The quiet improvements that have the surprising Chicago White Sox dreaming of the playoffs

Some of the finer details are fuzzy, but Chris Getz distinctly remembers the sound and the emotion.

At some point late last season, in one venue or another, the Chicago White Sox general manager was holding one of his occasional fan Q&A events. Getz is a personable guy, and he’s tried to be open about the direction of his ballclub, but when your team sets a modern-day record for losses one season and remains in the bottom of the American League the next, fan events tend not to be feel-good affairs.

“The last couple years,” Getz said, “it’s not exactly something you’re sprinting to.”

But late last year, there were some good things happening on the South Side. The White Sox were still losing most of their games, but their offense was pretty good in the second half, and they had a positive run differential after the All-Star break. Touted prospects Colson Montgomery and Kyle Teel came up from the minors and were immediate impact players. They swept a series in Pittsburgh, took two of three against the Phillies, and put together a six-game winning streak in early September.

At some point late in the season, Getz walked into one of those fan-filled venues, and — get this — the fans actually cheered.

“So many people were clapping,” Getz said. “Like, I almost got this ovation. It was welcoming. It was warm. And I was completely shocked. That was kind of the first sign of, oh wait, people are starting to notice.”

It’s not just the diehards who are noticing this year. Two years after that embarrassing 41-win 2024 season, the White Sox are competitive in 2026. They’re not necessarily World Series favorites, but a 6-2 win against the Minnesota Twins on Thursday pushed the White Sox to two games above .500. They haven’t been below .500 in more than two weeks, and if the season ended today, they’d be a wild-card team in the playoffs.

In a 40-minute phone conversation with The Athletic on Thursday, Getz, the 42-year-old, third-year GM, discussed his franchise’s quiet improvements. They began percolating behind the scenes in 2024, showed some tangible results in late 2025, and moved this winter from strict rebuilding toward something far more satisfying.

“We starting to really have this winning kind of mindset,” Getz said.

Thinking it is one thing. Doing it is another. And lately, the White Sox are doing both.

When Getz was promoted to general manager in October of 2023, he told White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf that updating the inner workings of the organization would be a priority. The White Sox farm system had not been highly ranked in many years, and not counting the shortened 2020 season, the team had been to the playoffs once in 14 seasons. As Getz studied other teams around the league, he’d grown to believe the White Sox systems were out of date. Their baseball operations lacked cohesion. Ideas trickled down, they didn’t spread from within.

“There were just valves that were turned off,” Getz said.

When the pipelines began to flow again, a 24-year-old became their cleanup hitter.

A first-round pick in 2021, Montgomery had come into the organization with a veteran’s calm and Corey Seager’s upside, but he was a teenager, still raw and growing into his 6-foot-4 frame. For four years, Montgomery’s minor league results were inconsistent, and in 2025 he got off to such a bad start in Triple A that the White Sox sent him to their minor league complex in Arizona for a two-week reset in early May.

Two months later, Montgomery was in the big leagues. He’s been one of the best shortstops in baseball ever since.

That, Getz said, is the White Sox system with the valves wide open. In his three years as head of baseball operations, Getz has hired organizational directors of hitting and pitching. He’s brought in a new big league manager, pitching coach and hitting coach. There is better alignment, he said, in the draft, in free agency, in player development, and in player evaluation.

“It just starts to go. It starts to move,” Getz said. “And it’s cleaner, and therefore your more confident in it. You create conviction throughout the organization.”

When the White Sox sent Montgomery to Arizona, there was trust that Fuller would focus on changes that Montgomery could reinforce in Triple A and eventually bring to Chicago. And that’s exactly what happened. He got hot for a few weeks, and the White Sox brought him to the big leagues. Only Bobby Witt Jr. and Kevin McGonigle have a higher fWAR among American League shortstops this season.

Montgomery, third baseman Miguel Vargas and first baseman Munetaka Murakami now form the heart of the White Sox lineup that’s eighth in the Majors in wRC+ — the White Sox were 27th last year — and none of those three is older than 26.

Murakami, signed out of Japan, has been a revelation, leading the American League in home runs and looking like the steal of the offseason. Vargas, acquired from the Dodgers at the 2024 trade deadline, was awful in his first two months with the White Sox and roughly league average last year, but he’s top five in third-base fWAR this season. Getz points to the organization’s internal systems that were able to work with Vargas and tap into his strengths.

“We had the luxury to give a runway to a player that had a starter kit,” Getz said.

With every small success, everyone involves grows a little more confident. When the White Sox began discussing a Garrett Crochet trade at the end of 2024, it was easy to target two of the biggest names in the Red Sox farm system — first-round picks Kyle Teel and Braden Montgomery — but the White Sox’s internal evaluations also lit up on an undersized fourth-round utility man named Chase Meidroth.

“He was juiced. He was,” Getz said. “He was juiced in our system.”

The White Sox pushed to get Meidroth included in the deal, and he’s been their everyday second baseman for two years now.

Also in 2024, the amateur draft evaluations got “loud” when a Meidroth-type hitter was available in the fifth round, and so the White Sox took Sam Antonacci out of Coastal Carolina. He’s another versatile, high-contact hitter, and the White Sox called him up after just 14 Triple-A games this season. He’s been their left fielder and leadoff hitter since early May. This week, the White Sox called up Rikuu Nishida, an 11th-round pick cut from the same cloth to play right field.

These guys don’t have elite power, and they were never top 100 prospects, but they give the White Sox a scrappy, relentless identity that’s not a fluke.

“Our projection systems light up on those players,” Getz said. “You can get to value in different ways.”

The White Sox are getting less value from their pitchers. Offensively, they’re in a league with the legitimate World Series contenders, but the White Sox remain bottom third in ERA in other pitching metrics. Davis Martin, 29, has been an unexpected ace — he got his eighth win on Thursday — and the White Sox have found a few other pieces, both internally and on the open market, to stabilize their rotation and bullpen, but injuries have cut into their depth, and the White Sox generally lack championship impact on the mound. Their defensive metrics are also not great, which hasn’t helped.

“I don’t feel like we’re where we need to be,” Getz said. “I know that we’ve got some guys that are capable, competent Major League starters that probably fall into that 3-to-5 range type starters, and to take another step forward we probably need to have a guy that is in that 1-to-2 — obviously two of them would be fantastic — but, yeah, we’re not there yet. We’re not. So, we’ve got to focus on getting some guys who can do that.”

There are some young arms in the minor league system and on the big league roster who could help eventually, but the White Sox remain a work in progress. Still, Gets knows it could be worse.

A year ago, a cheering crowd was enough to shock him. Now, Getz is getting questions about the trade deadline and whether the White Sox are going to be buyers. His team is at the high end or exceeding most of their internal win-loss projections for this point in the year, but Getz has been around long enough to know two months don’t make a big league season.

“It’s never been about 2026. It isn’t,” Getz said. “It’s still very big picture.”

The top two prospects from the Crochet trade have yet to have their full impact — Teel has been on the IL all year, Montgomery is in Triple A — but they could be good fits at catcher and right field, positions that have been weaknesses so far. The fifth overall pick in 2024, starter Hagen Smith, is also in Triple-A, and offseason trade acquisition David Sandlin pitched well in his Major League debut on Wednesday. There’s still room to improve.

So, if this were a community forum, and the White Sox GM were walking into another Q&A, an obvious question might be: What’s next, Mr. Getz?

“We just want to continue to find ways to build, and that’s really it,” Getz said. “Nothing really profound. You have to believe in what we’ve been doing, and I think we’ve got a group that is believing that we’re on the right track.”

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