White Sox End Three Years of 100-Loss Baseball
Nine runs. One night. That’s all Chicago needed to shut the door on three straight 100-loss seasons. The White Sox beat the Kansas City Royals 9-1 on Thursday, and with it, punched their first playoff ticket since 2021.
Miguel Vargas drove in two, Kyle Teel added a home run, and rookie right-hander David Sandlin did the rest: six innings, one run allowed on five hits. Kansas City starter Randy Dobnak never found his footing, charged with six runs across just 1⅓ innings.
Chicago still trails Cleveland by a game in the AL Central, but the head-to-head tiebreaker belongs to the White Sox. Either way, the number that matters now reads: playoff team.
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Guardians and Brewers Make It Official
Cleveland isn’t going anywhere either. Angel Martinez’s second-inning solo shot held up as the only run Cleveland needed in a 1-0 win over Boston, and Joey Cantillo made it stand with five shutout innings. It’s a third consecutive playoff berth for the Guardians, who have turned October baseball into a habit.
Milwaukee did something it had never done before. The Brewers beat Philadelphia 5-1, powered by a three-run eighth inning that Jake Bauers set off with an RBI single, and reached 100 wins in a single season for the first time in franchise history. That result also locks up the best regular-season record in baseball.
Cubs In, Arizona Closing, Cardinals Hit Rock Bottom
Chicago’s North Side had its own night. The Cubs edged the Marlins 2-1 on Nico Hoerner’s sixth-inning RBI single, with Matthew Boyd working seven strong innings to set it up. The bigger headline belongs to Pete Crow-Armstrong, who became just the seventh player in major-league history to reach 40 home runs and 40 stolen bases in the same season.
Arizona is not done chasing either. The Diamondbacks pounded Colorado 12-8, with Gabriel Moreno and Nolan Arenado both homering during a six-run first inning, and now sit two games back of Philadelphia for the final NL wild-card spot. Down in Texas, Josh Jung’s two-run first-inning homer salvaged a series finale against the Mets and kept the Rangers tied with Houston atop the AL West with barely a week left on the schedule.
It wasn’t all celebration on the night. Pittsburgh’s Paul Skenes closed out his season in style, eight strikeouts over 6⅓ innings, but the Pirates still fell 2-1 to St. Louis. That result locks the Cardinals into back-to-back losing seasons for the first time since 1994-95. Four teams punched their ticket in a single night, and San Diego made it a fifth earlier in the evening. The National League field is filling up fast, and so is the list of contenders nobody wants to face in October.
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