The White Sox moved two games above.500 on Thursday with a 6-2 win over the Minnesota Twins, a small sentence with a big charge attached to it in Chicago. If the season had ended that night, they would have been a wild-card team.
For Chris Getz, the moment fit a turn he has been trying to build since he became general manager in October of 2023. He said the club had been playing with a different edge lately, with a winning mindset taking hold in a way that would have sounded unlikely during the 41-win 2024 season.
That is the point. The White Sox were at the bottom of the American League only the season before, after setting a modern-day record for losses, and they had spent more than two weeks without dipping below.500. The progress has not arrived by accident. Getz told owner Jerry Reinsdorf that updating the inner workings of the organization would be a priority, and some of those changes started showing up when Colson Montgomery and Kyle Teel came up from the minors and made immediate impact.
The shift has not been limited to the standings. Late last season, Getz said fans at one of his Q&A events did something he did not expect: many of them clapped, and he nearly got an ovation. He had said those kinds of appearances were not exactly something he was sprinting to, which made the reception feel even more jarring. “So many people were clapping,” he said. “Like, I almost got this ovation. It was welcoming. It was warm. And I was completely shocked. That was kind of the first sign of, oh wait, people are starting to notice.”
The improvement has also shown up on the field in stretches that look less like a lucky bounce and more like a club starting to believe its own results. The White Sox swept a series in Pittsburgh, took two of three against the Phillies and put together a six-game winning streak in early September, all while moving away from the stripped-down rebuild that had defined so much of the recent past. Getz said of the atmosphere around the team, “There were just valves that were turned off.”
Now the question is whether that pressure stays on. Chicago has been competitive after years near the bottom of the American League, and it has gone from surviving another lost season to sitting in a playoff race that would have seemed remote a year ago. That makes the next few weeks less about symbolism and more about whether the White Sox can hold onto the thing they have spent two hard years trying to create.
