White Sox, Two Years Removed From MLB-Record Futility, One Win From the Playoffs
Chicago pounded out 14 runs and four home runs in a wild win over Kansas City, trimming its magic number to three as it chases a postseason berth no team has reached after back-to-back 100-loss seasons.
The Chicago White Sox are one victory away from finishing the most improbable turnaround in recent baseball memory. Chase Meidroth drove in five runs, Randal Grichuk fell a triple short of the cycle, and Chicago outlasted the Kansas City Royals 14-11 in a slugfest at Kauffman Stadium on Tuesday night, trimming the club's magic number for a playoff berth to three with five games left in the regular season.
Meidroth had three hits including a three-run homer in the third inning. Grichuk went 4-for-5 with a three-run blast of his own and two doubles. Brenton Doyle added a solo shot, and Munetaka Murakami's two-run homer sparked a five-run seventh-inning rally that put the game away. Kansas City didn't go quietly — Vinnie Pasquantino finished a triple short of the cycle with a ninth-inning grand slam among his five RBIs, and Bobby Witt Jr. went 3-for-4 — but the Royals fell to 67-90 and have now lost five straight. Chicago improved to 81-76, sitting in the third American League wild-card spot and a single game behind Cleveland in the AL Central, a division race it currently controls on the tiebreaker.
From 121 losses to the brink of October
What makes the run remarkable is where it started. The White Sox lost an MLB-record 121 games in 2024, then lost 102 more in 2025 — back-to-back 100-loss seasons. No team in major league history has ever reached the postseason the year after two straight 100-loss campaigns. FanGraphs' preseason model projected Chicago to finish 67-95 this year with less than a 1 percent chance of winning its division, according to reporting from The Athletic's Ken Rosenthal, who has been tracking the club's unlikely climb all season.
"One of the best stories in years," Rosenthal wrote of the White Sox's 2026 turnaround.
The rebuild has been powered by a wave of young, cheap production: Murakami, Colson Montgomery and Miguel Vargas have each hit 30-plus home runs, while a retooled bullpen and a lineup willing to grind out at-bats have turned last season's laughingstock into a legitimate October contender on the South Side.
Chicago now has a real chance to clinch as early as this week. The club's clinching math tightens with every game, and Chicago holds the tiebreaker over Toronto in the wild-card chase, meaning a combination of Sox wins and losses by the teams chasing them could end the suspense within days. The White Sox wrap their series in Kansas City on Wednesday before returning to Rate Field to close the regular season at home against the Colorado Rockies.
For a fan base that has watched the organization gut itself down to the studs over the past two winters, a playoff berth — division title or wild card — would cap one of the sport's sharpest single-season reversals. The full box score from Tuesday's win shows a team that no longer resembles the one that lost 223 games combined over the last two years. Whether it ends in a division title over Cleveland or a wild-card berth, Chicago is on the verge of writing itself into the record books for something other than losing.
A rival newsroom's own game-by-game tracker of the South Side's rebuild, filed the day before Tuesday's win, offers a longer look at how Chicago got here: a separate account of the White Sox chase for the AL Central title.