This is being written May 18, more than a quarter of the way through the 2026 season, and the White Sox are two games over .500 for the first time since September, 2022, and better yet, they just took a series from the Evildoers of the North Side in spectacular fashion!
Wow, indeed! Why that may be enough to make May 18 an important day in White Sox history!
But there may be a more important date, at least where 2026 is concerned. For a hint, just look at the top of this page.
YEP, APRIL 15 AIN’T ALL BAD
Sure, it’s a terrible deadline day for adult Americans who aren’t among the billionaires who don’t have to pay any taxes. And, sure, it’s a terrible day for fans of Abraham Lincoln, who died on the date in 1865; or fans of John Jacob Astor, who went down with the Titanic on April 15, 1912, or of fans of movies that aren’t grossly over-wrought, like the one about that same occasion; or supporters of healthy eating who mourn the opening of the first McDonald’s in Des Plaines on April 15, 1955.
Still, it’s a big positive day in baseball, Jackie Robinson Day, celebrating his debut with the Dodgers in 1947. And it could be a big day for the White Sox. Or at least White Sox fans of the more nerdy persuasion.
Ask most folks the key to the Sox offensive success so far this year, instead of being in the seemingly eternal basement of hitting — above average in runs per game at 4.52 and on-base percentage at .325, way above average in OPS at .738, near the top in homers with 66, etc. — and they will likely swoon over Munetaka Murakami’s 17 homers, or Colson Montgomery’s 13, or Miguel Vargas’ 11. After all, it’s all about power, right?
But let’s go back to that April 15 magic date. Up to that day, with all the sluggers already on board since Opening Day, the White Sox were 6-11, on pace for 105 losses. As of the end of the Crosstown series, they’re 24-22, on pace for 84 or 85 wins. Since that 6-11 start they’ve gone 18-11, a 100+ win pace, a .620 winning percentage that bests the season records of every team but the Braves and Rays.
Now, part of the bad early record was a difficult schedule and part of the really good record since is a fairly easy schedule — over all they’re only 6-9 against teams with .500 or better records — but that doesn’t come close to explaining the turnaround.
SO WHAT DOES EXPLAIN THE SUDDEN SUCCESS?
We need to go back to the 2024 draft and well into it, to the fifth round, from which no major-leaguers have yet emerged on the White Sox except one. That one had a brief college career at Coastal Carolina, a school which may be little known outside of baseball but which has had great success on the diamond for many years.
The draftee made no MLB Top 100 Prospects lists, even as an afterthought. Heck, he would barely have made a White Sox Top 100. He was mere filler behind Hagen Smith and Caleb Bonemer, who should make the bigs soon, and three guys who may never do so.
Then he started surprising people. He hit .333 in Kannapolis in 2024, then moved on up to Winston-Salem and Birmingham in 2025, with an OPS better than .800 both places, pretty good for a middle infielder who most experts had pegged for just a utility man in the majors. Then when his OPS hit .979 at the start of the season in Charlotte, after wowing the world playing for Italy in the WBC, and the Sox had some injury problems, he got the call to the big league team.
Welcome to Chicago, 23-year-old Sam Antonacci.
It would be nice to say the Sox had an immediate resurgence, but while Antonacci got a hit and a walk in his first game, the team lost two more to fall to 6-13. Then he went 0-f0r-11 — credit Will Venable and Chris Getz with not panicking and sending him back to North Carolina, even if it was only because they had no good alternatives.
Antonacci played one game at his natural position of second base, then got moved to left field, where he’d had some adjustment time in the minors, returning to the infield for only one other game. His left field play doesn’t score well for range, but both Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs have him at a neutral zero defense runs saved, a humongous improvement of the awfulness of three years of Andrew Beneintendi as the primary defender (if you can call him that) in left, one of Andrew Vaughn, one with Vaughn and AJ Pollock (OK, AJ was pretty decent in left while awful in center, but he retired a year later for a reason), a couple of Eloy Jiménez, and eventually back to Melky Cabrera, who at least had the decency to laugh at himself after he made an amazing diving catch that was right at the spot he’d vacated initially to take off in the wrong direction.
As for offense, Antonacci’s .286 average leads any Sox players with more than a few at-bats by a wide margin — Chase Meidroth is next at .262 — Antonacci’s OBP is first at .383 despite all the walks to Murakami and Vargas, and even his OPS of .801 tops everybody but the big sluggers despite hitting only one homer.
So the league may catch up to him on the hitting side, but Antonacci seems the type of player who knows how to adjust to adjustments. Meanwhile not only is his performance terrific, but he’s incredibly fun to watch. Maybe with luck the White Sox won’t have to suffer through another decade or more of incompetence in left field.
IS THERE A MOVIE QUOTE FOR THIS?
Of course. Well, a misquote actually, because the famed line in Casablanca wasn’t actually, “Play it again, Sam.”
So we’ll settle for the real thing: