Two years ago the Chicago White Sox lost 121 games, the most in modern major league history. They are now 4-0 this postseason and one win from the American League Championship Series.
Chicago beat Cleveland 4-3 on Oct. 5 to take a 2-0 lead in the ALDS, after a 3-0 shutout in the opener. Game 3 is Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET at Rate Field.
The Record Nobody Saw Coming
Per OptaSTATS, the White Sox became the only team in the modern era to have their bullpen throw at least five innings, record at least five strikeouts and earn the win in four consecutive games.
Read that again. Not one reliever. The bullpen, collectively, five-plus innings and five-plus strikeouts, four straight postseason wins. That is a pitching staff built entirely around not having a rotation and winning anyway.
Game 2 was the template. Sean Newcomb opened for two innings. Sean Burke followed with five and a third, allowing one hit and one run with six strikeouts, retiring 13 straight at one stretch. Grant Taylor got the four-out save.
Cleveland Cannot Get a Hit When It Matters
The Guardians are 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position through two games. They have stranded 12 runners. Across 18 innings they have three runs on seven hits and eight walks, with four hits total in Game 2.
That is not bad luck at this point. That is an offense that has stopped functioning at the worst possible time.
Gavin Williams was excellent in the loss: five innings, four hits, two runs with one earned, three walks and 11 strikeouts on 98 pitches, one short of tying the franchise postseason record. Munetaka Murakami drove in a run in the fourth, Braden Montgomery doubled home two in the sixth to put Chicago ahead, and Jo Adell tripled in a run off Taylor in the eighth that was not enough.
How Chicago Got Here
The White Sox finished 84-78 as a wild card, second in the AL Central. They led the division by five and a half games on Aug. 16 and got passed by Cleveland, who won it at 85-77 and hosted the first two games.
Then Chicago swept Houston in the wild card series, its first playoff series win since 2005, the year it won the World Series. The White Sox went 2-5 against the Astros in the regular season.
Will Venable, hired after the 121-loss season, has his team playing a brand of baseball that nobody can solve with a scouting report: a different opener every night, a parade of arms, and enough offense to stay within one swing.
Cleveland Is Out of Road
“I am not going to sugarcoat it. We’ve backed ourselves into a corner,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. He followed with the only thing left to say: “We’re not going to sulk. We’re going to come ready to play on Wednesday.”
Cleveland has not won a pennant since 2016 and has not won a World Series since 1948. Chicago has not won a playoff series in 20 years until last week, and now has two.
The team that lost 121 games is three wins from a pennant. Baseball does this on purpose.
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.