Welcome back to the AL Central, White Sox.
It’s the land of opportunity, for baseball’s Midwestern wannabes, where struggling teams know they have little to no shot, tally their games below .500 with faint hope of playing meaningful games in September and where rebuilds come to crashing halts.
It’s the neighborhood of the small spenders who look to the AL East and see all five teams above .500 with an accumulative payroll of $812 million, $167 million more than AL Central teams. The AL East can’t do anything wrong, even those that don’t spend. Its top two teams, the Rays and Orioles, have the division’s two lowest payrolls.
The AL Central has one team with a winning record, the Twins at 23-19.
The Sox, the highest paid team in the Central, entered their game against the Guardians Tuesday at Guaranteed Rate Field with a surprisingly awful 14-28 record, needing a three-game sweep of the second-place and defending champions to get within three games of them. They positioned themselves for a win Tuesday, erupting for six runs in the fifth inning after two outs against Shane Bieber while Lance Lynn was rolling with one of his best starts of the season.
Gavin Sheets’ three-run homer and Jake Burger’s two-run homer to the opposite field highlighted the Sox fifth that began with Luis Robert reaching on Mike Zunino’s catcher’s interference reach-in.
Lynn, who entered with a 7.51 ERA, retired the first 10 batters he faced and allowed one run in the first seven innings. The Sox led 7-1 after seven.
The Sox trailed the first-place Twins by nine games, and with the next 13 games and 16 of the next 19 against the division, they must carve a chunk out of that deficit. A nastier June schedule awaits.
“We’ve just got to dig,” manager Pedro Grifol said before the game Tuesday. “We’ve got to dig down deep and we’ve got to will ourselves to become that team that we know we can be. That might take making up one game a week, it might take 6-7 games in two weeks. I’m not sure, but we’ve got to do the work, we’ve got to prepare and we’ve got to play hard baseball, play to win every single night.”
And win more than every other night.
In any other division, the Sox might’ve been buried. But that games-behind column that was still in single digits with three-quarters of the season left gives them cause to hold off on giving up, at least for now.
The trick is keeping the players on board when things look bleak. PECOTA, after all, gives them a 1.9 percent chance of making the playoffs.
Are the Sox still locked in? Grifol needs that from his players, in pregame work and for nine innings.
“You see it all day long,” he said. “When guys are locked in, you see their work in the cage, you see their work on the field. It’s just a different level of focus, a different look on their face. It’s not always visible but most of the time you can tell when guys are locked in or when guys are maybe struggling a little mentally or confidence-wise.”
And what does Grifol see?
“Our guys prepare for a game really well,” he said. “They work hard. I don’t have an issue with the intensity and the preparation that we’re bringing on a day-to-day basis. We just have to do a better job when things come up, you know, that are not fundamentally sound. Of just cleaning them up quicker.”
A 1-3 series against the Royals of the AL Central last week was the season’s low point, dropping the Sox to 4-6 against the division. They were 37-39 against the Central during the disappointing 81-81 campaign of a year ago.
There’s no time like the present to turn that around. It’s now, or never.
Or else.
