There’s something mathematically beautiful about a baseball season. Three strikes, three outs, nine innings and 162 games. All are easily divisible by three or nine.
If you measure the season in such symmetry, you get 18 nine-game blocks. (Hey, it beats 10-game samples that don’t complete baseball math in this exercise.)
And after the first nine-game block of 2026, in purely mathematical terms, the White Sox are . . . mediocre.
Stop. The. Presses.
Well, almost mediocre after they completed a sweep of the Blue Jays — the defending American League champs, you know — with an impressive 3-0 victory Sunday at Rate Field. It’s the first time since 2004 the Sox have started 3-0 at home.
A sweep of the Blue Jays in Chicago? That hadn’t happened since 1995.
‘‘It’s gigantic,’’ said winning pitcher Davis Martin, who held the Jays to four hits in six impressive innings. ‘‘To win a series is great, but a sweep is even better. You have to continue to trust our way of playing baseball and, going forward, having fun.’’
Trusting the Sox way of baseball hasn’t been a recipe for success in recent seasons. And the way things started made 2026 look an awful lot like 2025.
And 2024.
And 2023.
But these same Sox, who were off to a 1-5 start and staring squarely in the eyes of 100 losses, are suddenly 4-5 and feeling a little full of themselves.
It just took a perfectly timed rainout of the scheduled home opener and a jarring talk from manager Will Venable to wake up his team.
‘‘The rain[out], off-day kind of came at the perfect time,’’ said Martin, who struck out six and walked two. ‘‘It gave everybody a day to collect their thoughts at home, settle into Chicago and come to the field excited, ready to go for this homestand.’’
This brush with mediocrity becomes a news flash because the Sox haven’t been mediocre since an 81-81 trudge to second place in the American League Central in 2022. