White Sox: The rising kings of Chicago
By Bill Felber
The schedule
The final factor favoring the White Sox in the 2020 in-city battle is the schedule. Their schedule simply projects to be easier.
Again, it is necessary to acknowledge that much is likely to change from the end of the 2019 season to the beginning of 2020. But it doesn’t take a professional analyst to recognize that the American League Central is likely to be baseball’s weakest division. The White Sox play nearly half their schedule – 76 of their 162 games – against AL Central foes.
More from Call to the Pen
- Philadelphia Phillies, ready for a stretch run, bomb St. Louis Cardinals
- Philadelphia Phillies: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
- Boston Red Sox fans should be upset over Mookie Betts’ comment
- Analyzing the Boston Red Sox trade for Dave Henderson and Spike Owen
- 2023 MLB postseason likely to have a strange look without Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals
The Cubs play 76 times against NL Central teams, two of which – the Cardinals and Brewers – made the 2019 post-season. More than a few analysts see the Cincinnati Reds – with Eugenio Suarez, Trevor Bauer, Sonny Gray, Luis Castillo, Scott Schebler and Aristides Aquino – as an emerging threat.
For what such comparisons are worth, if you rank all 30 teams in order of their 2019 records and then calculate how many times the Cubs and White Sox play each team, it works out that the average 2019 rank of a Cubs opponent is 15.43 among the 30. The comparable figure for the White Sox opponents is nearly a full place worse, 16.38.
In short, the Cubs project to have the harder 2020 schedule.
The Sox will also carry at least a bit of relative momentum into 2020.
For the entirety of 2019, the Cubs had by far the better record, finishing 84-78 compared to the Sox 72-89.
But that 12 and one-half game advantage disappeared almost entirely across the season’s final two months. For August and September, the Sox went 26-30, just one and one-half games worse than the Cubs’ 27-28. And for the final month alone, the White Sox were marginally the better team, going 12-14 to the Cubs’ 11-16.
Next. Konerko's Hall of Fame Case. dark
In short while the Cubs’ performance steadily stagnated and declined through the final third of the 2019 season, the White Sox’ performance steadily matured and improved.