White Sox Cash a 16-1 Playoff Bet After 121 Losses

The Chicago White Sox clinched a 2026 playoff berth on Thursday with a 9-1 win in Kansas City, the first such jump after consecutive 100-loss seasons. They are 82-77, they opened the year as 16-1 playoff long shots at DraftKings, and they still sit a game behind Cleveland.

Kyle Teel, Chase Meidroth and Braden Montgomery, the hitters Chicago took in the December 2024 Crochet deal, were all in the lineup. Munetaka Murakami, signed last December for two years and $34 million, drove in his 74th run. The winter tickets got punched under plastic in the visitors clubhouse.

A 9-1 Rout Cashed a 16-1 Ticket

On the field they formed a handshake line, as if a 9-1 matinee at Kauffman Stadium were any other Thursday. Manager Will Venable said the group already treated October as the plan, not a surprise. “They know what this is about. This comes with the expectation that this was going to happen,” Venable said. “We’ll have a fun plane ride, but then back to business tomorrow.”

The business is the American League Central. Chicago began Thursday a game behind the Guardians, jumped to a half-game after the afternoon rout, then fell back to one game when Cleveland won 1-0 at Fenway Park that night on an Angel Martínez homer. The White Sox still own the first tiebreaker. They also locked a winning record for the first time since 2021, when they won 93 games and last reached the postseason.

Sam Antonacci singled on the second pitch of the game, and the Sox scored three in the first and three in the second off Randy Dobnak. It was 6-0 after two innings and 8-0 after four. David Sandlin, a former Royals draft pick, gave up Salvador Perez’s 20th homer across six innings, struck out seven, walked nobody, and threw 85 pitches. “It meant the world, especially to go against the team that drafted me and in a position to put us in the playoffs,” Sandlin said.

Miguel Vargas had two hits, two RBIs and two runs in the clincher and is hitting 33 homers with 92 RBIs, a.842 OPS and 21 steals. Colson Montgomery has 31 homers and 87 RBIs and, on the same afternoon, tied Mark Reynolds’s season record of 223 strikeouts. “W’s are all that matters,” Montgomery said, champagne on his goggles. “You see this? This is all that matters.”

DraftKings hung Chicago at 16-1 to make the playoffs before Opening Day, with only Colorado longer at 35-1, and posted a 67.5 win total. The Sox started 6-13. By the All-Star break they were 50-45 and, for a stretch, the most profitable moneyline club in the league. They held first place for 82 games until Cleveland took it on September 17. Thursday was the cash-out date on the regular-season bet. The division slip is still live.

THE TWO-YEAR WAGER

1. December 11, 2024: Chicago sends left-hander Garrett Crochet to Boston for catcher Kyle Teel, outfielder Braden Montgomery, infielder Chase Meidroth and pitcher Wikelman González.
2. December 21, 2025: The club signs Murakami for two years and $34 million and pays a $6,575,000 posting fee to the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.
3. Late March 2026: DraftKings lists the White Sox at 16-1 to reach the playoffs after a 60-102 year.
4. April 2026: Chicago starts 6-13 and looks like the same last-place club the market priced.
5. September 24, 2026: A 9-1 win in Kansas City clinches no worse than an AL wild-card spot at 82-77.

General manager Chris Getz, standing on the grass for photos after the last out, did not dress it up as luck. “You look back and where this journey started a couple of years ago, and to know you go into 2026 and you start the year 6-13 and now getting to the playoffs, it’s been just an amazing ride,” Getz said. “It doesn’t really matter what I think because this group believes. They do.”

What the White Sox Got for Crochet

Crochet was coming off a 6-12 season with a 3.58 ERA, 209 strikeouts in 146 innings, and the AL Comeback Player of the Year award, his first full year as a starter after Tommy John surgery. Boston wanted the two years of control. Getz wanted a catcher, a switch-hitting outfielder, a walk machine and a live arm. The four-player return for Garrett Crochet was announced in Dallas on December 11, 2024, with all four ranked among Boston’s top 15 prospects.

