The White Sox are 24-23. They lead baseball in OPS, home runs, RBI, OBP, and slugging over the last 30 days. Munetaka Murakami has 17 home runs and leads the entire American League.
FanGraphs still projects them to finish last in the AL Central.
That’s not a scouting take. That’s just someone refusing to update their priors.
The rebuild framing made sense. Three straight 100-loss seasons will do that. ESPN had them 28th in their preseason power rankings. Nobody was picking the South Side to be a problem in May. But at some point, the evidence piles up and you either adjust or you look foolish. National media is currently choosing to look foolish.
Murakami’s 17 home runs through roughly 46 games put him third-most in MLB history through that point, and he’s doing it on a 2-year, $34 million deal — a contract ESPN projected would cost $80M over five years. The White Sox got him for less than half of market value and he’s leading the AL in home runs. That’s the kind of transaction that wins GMs awards.
And it’s not just Murakami. Colson Montgomery has 13 home runs. Miguel Vargas has 11. All three are under 27. According to MLB researcher Sarah Langs, Murakami, Montgomery, and Vargas homered in the same game four times in the first 45 games — the most by any teammate trio through 45 games since at least 1900. That’s not a hot streak. That’s a core.
The counterargument people keep reaching for is run differential. The Sox are at minus-7, and they’re 9-5 in one-run games, which means the pythagorean gods have opinions. Fine. Valid. A minus-7 differential at 24-23 means some regression is probably coming. But that’s true of every team playing above their head in May, and it doesn’t erase what Davis Martin has been doing. The guy is 6-1 with a 1.61 ERA and 52 strikeouts over 50 innings. Third in baseball in ERA. His strikeout rate jumped from 17.3% to 27.4% and nobody outside Chicago is talking about it.
The White Sox started this season hitting .192 with a .567 OPS through 15 games. They haven’t dipped below .700 OPS since game 25. That’s not a fluke — that’s a team that figured something out and kept building on it. Two games out of first in the AL Central, trailing only Cleveland.
You don’t have to pick them to win the World Series. But calling this team a rebuild at 24-23 with the hottest offense in baseball is just lazy. The label expired. They outgrew it.
Murakami alone made the “wait till next year” crowd look like they were watching a different sport.
