The Chicago White Sox beat the Cleveland Guardians 4-3 Monday to take a 2-0 lead in the American League Division Series, and the specific detail that makes this absurd goes back two years: 121 losses, the modern-era record for futility in Major League Baseball.
I pulled up the bracket on my phone twice before I believed it, because the last time the White Sox played for a trip to the ALCS, the iPhone didn’t exist yet and I was still in elementary school.
That was 2005. Chicago beat the Angels in that series and went on to win the World Series. Twenty-one years and three straight 100-loss seasons later, this team has gone four games into October without losing one.
Every one of those four wins has come on the road. Chicago swept the Houston Astros in the wild card round, then flew to Cleveland and took both games of this series in the Guardians’ own ballpark — no soft bracket, no home crowd to carry them, just four road wins against two different opponents in two different cities.
Sean Burke is a specific reason why. The right-hander threw 5 1/3 innings of relief Monday, allowed one hit and one walk, struck out six, and at one stretch retired 13 straight Guardians. Yahoo Sports’ live coverage had Cleveland starter Gavin Williams striking out 11 of his own before getting pulled at 98 pitches in the sixth. Williams had the better strikeout line; Burke had the innings that decided the series lead.
Braden Montgomery supplied the offense that mattered. His two-out, two-run double in the sixth put Chicago ahead 3-2, Chase Meidroth followed with an RBI single for insurance, and Cleveland’s Jo Adell cut the margin to one with an eighth-inning triple before the box score locked in at 4-3. Nobody outside Chicago noticed.
Put those two performances next to each other and the pattern across all four wins gets clearer: pitching that holds up away from its own ballpark, and hitting that shows up in the specific innings that decide games, not just the box score totals. A team can fake either one of those for a week. Doing both, on the road, in a different city against a different opponent each round, is what separates a hot streak from a roster that’s actually built for this.
The Yankees are down 0-2 to the Rays. The Dodgers are tied 1-1 with the Braves. Those two series are eating the sport’s attention this week, while the best worst-to-best-case arc in this postseason plays out in near silence. Burke put it simply after the win:
https://twitter.com/MLBNetwork/status/2107270969387622698
He sounds like someone who already knew what he’d done. Almost nobody else did.
That’s the sport’s loss, not Chicago’s.
