What if Nobody Got To Play the White Sox?

Despite notching two wins over their last six games, the White Sox are flirting with history, and not the good kind. As of this morning, Chicago stands 63 games below .500, 42.5 games back in the AL Central, and on pace to finish 39-123. Out of compassion, I will refrain from reciting the record of the 1962 Mets, but the players from that team who are still with us are likely taking this time to get the champagne good and chilled. Hard as it may be to believe, the goal of this article is not to dunk on the White Sox. Instead, as we enter the home stretch of the season, I’d like to consider how they’ve affected the playoff picture.

The White Sox have played 25 of the other 29 teams in the league, and they have distributed to those fortunate franchises a net total of 63 victories in the same way that an elderly man on a park bench distributes bread to the legion of ravenous pigeons jockeying for position at his feet: indiscriminately. For a few weeks now, I’ve been wondering whether the landscape would look different if those 25 teams never had the good fortune of playing the White Sox. Whom have the White Sox helped or hurt the most?

Let’s start by checking each team’s record against the White Sox. It turns out that eight of those 25 teams have swept the South Siders and 10 more have a winning record against them. Two teams have fought the Sox to a draw, five have a losing record against them, and four have yet to play them. Here’s an individual breakdown.

The obvious winners here are the Twins and Royals, who have both absolutely annihilated their division rival, adding 11 net wins to each of their records. The Mariners have added five wins of their own, and five different teams have netted four. Those teams would all be hurt in a big way if we were to suddenly erase their games against the White Sox. Of the five teams with a losing record against Chicago, two are completely out of contention, while three – the Braves, Cardinals, and Rays – are in the hunt for a Wild Card berth. But those are just individual records above. It’s more revealing to look at how the overall standings would be different if the league had played without a punching bag this season.

Starting with divisional races, we can see that the National League would be largely unaffected, aside from the West, where the Dodgers would see their 4-game lead over the Padres and Diamondbacks drop to 2 and 2.5, respectively. In the AL West, the Mariners would pay for their success against Chicago, going from 1.5 games back of the Astros to 3.5. When I started writing this article yesterday, the Yankees trailed the Orioles for the lead in the AL East by half a game, and removing games against the White Sox would have reversed that situation. However, Baltimore’s loss yesterday, along with New York’s win over — of course — the White Sox, pushed the Yankees half a game ahead anyway. (The Yankees play their final game against the White Sox tonight.)

Naturally, the AL Central would see a huge shift. No longer buoyed by their 12-1 records against the White Sox, the Twins would fall to just four games over .500, while the Royals would have a losing record. More importantly, the Guardians, whose 5-5 record against the White Sox means that they’ve lost more games to the South Siders than any team in baseball, would see their divisional lead jump from 3.5 to 9 games, the largest in baseball by a huge margin. The dominos would keep falling in the Wild Card races. Here’s the NL.

Naturally, the NL would change less than the AL. In fact, erasing all White Sox games would actually solidify the position of the six teams currently in playoff position. The Padres would jump a half-game ahead of the D-backs for the first Wild Card spot. The Cardinals would stay where they are: 3.5 games out of the last spot. Both the Mets and Giants, who have not yet had the pleasure of facing the South Siders, would fall half a game further away from that last Wild Card spot. Meanwhile, the Cubs and Reds, who have both swept the White Sox, would fall from fringe contenders to full-on longshots.

In the AL, there would be bigger differences. The Guardians would own the best record in baseball and a two-game lead over the Yankees for the best record in the AL. The Red Sox would vault all the way into the second Wild Card spot, while the Twins would drop from the second spot to the third and see a lot of their margin for error eliminated. The Royals would go from possession of the final Wild Card spot to being the third team in line for it. The Rays, whose 2-4 record against the White Sox is the worst in baseball, would suddenly be tied with the Mariners, 1.5 games behind the Twins for the final Wild Card spot. That would leave six different teams within 2.5 games of the games either way of the final postseason berth, setting up a gloriously chaotic end to the regular season, with the playoff teams and matchups potentially changing on a daily basis.

In any sport, the general rule is that good teams beat up on the bad teams, then try to go a bit better than .500 against the other good teams. But baseball has more randomness baked in, and for a team like the Rays, going 2-4 against the White Sox could be the difference between making a playoff push and waiting for next year. The Twins and Royals must be truly chagrined to know that they won’t face Chicago again for the rest of the season. Without those huge margins, the AL Wild Card race becomes a delightfully sloppy mess, while the Mets, Padres, and Giants can’t wait to finally get their crack at the South Siders.

The White Sox aren’t just fighting to stay out of the history books. They have the chance to play one of the more unlikely spoilers the league has ever seen, with series against the Mets, Orioles, Red Sox, Guardians, Padres, and Giants still to come. The saying goes that you can only play the team in front of you. It’s not the fault of the Twins and Royals that they’ve made the most of their encounters with the White Sox, and we might need to perform some sort of forensic investigation to figure out how the Guardians, who are currently tied with the Dodgers for the best record in baseball, managed to drop five games to Chicago. Still, removing the Central’s favorite chew toy would make the entire American League playoff picture even more fun.