White Sox Sweep Astros, End 21-Year Wait for a Playoff Series Win

The Chicago White Sox swept the Houston Astros out of the American League Wild Card Series on Wednesday night, winning Game 2 by a score of 7-3 at Daikin Park to claim the franchise's first postseason series victory since the 2005 World Series. The win sends Chicago, an 84-78 team that needed a late-season surge just to reach the postseason, into the AL Division Series against the division-rival Cleveland Guardians.

Chase Meidroth supplied the decisive blow, a three-run home run off reliever Bryan Abreu in the top of the sixth inning that turned a one-run game into a four-run cushion. The White Sox had built an early advantage by batting through their entire order in the first inning, then held on as Houston's middle-of-the-order hitters answered with three solo home runs of their own.

The Numbers

Chicago scored four runs in the first inning of Game 2 on four consecutive singles from Sam Antonacci, Kyle Teel, Andrew Benintendi and Tristan Peters, chasing Astros starter Hunter Brown after two-thirds of an inning. Houston clawed back with solo homers from Jeremy Peña, Cam Smith and Jose Altuve — the 28th postseason homer of Altuve's career — to cut the deficit to one run before Meidroth's drive off Abreu in the sixth settled the outcome. Sean Burke started for Chicago and struck out eight over four innings, and Anthony Kay and Erick Fedde combined to close it out without allowing another run.

The series opener a night earlier had gone almost as lopsided: the White Sox won Game 1, 6-3, behind a Colson Montgomery home run and 3 1/3 scoreless innings of relief from Grant Taylor and Jordan Hicks. Across the two games, Chicago outscored Houston 13-6 and never trailed for more than a handful of innings. The sweep also extended an unwanted streak for the Astros, who have now lost nine consecutive home postseason games dating to Game 2 of the 2023 American League Division Series, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Two Decades in the Making

The White Sox have not been shy about the length of their drought. Chicago clinched a postseason berth on September 24 for the first time since 2021 and just the third trip in seven seasons, after several years of losing that bottomed out with one of the worst records in modern major league history in 2024. The turnaround this year was built around a core of homegrown position players — Meidroth, Montgomery and Teel among them — paired with a pitching staff that general manager Chris Getz had reshaped through trades and development rather than high-priced free agency.

Houston, by contrast, arrived in the wild card round as an unusually vulnerable division champion. The Astros finished the regular season at 81-81, the lowest winning percentage ever posted by a division winner, and only clinched the AL West title on the final weekend after the Texas Rangers lost to Minnesota. That record made them the third team in MLB history to reach the playoffs without a winning record, a fact that drew criticism of the expanded postseason format even before the White Sox arrived in Houston. The matchup carried its own history: the two clubs had met in the postseason twice before, with Chicago sweeping Houston in the 2005 World Series — when the Astros were still a National League team — and Houston winning the rematch in the 2021 AL Division Series.

Reaction

Manager Will Venable credited the way his roster, largely assembled from within the organization's farm system, handled the moment. "We were able to do that with two games that I thought were emblematic of how we've won all season," Venable said, in comments relayed by MLB.com. Getz, who has overseen Chicago's rebuild since 2023, was more pointed about the group's temperament in a pressure series on the road.

"These players are scared of nothing," Getz said.

Meidroth, who entered the sixth inning having already contributed an infield single and a run scored, downplayed the mechanics behind his go-ahead homer. "When I'm locked in on the field, I don't know what goes through my mind," he said. Reliever Anthony Kay, who got the win after retiring the only two batters he faced, pointed to the group's selflessness: "You saw how it was this series. Everyone didn't worry about themselves, just played as a team." Fedde, who threw two scoreless innings to close out the clincher, said he had not expected to be the pitcher trusted with the final outs. "Hard to imagine myself in that situation, honestly, but I'm so glad they chose me," he said.

In Houston, the result extends a difficult stretch for a roster that won the American League West for the eighth time in ten years but never found consistent footing in October. Manager Joe Espada's club will now spend the offseason answering questions about the back of its bullpen, which allowed home runs in three of the final four innings of Game 2 before Abreu surrendered the deciding blow to Meidroth.

What's Next

The White Sox move on to face Cleveland, which won the AL Central by a single game over Chicago during the regular season despite the White Sox taking the season series 7-6. The Guardians earned a first-round bye as a division winner with a top-two seed and will host Game 1 of the Division Series on Saturday at 1 p.m. ET. Chicago has not reached the Division Series since 2021, when it lost to Houston in that round. For a franchise that spent much of the past four years near the bottom of the American League, advancing even one round further would mark unfamiliar territory — and the clubhouse, Getz suggested, is not treating the moment as an endpoint.