The Chicago White Sox were playing with house money in 2020.
The Chicago White Sox were a good team in 2020. Watching them play in 2020 was a blast but they didn’t finish very strong. They struggled in the last week of the regular season against the Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Indians, and Chicago Cubs. It carried over into the playoffs against the Oakland Athletics where they were eliminated in three games out of three. It was a hard-fought series but they didn’t have enough pitching in the end. If they can make a few roster adjustments over the winter, they will be right back again in 2021.
Being good by 2021 was the goal all along anyway. The rebuild took a long time and there is still a lot of work to be done. This is an organization that has a lot of talent and has even more on the way. That doesn’t even include the free-agent talent that they very well might add over the course of the offseason. This year was just a little appetizer for the long term success that feels inevitable for this team.
2020 was free money for them. It didn’t help that the global pandemic of COVID-19 shortened the season by over 100 games but they made it work anyway. They only had a two month set of games that they had to learn a lot from and they did. They even had one of their best players, Yoan Moncada, test positive for the virus and he made it very clear that the long-term effects hindered his play/energy level on the field. The hope is that he is ready and feeling good by the start of Spring Training.
They also had rookies making a major impact on their team. Dane Dunning, Nick Madrigal, and Luis Robert all made their MLB debuts this season. There are always going to be ups and downs during a season where a decent chunk of your roster is that young. Even guys like Eloy Jimenez, Yoan Moncada, and Lucas Giolito are early in their careers, despite not being a rookie and having success so far in their careers.
This was a year that the squad learned a lot. They need to make some additions to the roster and perhaps the coaching staff but they have such a bright future. It was clearly a new team trying to take the next step and they did. They made the playoffs for the first time in 12 years but it needs to go further than that going forward. The goal is to win the World Series and this team believes they can already. 2020 was free money, as mentioned before, but now 2021 will carry heavy expectations.