Chicago White Sox: Magic number is finally in single digits

It became pretty clear in about early August that the Chicago White Sox were going to walk into the playoffs with relative ease. The Cleveland Indians, who have been in second place of the AL Central behind the White Sox for a long time, were sellers at the trade deadline. They even gave one of their best hitters in Cesar Hernandez away to the White Sox.

The White Sox haven’t even been at their best since the All-Star Break and they still have pulled far away from them in the division. Regardless of all of this, everyone still wants to see them officially clinch. Anything can happen in baseball so it would just be nice to see them clinch.

The magic number is now nine. Any combination of nine White Sox wins or Cleveland Indians losses will mathematically lock the White Sox into a playoff spot. They also want to clinch a home field spot but that will take a bit of work.

With the division lead so big as the season winds down, why is it so important to people to see them clinch? Well, there are a lot of reasons. One of them is the fact that the Chicago White Sox haven’t made the playoffs for two years in a row in franchise history. It sounds like a fake stat but it is absolutely real. Even the 2006 White Sox, who were very good as the defending World Series champions, missed the playoffs but a few games.

The Chicago White Sox have a magic number of nine going into this week.

Clinching would make it the first time that they did that in franchise history as we all know about what they did in 2020. This time, it will be as AL Central Division champions for the first time since 2008. They believe that they have a chance to be American League Champions if everything goes right so clinching will mean a lot.

They are starting a series against the Los Angeles Angels this week. The Angels are a good team but the White Sox should be able to do well against them. After that, they have the Texas Rangers and Detroit Tigers so you’d think it will happen sometime in there. Cleveland has the Minnesota Twins, New York Yankees, and Kansas City Royals on deck so it will be interesting to see what they do.

The White Sox have already quietly been getting ready for the playoffs. They have rested players who have sore legs, given starters some time off, and tried different strategies during actual games. It is good to know that they are almost in but it would be nice to see them gain a lot of momentum going into October.