Freddy Peralta takes the ball in the first game of a set on Chicago’s South Side Tuesday, as the Brewers try to salvage a road trip that began with bad vibes and lots of losses. Beyond a tone-setting start from Peralta, what are the keys to a sweep for the Crew?
At the end of a road trip marked by errors, walkoffs, and rallies rendered moot, the Brewers find themselves at a crossroads. Sitting one game under .500, they’re now looking up at Cincinnati and the Cubs. At just the right moment, they head to Sox Park, to face a still-undeveloped White Sox team. Can the Brewers make an example of this green squad—or will they leave Chicago in even worse condition than they arrived?
There is no charitable light to cast on the Brewers for how this road trip has unfolded. The runs have come, yes, but Milwaukee is a team built on run prevention—and that’s where things have gone most awry. Rallies can be exciting, but when the punctuation to the contest is a division rival walking you off, they only serve to highlight how the losses came to pass. In the case of games one and two of the three-game set against St. Louis, those losses may not have happened, had sloppy play not helped the Redbirds notch a few extra points.
There is some potentially good news, though, should the Brewers make good on it. The last series on this jaunt pits Milwaukee against the lowly Chicago White Sox. The White Sox made history last year in all the worst ways—most infamously, by taking sole possession of the worst record in modern baseball history, a cringeworthy 41-121. It’s worth mentioning that they tied the previous franchise record (107 losses) on the first day of September, giving them almost a whole month of games to build on their horrendous legacy. Since then, the White Sox have done what they can to crawl their way out of baseball hell, and there are glimmers of competence emerging.
The South Siders are still quite bad. You can’t go from that level of misery to competitive relevance in one offseason. That said, they do at least look vaguely like a team that can play major-league baseball. With the Brewers on their heels after back-to-back series losses that shouldn’t have been, this will be a good opportunity for them to reverse course and crawl back over the .500 mark. If the opposite happens, however, it will be an ill omen for their ability to meaningfully compete in a division that has a suddenly dominant Chicago Cubs team atop the standings.
Three Keys for Taking Down the White Sox
Tighten Up!: It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon. No single series defines a team over a 162-game season. It’s a comforting cliché to lean on when times get tough — but there’s another side to the coin.
We’re not even through the first month, and Brice Turang has already committed three errors. Last season, he committed just seven all year. When the Platinum Glove Award winner is off his game, it redounds to the entire identity of the team.
The White Sox are a bad team, but they aren’t as abjectly bad as last year, and could steal a win if the Brewers leave it on a plate for them.
Work the count, but watch your back: The White Sox pitching staff is on pace for 126 hit batsmen. For context, the average for a team usually hovers between 60-70 per year. This is insanely high, and dangerous, but also speaks to a fairly easily exploitable flaw in the opposition. If the Brewers can exhibit a bit of plate discipline, they can stake themselves to an early lead and sail to victory from there.
Once men are on, time to slug: The 2024 White Sox outfield posted a dreadful -19 Outs Above Average, and not much has changed since, aside from the addition of Joshua Palacios—who owns a -0.1 dWAR. With defense being an uncharacteristic question mark for the Crew so far, the bats have a prime opportunity to come alive in this series. The Brewers aren’t a dominant power team, but they have enough pop to challenge a shaky outfield.
Expectations: I’ve been too bullish on the Brewers over their last two series, so I’ll pump the brakes a bit on this. I still believe in the team and believe they can and should win series against teams that are inarguably worse than them, even if they haven’t done so in recent days. The White Sox are a compelling enough team, and one with home-field advantage, so I’ll say they win one to the Brewers two.
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