Four in a row.
Four games account for just a little more than two percent of a 162-game Major League Baseball schedule, a number that ought to illustrate just how pointless it is to attempt to glean season-long declarations out of the White Sox current winning streak.
But it’s a winning streak, nonetheless, and those have been few and far between during the first two years of this franchise’s rebuilding project. The South Side saw a combined 195 losses during the 2017 and 2018 seasons. The current four-game streak is the first at Guaranteed Rate Field since August 2017. So some giddiness over four consecutive victories can certainly be excused.
The question is: Is it warranted?
Just how realistic is an unexpected surge from these White Sox, an overtaking of the Cleveland Indians for the second-place status in the AL Central and a potential lingering presence in a top-heavy and uncrowded American League playoff race?
Obviously, the White Sox aren’t there yet, still under .500 even after defeating those Indians in the first of a four-game weekend set Thursday night. But a win Friday would even the division rivals’ records. As the Minnesota Twins proved with three straight poundings of the White Sox last weekend in the Twin Cities, there’s an awful lot of daylight between the Central leaders and everyone else in the division. But such is not the case in the AL wild-card race, where the White Sox, at 27-29, are just two games out of the second wild card.
It’s still May, obviously, so don’t start scoreboard-watching just yet. But this is a team that came in with almost no expectations, from outside the clubhouse, anyway, of crashing the postseason. And while their sub-.500 record and minus-47 run differential shouldn’t force anyone to go canceling their October plans, there are plenty of positives on this team that, when the competition is the kind they’ll get from 60 percent of this division this season, can result in wins like Thursday’s.
MLB
The White Sox got to Carlos Carrasco, finally, after he had thrown a combined 12.1 shutout innings in his first two starts of the season against them. Thursday, they tagged him for six runs on 10 hits, part of a bigger 10-run, 15-hit night for the offense. Five White Sox hitters had multi-hit nights, Leury Garcia got his batting average back up over .300, Yonder Alonso put together one of the performances the White Sox expected when they traded for him in December, Eloy Jimenez had three hits, and Jose Abreu added his 15th homer and upped his RBI tally to 49. He leads the AL in the latter category.
All good things, enough of them to inspire confidence, too, that while a playoff push might not be in the offing, at least a nice streak like this is no fluke.
"I think that the youth, the new blood, the new kids have meshed with the old guys, with the veterans. We have a good atmosphere here,” Abreu said through team interpreter Billy Russo. “We go out every day, try to win games, try to do our best, try to fight, and at the same time try to have fun. We have been working with Ricky (Renteria) and the coaches, trying to improve, trying to do the little things to win games, to be consistent with what we know that we can do.
“I think we're going in the right direction. We're working hard, and I think we're going to be good."
That’s the plan, of course, even if it doesn’t happen this season. White Sox fans asked to be patient during this rebuilding process likely won’t notice the corner being turned. That’s likely to be a gradual occurrence rather than one that comes with fanfare.
But that end goal looks a lot more achievable when Moncada and Jimenez keep having big nights, when Abreu — who sure seems to be in the White Sox plans past 2019 — continues to show he can be one of the game’s top producers, when Tim Anderson still leads the AL in batting average and Lucas Giolito might be on his way to AL Pitcher of the Month honors.
All of those things are reasons to feel giddy, much more so than a sweep of a woeful Royals team and a four-game winning streak in late May.
Of course, there are plenty of reminders that the White Sox are still in a rebuild. The starting pitching outside of Giolito has yet to reach reliability. Dylan Cease and Luis Robert are tearing it up in the minor leagues rather than on the South Side. Michael Kopech, Dane Dunning and Carlos Rodon are all recovering from Tommy John surgery.
And with a seven-run lead heading into the ninth inning Thursday, there was unwelcome drama, Jace Fry allowing a pair of base runners before an Anderson throwing error brought one of those runs home. Renteria made a pitching change with the bases loaded, and closer Alex Colome even stirred despite a six-run lead on the scoreboard.
But those things that defined the 2018 season are not the dominant traits of the 2019 edition of these White Sox to this point. The win-loss totals on the final day of May are dramatically different: 16-37 at this point last year, as opposed to two games below .500 right now.
But Rick Hahn has been talking since January about how the win-loss total will be less important than how the White Sox get to it by season’s end. And how they’ve gotten here has been promising for this future-facing franchise. It’s been thanks to Anderson and Moncada and Giolito and Abreu -- guys who are expected to be key contributors to the next contending group of White Sox.
That next contending team might not be this one. But the bright spots have been bright enough to make it feel like that team might not be too far away. So go ahead and get giddy over this four-game winning streak. It might just be a sign of things to come.
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