A common trope that baseball fans make fun of is the granular trivia stat qualifier. You know the gag: “He is the first switch hitter to hit a home run during a harvest moon while the wind blows north to northeast.”
At first, that was the tone and tenor surrounding the Second Half White Sox (capitalization done to denote respect.) Remember when they opened the second half against the free-falling Pirates, and they scored 27 runs in three games? After those three games, the White Sox were leading the league in a plethora of offensive categories “since the All-Star Break.”
Of course, nobody was taking the Second Half White Sox seriously at that point. It did not seem sustainable that a club that had ended the first half with a record of 32-65 could depend on Mike Tauchman to continue blasting balls into the Allegheny River and pimping them like Ken Griffey Jr.
At the beginning, I thought the Second Half White Sox were a byproduct of their collective mediocrity. The club did not send a single hitter to All-Star Weekend (how foolish that seems now!) Instead, they got to rest. And perhaps they took some extra time to prep for a Pirates team that they believed they could jump on. Maybe they took a few extra cuts in the batting cages while everybody else was down in Atlanta, trying to gaslight the world into believing that the new Home Run Derby rules don’t suck ass.
We’re no longer in a small sample size fairyland. The second half has been 45 games long as of September 8 —over a fourth of the full season. And the Second Half White Sox still bang.
Let’s start with home runs. Unfortunately for my hatin’ ass, the Yankees have begun to figure themselves out and are not leading the league in home runs by a huge margin, with 92. Behind the Yankees is a tier of teams all within four home runs of one another, and then another steep drop-off.
The offensive numbers for the Second Half White Sox have stayed near the top of the league across the board. They are:
- Fifth in runs scored (250)
- Sixth in total bases (729)
- Seventh in slugging (.443)
You can quibble with their team base on balls, which has drifted down to 23rd, but their strikeout rate is also Top 5 since the break (20.2%), so it not a case of reckless swinging and good batted-ball luck. The Second Half White Sox are jumping on all of the pitches that the patient but anemic first half White Sox generated for them. Pitchers are coming into the zone and getting punished.
Do you still doubt the great and powerful SHWS? Do you think it might just be one of two guys putting everybody else on their back? Sacrilege!
The SHWS currently have 12 hitters with 50 or more plate appearances:
Kyle Teel and Colson Montgomery are the tip of the spear, slashing a combined .266/.333/.549. Two others, Miguel Vargas and Luis Robert Jr., are on the injured list. But they’ve also continued getting good second half production from Edgar Quero (.311/.351/.467), Chase Meidroth (.311/.368/.426), Andrew Benintendi (.269/.335/.442), and Lenyn Sosa (.256/.305/.465). The only “soft” spots in the Sox lineup right now are Curtis Mead, who hasn’t had any pop but is still batting .274, and Michael A. Taylor, who still managed to win a game for the club last week.
As the Second Half White Sox transition into a spoiler role for the stretch run, the most important number for the club has been their record — a salt-of-the-earth 23-24. I wonder if the world outside of Chicago will begin to look past the shabby, dented exterior from the hard miles the Sox put on the 2025 season back in April, and start to notice that there’s an engine under the hood beginning to whirr like a V8. Nothing helps with that better than playing spoiler and bashing the ball.
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