The White Sox Lean Into The “Windy” In “Windy City”

The Chicago White Sox had been given oodles of credit for overcoming the three worst years in their history (throwing the 1919 World Series aside). And when they plowed remorselessly and successfully through their first four postseason games this fall, you could sense that magic was being conjured in the least explicable way. They'd been kissed on the forehead by the same gods that had pummeled them repeatedly. They were going to be a team of destiny, whether or not they liked or understood it. But these White Sox are made of sterner stuff than that, and the thing that made them charming—their return from bulk failure to national quasi-relevance—was turned on its head Saturday in spectacular style. They had, in short, boiled down their 2023, 2024, and 2025 seasons into one evening's work, an homage to their own abjectness condensed into two hours and 36 minutes. Last night was just a montage of them getting their steps in, almost all of it walking to and from their own dugout. There's no point in being clever about this either. In the game that they needed to win to advance to the American League Championship Series and make all their suffering worthwhile, they struck out 21 times. Twenty-one. In nine innings. They were allotted 27 outs and did the least they could possibly do with those outs nearly 78 percent of the time. Nobody has ever done that before in a nine-inning game in the 156-year history of the game as counted by those psychos at Baseball Reference—regular season or playoffs. In the game that could have made them the most improbable underdog in the history of dogs, they went out like, well, dogs.

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