Thirty-two and twenty-nine. Second in the AL Central. Three weeks above .500 and climbing without their best hitter.
Go ahead and check the standings yourself. We’ll wait.
They crossed .500 on May 15 and haven’t dipped back below since. That hasn’t happened this deep into a season since 2023, back when this organization still had a functional roster and actual expectations. The rebuild — the long, ugly, historically bad rebuild — produced something real. Baseball just hasn’t caught up yet.
The part that makes this legitimately dangerous: Munetaka Murakami hasn’t played in over a week. Grade 2 hamstring strain, 10-day IL, projected out 4-6 weeks. The guy hitting .242/.381/.566 with 20 home runs is watching from the training room. And the White Sox are still in second place.
That’s not luck. That’s depth.
Colson Montgomery is leading ALL MLB shortstops with 15 home runs. Read that back — wait, no, banned phrase — just sit with it. A shortstop from the White Sox is the best power-hitting shortstop in baseball right now. Miguel Vargas has 15 HR and an .837 OPS — quietly one of the best-hitting third basemen in baseball right now. The middle of this lineup is younger and more dangerous than anyone projected, and the projections had Chicago finishing second-worst in the American League.
Sixty-four wins. That’s what Vegas thought. That’s where the house had its money.
SIXTY-FOUR WINS.
Davis Martin is out here with a 2.04 ERA making Cy Young noise. Grant Taylor in the bullpen has been nearly untouchable. The team ERA sits at 4.32 — not lights-out, but more than enough when Montgomery and Vargas are dropping bombs every third night. This is a complete team doing it with the third or fourth option at every position while the guy they actually built around gets his hamstring fixed.
The unpredictable part of this story isn’t Murakami coming back in July like a trade-deadline acquisition they already made internally. You genuinely cannot identify the one player this team relies on. Cleveland at 34-25 is a real opponent, the Guardians are good, but Chicago is three games back and climbing.
Three games back.
WE ARE THREE GAMES OUT OF FIRST IN JUNE.
That sentence needed caps. This whole season needed caps. Three years of 100-loss baseball and now we’re having a different conversation entirely. The rebuild worked. The kids are real. And when Murakami gets healthy, whoever Cleveland’s been running out there is going to have a very bad August.
Baseball hasn’t figured the White Sox out yet. By the time it does, it won’t matter.
