Best Team in Baseball, the South Side Nine

The White Sox are playing out of their minds right now. They are 24-7 and clearly the best team in baseball at the moment. They won again yesterday sweeping the Blue Jays and winning their 8^th in a row. This team is playing great baseball. They’re getting amazing pitching; they are third in the majors with a 3.04 team ERA and first in the American League. They have had the lead at some point in EVERY game they’ve played this year. About the only thing you could complain about with this is that they have had some trouble scoring runs and have been winning a lot of one run games. But they are getting the job done in every which way.

Kenny Williams, the GM, has built a team that does a little bit of everything. They are well balanced and play good baseball or as their manager Ozzie Guillen says “smartball”. They can steal a base if they need to. They hit behind runners. They find ways to get runs across the plate when they need to. They can hit a home run or make a good defensive play to save a run. Their bullpen has been fantastic. Their starting pitching has been even better.

They Sox have played 31 games, almost 20% of the season, and are on pace to win 125 games. That’s not going to happen, but they’re looking like they’ll play some October baseball. Here’s some food for thought, if the White Sox play x% baseball the rest of the way:

X% - Wins
.650 - 109
.625 - 105
.600 - 102
.575 - 99
.550 - 96
.525 - 92
.500 - 89

Even if the White Sox play .500 ball from here till the end of the season, they’ll win 89 games. Odds are they’ll play a little better than that and 90 wins seems like something they’ll do.

By the numbers…
The Sox have the highest RPI in baseball at .563.
They’ve played the 17^th hardest schedule, .493
And they are expected to play .669 baseball according to their stats, so they’re playing over their heads and getting a little lucky. But that .669 would be a 21-10 record (108 wins over 162) and would be the best record in baseball.

I don’t want to get too excited about all this, but it looks like the White Sox are going to be playing baseball in October.