We can now safely assume one of two things to be true:
- The Royals are pretty good.
- The White Sox are pretty bad.
I say this not out of meanness towards the Good Guys or inexplicable fear of a Kansas City team on an early-season hot streak, but at a certain point you have to start taking teams seriously in either direction. A hobbled lineup losing to the class of AL pitching on a Monday night on the road is one thing, but when Sox pitching flirts with walking in the double digits, one man robs two different batteries and no lead is safe – that means something.
Of course you can easily shrug these games off. It’s only 26 games into the season. It’s May 5th. The division’s still anyone’s for the taking, and it’s a long seasongrinder/grit/anything can happen and so on. Thing is, games like tonight’s are exactly the games the Sox should (and theoretically can) win: the bomb squad on full health, one of three presumed good Sox pitchers on the mound against one statistically abysmal starter for the other guys.
And yet they struggle, the entire game tied to the fate of an oh-so-necessary two-run home run in the 9th.
They’re in the middle of the pack in a competitive (not to be confused with “good”) division, and if it’s still going to take 86, maybe 87 wins to take the Central they only have to play .536 ball from here on out. This is not impossible; if you think about it, all they have to do is learn to beat up on the Royals.
So do we anoint KC as anything more than the first-place team in a race to the bottom?
No, of course not. Come on, they beat the Sox. That doesn’t count.
Yet.