White Sox secure ALDS date against Guardians with forceful victory over Astros

The Cleveland Guardians and Chicago White Sox faced off 13 times in the 2026 regular season. 

While the White Sox may have won the season tiebreaker by a single game, the Guardians recorded plenty of signature moments against the White Sox this season, including Brayan Rocchio’s two walk off wins over Chicago (both against Grant Taylor) along with Kahlil Watson’s walk-off single. 

Their matchups may not have always gone the way the Guardians wanted, but the two teams are as intimately familiar and battled for the division for the bitter end until the Guardians won it on the penultimate day of the season. 

They’ll add some more moments to that ledger this weekend when the two teams face off in the best-of-five ALDS that will start at Progressive Field. The White Sox officially clinched a spot in that series Wednesday with a 7-3 win over the Astros that secured a three-game sweep over the Astros in the Wild Card Series. 

White Sox secure ALDS date with Guardians with Wild Card win over Astros

The White Sox clinched their spot in the ALDS in stereotypical White Sox fashion, as the big blow came in the form of a homer while they benefited from a lot of pitching madness. 

Although Chicago jumped out to an early lead for the second straight game, that big blow came in the sixth inning when second baseman Chase Meidroth slugged a three-run homer a half inning after the Astros cut the White Sox lead to just a run. 

That kind of power has become the norm for the White Sox, as they were fourth in MLB with 411 home runs and finished the year with three players with 30+ home runs (Munetaka Murakami, Colson Montgomery and Miguel Vargas). 

Vargas and Murakami struggled against the Astros, but Montgomery provided the spark in Game 1 with a booming homer of his own. 

The one vulnerability they showed during their series was their pitching (especially since they had to use eight pitchers across the two games of the series), but the Astros failed to make them pay. 

While it can be tough to parse a lot of things from series to series because of team-to-team differences, the White Sox scored a run in the first inning in both of the games, which puts even more pressure on Cleveland’s pitching staff to do their job in the first inning. 

The White Sox lineup clearly didn’t seem daunted by the bright lights of the postseason, and now they’re going to head to Cleveland confident and settled in. 

This may not be the first rodeo for the Guardians, but the White Sox are coming in with all the momentum.

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