White Sox drop first round of tough crosstown test

Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images

Any crosstown series against the Cubs is always going to have a little more juice to it for the White Sox, but the 2026 iteration began Friday night at Rate Field with more than the usual excitement.

On one hand, it’s the first time the two teams have faced each other with better-than-.500 records since 2008, which by itself shows something about the trajectory of Chicago baseball on both sides of town. The Sox have a winning record in mid-May, which hasn’t happened since 2022. The Cubs are in first place in their division, one that they’ve been fighting to wrestle out of the Brewers’ grip for half a decade.

There’s a lot of season left, but things are looking up for both teams. The Sox came into the weekend on a five-game winning streak, and for the first time in years, they’re looking like a proper baseball team. This weekend’s series is a good barometer for the Sox, simply because they’re facing a first-place team and have a chance to gauge themselves a bit.

“We’re trying to win baseball games,” manager Will Venable said. “We certainly understand the meaning of this series for the community, and these guys will play with everything they’ve got, like they do every night. But it’s one baseball game that we’re going to try to win tonight and we’re going to go from there.”

Again, it’s early, but the Sox have been winning games at a .667 clip since getting off to a 6-13 start. The way the American League has looked so far, and especially the AL Central, it’s increasingly less outlandish to imagine the Sox grabbing a playoff spot this fall.

So perhaps what better to test how good they actually are than a series against the Cubs, a team at the top of the National League Central; that division has as many teams (5) with winning records as the entire American League. The crosstown element becomes almost secondary.

Round one of that test went to the Cubs, but there were signs of resilience in this White Sox team that have largely been absent for the past few seasons. They trailed twice in the first six innings and battled back to a tie. The first time on Colson Montgomery’s solo home run in the second inning, and then Miguel Vargas hit a solo shot in the sixth that tied that game after a two-run fifth inning brought the Sox within a run.

“We battled the whole nine innings. We stayed doing that, a great job,” Vargas said. “We were down, and we still scored in the last inning. I feel that’s a mentality for us, to keep going. The game’s not finished. Tomorrow is going to be a new day for us.”

If there’s an Achilles’ Heel that’s holding the Sox back at this point, it’s the consistency of the bullpen. On the whole, they ranked 22nd in baseball in ERA coming into Friday night’s game, and though starter Sean Burke didn’t have his best stuff on Friday night, he left the game with the Sox down just a run. Trevor Richards stymied a Cubs rally in the fifth and Grant Taylor cruised through the sixth, putting the Sox in position to score go-ahead runs in the latter third of the game.

But Bryan Hudson and Jordan Hicks, who had previously been reliable, both struggled and together gave up six runs to bury any chance at a Sox comeback win. You’d have to go all the way back to March 31 for the last time Hudson had given up a run, and Hicks had gone untouched since April 11. Unfortunately, they ran into a Cubs offense that has been relentless at getting on base all season.

“With [the Cubs’] lineup, they make it really tough on you, to the point where you feel like you have to be perfect and can’t make any mistakes,” Venable said. “A couple mistakes there, and they were able to create a lot of traffic, and obviously we weren’t able to get the outs when we needed them.”

Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images

Friday night’s loss was a tough one for the Sox to swallow, in part because there is a growing expectation that this team is capable of a lot more than was projected for them at the start of the season. In the past month, they’ve climbed from six games below .500 and in last in their division to 22-22 and pretty solidly in second place in the AL Central.

Their success in the last four weeks has yielded a confidence in the White Sox locker room, even when they’re hosting a team like the Cubs, who have two 10-game winning streaks this season.

“We came today with the mentality to win, starting the season (series) 1-0,” Vargas said. “Before today, we had five straight wins. We had to lose (at some point). Today, we did a really good job, we played all nine innings. Our expectation for tomorrow is to win the game, and we’ll be ready for it.”

However this weekend’s series turns out for the Sox, it will have given them some kind of an indicator of how well they stack up against one of the best teams in baseball. Taking a game or two against their crosstown rivals is one thing, but this is also a chance to test their mettle. The success of the last month of Sox baseball has begun to instill both confidence and self-belief that was hard to find even a year ago.

And with that, an increased team-first attitude among guys like Vargas who are gradually developing into leaders in the clubhouse.

“I just want to be part of the group. In general, we’ve been playing really good baseball,” Vargas said. “For me, contributing to that and being a part of that has been amazing. I just come every day ready to play the game, and whatever happens out there is out of my control. But I’m very happy and glad with what I’ve been doing and happy to help my team to win games.”