the Rays by five games for the top spot.
And for general manager Chris Getz, that creates a fascinating stretch ahead. This team was not expected to be here in 2026, but here it is anyway.
The division was supposed to be stronger, the league was supposed to be stronger, and neither has played out that way.
There’s still a developmental element to all of this because the roster is packed with young players. But there’s also a real opening here. A move or two before the Trade Deadline could change the ceiling in a hurry and turn this surprise into a legitimate World Series threat.
Inside the clubhouse, though, the message stays grounded. The players aren’t pretending not to know where they stand, but they’re not living in the standings either.
“Our focus is winning the division and then going from there,” Burke said. “Come out here and take care of business every single day. You look up and it’s, ‘Oh … We are tied for the best record in the AL’ or whatever it is.”
Vasil put it another way: “There’s a beauty to not realizing, in a way, with what we are doing and what we’ve done in the past, how special this year is,” he said. “At the same time, we are a very talented team. This is by no means a fluke … We are all not shocked we are doing what we are doing.”
The contrast with a year ago is stark. At the 2025 All-Star break, the White Sox were 32-65 and finished 60-102. Now they have a shot to go from 33 games under .500 on July 13, 2025, to a team with some level of meaningful home-field playoff advantage a little more than a year later.
Still, nobody in that room sounds interested in fast-forwarding.
“Long way to go. It’s still July,” Chase Meidroth said.
“Take care of business … It’s just day by day. Can’t control two months down the road.”
Montgomery echoed that same approach.
“Just keep our head down, do what we do each day,” he said. “Play hard, and if we get down, so what? We are going to trust the pitchers to keep us in the game and we are going to do whatever we can to drive the runs across.”
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Chris Getz has already signaled the front office is paying close attention to where this run is headed, and the next few days could tell the story of how aggressively the club wants to support it. The White Sox have enough in hand to justify standing pat, but they also have enough momentum to make the August 3 deadline feel like more than a routine checkpoint, especially with some underlying numbers still hinting at a tougher test ahead. [Read more 🡒]