Will Venable is now, officially and unambiguously, the answer to every “this rebuild will never work” argument the White Sox absorbed over three brutal seasons. On October 22, the Sporting News named him American League Manager of the Year, and the timing works in his favor: the vote landed after a five-game ALDS exit to Cleveland, which means his peers graded the whole season, not just whichever week looked best.
That timing matters. Three years ago this team lost 121 games; this year it won 84 and played into October, and the award rewards that full three-season climb, built and sustained long before the season’s final month.
What Makes This Award Actually Historic
Arithmetic carries the case for Venable here. Per MLB.com’s recap of the award, he’s the third manager since 1901 to oversee back-to-back 19-plus-win improvements. Miller Huggins and John McGraw are the only other two names on that list — Huggins pushed the 1925-27 Yankees from 69 wins to 91 to 110, and McGraw did it with the 1902-04 Giants, 48 to 84 to 106. Both are Hall of Famers who built dynasties off exactly that improvement curve.
Venable’s version reads 41 wins in 2024, 60 in 2025, 84 in 2026. Nineteen games better, then 24 games better. Three straight 100-loss seasons behind him, an 84-win playoff team in front of him, and a resume that now sits next to two names Cooperstown already approved.
Why the “Fire Everyone” Crowd Lost the Argument
2024 still lingers in Grabsomebench’s mailbag, where half the letters that year wanted the front office gutted. A 121-loss season like that one was a franchise-wide identity crisis — the kind of year a team plays like it owes the league money. Doubters weren’t being unreasonable. Nobody outside the organization had the information Venable and Chris Getz were working with.
Here’s the team’s own account of the climb, and it lays out how little of this was luck:
BREAKING: Will Venable has been named AL Manager of the Year by Sporting News.
Will lead the Sox to an 84-78 record, a playoff berth, a Wild Card series win, and a trip to the ALDS.
Well deserved for the White Sox 2nd year skipper! pic.twitter.com/ruEntdSPgz
— Just Another Year: White Sox (@JAYChi_WhiteSox) October 22, 2026
In a post on X, David Axelrod (not exactly a baseball insider by profession) put it almost as well as the Sporting News voters: Venable took “a bunch of untested kids” and turned around what had been the losingest operation in the sport. One win separated Venable’s club from an AL championship series berth. Call the 84-win season the headline — the ALDS loss to Cleveland is just the footnote. Losing a five-game series to a good Guardians team doesn’t erase a 43-win swing over two years.
Vargas, Crochet, and the Plan That Actually Worked
None of this happens without the front office’s return on trading Garrett Crochet to Boston, and Miguel Vargas is the proof. His 2026 season says the rest: 33 home runs, an .837 OPS, numbers nobody inside the organization was promising in 2024 when the deal closed. Pair that with a genuine youth movement and Venable’s ability to make all of it play together, and the full accounting of how Chicago got here reads less like a lucky bounce and more like a plan executed on schedule.
Getz already flagged the rotation as next year’s project. That’s fine. Offensively, this build is done arguing with itself, and as of October 22, the manager’s seat is too.
