Two Years After 121 Losses, the White Sox Lead the AL Central in August
Chicago closed the weekend by hammering the AL East-leading Rays 9-1 and holds a three-game cushion over Cleveland — with the hardest remaining schedule in the division still to come.
August has arrived, and the standings still say it: the Chicago White Sox — losers of a record 121 games in 2024 and 102 more last year — sit in first place in the AL Central. Chicago is 59-52 atop the division, three games clear of the Cleveland Guardians (57-56), per the live Torch standings.
They are not sneaking through the back door, either. On Sunday the White Sox closed out their series in St. Petersburg by beating the Tampa Bay Rays — owners of the AL East lead at 65-46 — by a 9-1 score, per the Torch scoreboard. Cleveland kept pace with a 5-0 shutout of Arizona, and the Twins (56-57) linger within four games, so nothing is settled. But a franchise that was a punchline eighteen months ago is now the team everyone in the division is chasing.
How they got here
The turnaround has been building all season. As CBS Sports noted when Chicago first seized the division lead in June, it was the club's first time in first place that deep into a season since the 2021 division-winning year, powered by breakout pitching — Davis Martin was 9-2 with a 2.41 ERA at the time — and early contributions from rookies like Braden Montgomery, who homered to walk off his major league debut.
The catch: the schedule
Here is the asterisk worth watching. According to Yahoo Sports, the White Sox came out of the All-Star break facing the 17th-hardest remaining schedule in baseball — the toughest in the AL Central — while the Guardians drew the easiest slate in the majors and the Tigers the second-easiest. Sunday's demolition of Tampa Bay suggests Chicago can handle the heavyweight portion of that draw.
The fallback matters too. The Yankees (63-49) and Red Sox (60-51) currently hold two AL wild-card spots, with Cleveland, Minnesota, Texas and Seattle bunched within about two games of the third — so the AL Central race may effectively be a fight for the division or nothing.