Twenty-one months later, three of them helped clinch. Teel homered, reached base five times and scored three runs. Meidroth had two hits and stretched his on-base streak to 15 games. Batting last, Braden Montgomery singled and scored in the three-run second. González, the pitcher in the package, was not in the lineup. The hitters were.

THE CROCHET RETURN ON THURSDAY

Teel had been Boston’s No. 4 prospect and the No. 3 catcher in the minors. Montgomery, the 12th pick out of Texas A&M after a 27-homer junior year, missed his 2024 pro debut with a broken ankle. Meidroth led the minors in walks at Worcester. The deal was supposed to pay in 2027. It paid on September 24, 2026, in a game that was over before the fifth inning.

Assistant general manager Jin Wong watched the clubhouse from the edge of the tarp. “This is like a fraternity that plays baseball together,” Wong said. “They play for the name on the front of the jerseys and not the back.” That is the language a front office uses when the prospects it asked for are the ones pouring the champagne.

Murakami Rated the Party a 100

The other half of the bet arrived a year later. Murakami, then 25, had hit 56 homers in 2022 for Yakult, the NPB record for a Japan-born player, and put up a.270/.394/.557 line with 246 homers in 892 games. Clubs that wanted him on a long, cheaper deal lost. He took two years and $34 million, plus a $1 million bonus, $16 million this season and $17 million in 2027, and Chicago sent $6,575,000 across the Pacific. The whole outlay is $40.575 million. He cannot be optioned without his consent and will be a free agent after next year.

Getz called him “one of the most prolific power hitters on the planet” the day he was introduced at Rate Field. Murakami said the White Sox were the best fit. He has 33 homers and 74 RBIs as a rookie first baseman, one of three Sox with at least 30 homers, joining Vargas and Colson Montgomery. In the plastic room he answered Brooke Fletcher of the Chicago Sports Network in English, with interpreter Kenzo Yagi beside him.

One hundred! Not 10. 100!

Munetaka Murakami, White Sox first baseman, to CHSN after the clinch

Asked what it meant to celebrate with this group, he shouted “I AM JAPANESE!” while beer hit him in the face. The clip moved faster than the box score. The sentence did not match the question, and that was the point: he had a phrase ready for a night he had not lived in this league before. Via Yagi he also called it “Tremendous. This is unbelievable.” Later he said, “This is what the White Sox is. We come together, and this is not the end. We’re going to start from here.”

Vargas, who has drawn MVP talk, did not treat the 16-1 number as a compliment. “In the beginning of the year, nobody really believed in us,” he said before the clinch. After it, still soaked, he kept it shorter. “We’ve been chasing this moment for a long time. It’s special for us. It’s special for the whole organization.”

No Team Had Climbed This Hill Before

The White Sox lost 101 games in 2023, a post-1900 record 121 in 2024, and 102 in 2025. That is 324 losses in three seasons. No club had ever reached the playoffs after two straight 100-loss years, let alone three. Sarah Langs, who logs these marks for MLB, put Chicago on a short list of four teams to reach October after 100 losses, and the Sox are the only one that did it after more than one such year.

100-LOSS TEAMS THAT REACHED OCTOBER

Eighty-two wins are already the most for a team coming off three 100-loss seasons. Expansion-era clubs that lost 100 the year before have averaged about 68 wins the next year. The 1967 Cubs and 1989 Orioles topped out at 87. Chicago can still pass that with a sweep of Colorado. It already has the other mark that the 16-1 ticket was priced against: a playoff berth, the franchise’s 12th, and the first since 2021.

Venable took the job before the 2025 season, the 60-102 year, and kept it. Colson Montgomery, a 2021 Sox draft pick, said the room had been staging this night through the bad ones. “You know how the past couple seasons have been with us. We always envisioned this. Deep down and everything like that, we all believed in ourselves, believed in each other. For this to come to fruition, it’s awesome.”

Cleveland Still Leads by One Game

The Guardians are 83-76 after the 1-0 win in Boston, their third straight year in the field, with Joey Cantillo throwing five one-hit innings in a bulk role. Chicago is 82-77. The math is one game, not a half, and it will stay that way if both clubs split the weekend. The Sox hold a 7-6 season-series edge over Cleveland, so a tie at 84-78 or 85-77 gives them the Central and a first-round bye. Cleveland has to finish at least one game ahead.

