The White Sox opened their first series against the Tigers this season on Friday and did it from a very different place in the standings. Chicago came in at 29-27, three games behind the Cleveland Guardians, while Detroit arrived at Rate Field at 22-35, 10.5 games out of first place and trying to stop a slide that had already swallowed seven straight series.
That gap is why Colson Montgomery matters now. The former first-round pick has built on the slugging promise he showed late in 2025, giving Chicago another bat to hang its recent push on as the White Sox try to keep climbing in a division that has been turned upside down. They had not finished first and second with the Tigers in the division since 2012, and this was their first meeting of the year, a three-game set that carried from Friday through Sunday.
Chicago’s timing was right. The White Sox were 15-10 in May and had secured their first winning month since May 2023, a stretch that has helped pull a club two years removed from a modern-day major-league record for losses into the edge of contention. Will Venable said the club’s floor has been raised and that the expectation for what it looks like every day should be higher than it was last year, adding that two months of playing.500 baseball or better is a good sign that the team is headed the right way.
Detroit’s problem is larger than one bad weekend. The Tigers came in with the bigger payroll, back-to-back postseason appearances behind them and a franchise-record spend on player salaries, yet they were still carrying the league’s kind of record that forces hard questions. They had gone 6-19 in May, lost seven series in a row and dropped seven series this season to teams under.500, including three against clubs that were then in last place. Even a series loss to the Royals, who were only a half-game ahead of them in the AL Central, had left them looking up at the teams they were supposed to be chasing.
That is the friction in this matchup: Chicago is arriving with momentum and a younger, better month, while Detroit is still searching for offense and stability. AJ Hinch said after a 7-1 loss to the Angels on Wednesday that the numbers, the record and the production did not look pretty, and the Tigers did not solve the problem this winter. If Montgomery keeps driving the ball and the White Sox keep playing above.500, this series will be remembered less as a meeting of equals than as the point when the division’s direction became impossible to ignore.
