White Sox chase AL Central title after three straight 100-loss seasons

CHICAGO — The Chicago White Sox enter the final week of the 2026 regular season one game behind the Cleveland Guardians in the American League Central, chasing a division title that no team has ever won the year after three consecutive 100-loss seasons. Chicago is 80-76, Cleveland 81-75, with six games remaining for each club, and the White Sox hold the tiebreaker after winning the season series between the two teams, 7-6.

The White Sox have already all but secured a return to the postseason for the first time since 2021. Their magic number to clinch at least an American League wild-card berth stands at four — some combination of Chicago wins and Houston Astros losses — and they carry a three-game cushion over the Toronto Blue Jays for the final wild-card spot. The bigger prize, a division title that would send them into October with a first-round bye, remains a coin flip with Cleveland.

The numbers behind the collapse, and the recovery

Three years ago, the idea of the White Sox playing meaningful baseball in the final week of September would have drawn laughter on the South Side. The franchise lost at least 100 games in three straight seasons:

• 61-101 in 2023
• 41-121 in 2024, the most losses by any team in the modern era, dating to 1900
• 60-102 in 2025

That stretch of futility, the worst in franchise history, has been followed by back-to-back double-digit win improvements. Chicago improved by 19 wins in 2025 and is on pace to add roughly 20 more this year, a jump chronicled in MLB.com's look back at the 121-loss 2024 season. Only twelve teams in major league history have lost 100 or more games in three consecutive seasons, and none of them won a division title the following year. The closest precedent is the 2017 Minnesota Twins, who reached the playoffs as a wild card the year after a 103-loss season but did not win their division.

Who is driving the turnaround

Manager Will Venable, hired before the 2025 season, has overseen both year-over-year jumps. His roster leans heavily on players who had never taken a significant major league at-bat before this year, including shortstop Colson Montgomery, who has hit 31 home runs, and Japanese import Munetaka Murakami, who has hit 32 in his first big league season after eight years with the Tokyo Yakult Swallows. Third baseman Miguel Vargas has added 31 home runs of his own, giving Chicago three players with 30-plus homers on a roster that entered the year projected by analytics models for roughly 67 wins and little chance of reaching October.

Venable has been careful not to frame the season as validation for the losing that preceded it. "Of course, no one wants to lose 100 games," he said recently, adding that he does not expect the subject to come up much within the clubhouse this week. Bench coach Walker McKinven, describing the mood inside the organization, put it more simply.

"This is a special year." — Walker McKinven, Chicago White Sox bench coach

Venable has pointed to changes off the field as much as on it. "What I am positive about is the progress of our research-and-development department, of our infrastructure, how we communicate things on both the pitching and the hitting side," he said this week, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. "The underlying structural things that the organization is doing are going to expedite us being really good."

Cleveland is not conceding anything

The Guardians, who reclaimed first place in the division earlier this month after trailing for stretches of the summer, have their own reasons for confidence. Cleveland's bullpen, anchored by closer Cade Smith, has been one of the American League's steadiest units down the stretch. "We've got momentum. We've got confidence in the way we're playing," Smith said. "There's this kind of calm focus." President of baseball operations Chris Antonetti, whose front office has guided the Guardians into playoff position in three of the past four seasons, described the stakes plainly. "This is why we play, to play meaningful games in September with a chance to get in October," Antonetti said, according to an MLB.com report on Cleveland's path to the division title.

Projections cited in that report give Cleveland roughly a 98 percent chance to reach the postseason in some form and better than a 60 percent chance to win the division outright, reflecting the Guardians' one-game edge but also the tiebreaker they must overcome. If both teams finish the week 3-3, Cleveland holds the division. If Chicago goes 5-1 while Cleveland goes 4-2, the two clubs would finish tied at 85-77, and the White Sox would claim the AL Central by virtue of the season-series tiebreaker.

The final week

Neither team closes the season against the other. According to MLB.com's preview of the week's key series, the White Sox opened a three-game set at Kansas City on Tuesday before returning home for a season-ending series against the Colorado Rockies at Rate Field. The Guardians play three games at Fenway Park against the Boston Red Sox, who remain in playoff position themselves, before closing the regular season at Kansas City as well. Chicago's offense has cooled at an inconvenient time, posting a .672 OPS in September that ranks 25th among the 30 major league teams, a slump the White Sox will need to reverse against two clubs, the Royals and the Rockies, both far out of playoff contention in their own divisions.

A White Sox postseason berth of any kind would be the franchise's first since 2021 and would arrive four seasons after the front-office reset that followed the 121-loss campaign. A division title would go further, making Chicago the answer to a question the sport had not seriously had to ask before this month: which team turned three consecutive 100-loss seasons into a division championship the very next year. Whether that question is answered will be settled in Kansas City and at Rate Field over the next six days, with Cleveland's results at Fenway Park and in Kansas City determining the other half of the equation. Ken Rosenthal, in a column earlier this month, called the season one of the best stories baseball has produced in years.