The Chicago White Sox walked into Houston as the last team in the American League bracket and walked out having ended the Astros’ season in two games. Chicago won 6-3 on Tuesday and 7-3 on Wednesday to sweep the Wild Card Series as the No. 6 seed.
It is the franchise’s first playoff series win since 2005. That year ended with a World Series title and a parade. Everything in between has been 21 years of waiting.
Twenty-One Years Is a Long Time
Put the drought in context. The last time the White Sox won a postseason series, the roster featured Paul Konerko and Mark Buehrle, and that team swept the Astros in the World Series. Houston has been to the Fall Classic repeatedly since. Chicago had not won so much as a round.
The franchise bottomed out historically in recent seasons. Getting back to October at all was the achievement. Beating the third seed on the road, twice, in 48 hours was not part of anybody’s projection.
Houston Has Questions Now
The Astros earned the No. 3 seed and home field and never led the series. Losing a best-of-three at home to a six seed is the kind of exit that follows an organization into the winter, especially one that has spent most of the last decade treating the ALCS as a formality.
Two games is a small sample and anyone claiming it reveals deep truths about Houston is reaching. It still counts the same in the standings as a seven-game collapse.
The Reward Is Cleveland
Chicago now gets a Division Series against the No. 2 Guardians, with Game 1 on Saturday at 1 p.m. Eastern on TBS, truTV, UniMas and HBO Max. Cleveland holds home field after finishing 85-77 and winning its division by a single game.
That is a winnable series, which is a strange thing to type about a six seed. The Guardians were not a juggernaut. They won 85 games and backed into the division by a hair, and they have not played a postseason game yet while Chicago just spent two days getting comfortable in a hostile park.
The format helps too. Best-of-five with the higher seed hosting Games 1, 2 and 5 means the White Sox need one win in Cleveland to flip the math entirely.
Why This One Should Be Taken Seriously
There is a lazy way to write about a low seed advancing, which is to call it a fluke and move on. The better read is that the gap between the No. 3 seed and the No. 6 seed in a 162-game season is often a few games in April, and the gap in a best-of-three is close to nothing.
Chicago pitched well enough to hold a good offense to three runs in consecutive games on the road. Do that twice more and the White Sox are in an ALCS nobody on the South Side would have believed in March.
The rest of the American League bracket has the top-seeded Rays hosting the Yankees, which means the loudest series in the sport will absorb all the attention this weekend. Fine. Chicago has been ignored for 21 years and just turned it into an advantage.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.