The FanGraphs playoff odds board has both clubs at 100 percent to make the field, Cleveland at 54.7 percent to win the division and Chicago at 45.3 percent, with the Sox a tick higher to win the World Series at 6.4 percent against Cleveland’s 5.3 percent. Those October numbers are a model, not a promise. A wild-card series is a three-game sprint. A bye is the thing this roster has been playing for since it lost the Central on September 17.

THE LAST THREE GAMES

• White Sox: Colorado at Rate Field on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with Sean Burke (10-7, 3.40 ERA) listed for Friday and former Sox left-hander Jose Quintana lined up for the Rockies on Saturday.
• Guardians: Three games at Kansas City, the same club that just hosted Chicago’s clinch and is long out of the race.
• Colorado: 102 losses and three scheduled starters with ERAs over 5.30, the softest close on the board if Chicago is going to catch a one-game deficit.

That is why the handshake line on the field looked so flat. They still need the Royals, the team they just beat by eight, to take a bite out of Cleveland. Outfielder Randal Grichuk was already talking past the tarp. “With off-days built in, our staff and our bullpen is good enough. Our offense showed they can put up runs. It’s once you get in, it’s who is playing hot. There’s somebody unexpected that takes a deep run. We are built for it.”

The louder objection around the clinch is that an 82-77 club in this Central has not yet won a game that changes a seed. Fair. Baltimore is out. The Sox are in. Seeds still move through Sunday.

Chicago’s Two Clubs Clinched Hours Apart

While Sandlin was working through Kansas City, the Cubs were beating the Miami Marlins 2-1 and locking their own National League wild-card spot. Both Chicago teams are in the field for the fourth time, after 1906, 2008 and 2020. It is the first time they clinched on the same day. The Cubs were there last October too, when the White Sox were finishing 60-102 and selling the idea that the kids were close.

The kids were the bet. Teel, Meidroth and Braden Montgomery were the price of Crochet. Murakami was the $34 million short contract a lot of clubs would not write. Vargas, already on the roster from a 2024 three-team deal, hit 33 homers. Colson Montgomery hit 31 and struck out 223 times and did not care, because the goggles were wet and the wild-card box was checked.

Getz said he does not know what the coming days hold, only that this group will show up. Venable promised a fun plane ride and then the Rockies. Murakami, asked to score the party, refused a 10 and gave it a 100. The 16-1 ticket is punched. The Central one is still on the counter through Sunday.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did the White Sox last make the playoffs before 2026?

The 2021 club won the AL Central with 93 victories, then lost a four-game AL Division Series to the Houston Astros, the last October trip before Thursday’s clinch and the last winning record until this 82-77 team.

What did Chicago get in the Garrett Crochet trade?

Beyond the three hitters who started the clincher, the Sox received right-hander Wikelman González, Boston’s No. 14 prospect, a 2023 minor-league pitcher of the year who threw a no-hitter at Double-A Portland on July 23, 2023; Teel came from Virginia as the 14th pick in 2023, and Braden Montgomery from Texas A&M as the 12th pick in 2024 after a broken ankle delayed his pro debut.

Which other teams reached the playoffs a year after 100 losses?

The 2017 Twins (85-77 after 103 losses) lost the AL Wild Card Game to the Yankees; the 2024 Royals (86-76 after 106 losses) swept the Orioles in the wild-card round and then lost the ALDS to the Yankees; the 2020 Marlins did it in a 60-game season after 105 losses in 2019.

What is Munetaka Murakami’s White Sox contract?

The two-year, $34 million deal pays a $1 million signing bonus, $16 million in 2026 and $17 million in 2027, with 2027 able to rise by $1 million for an MVP or smaller amounts for other awards, and he cannot be assigned to the minors without his consent before hitting free agency after 2027.

How many times have the Cubs and White Sox both reached the playoffs?

Four times, in 1906, 2008, 2020 and 2026, and the 2020 pairing came in the 60-game pandemic season, the most recent dual trip before Thursday, when the Cubs were in and the White Sox were still a 102-loss club.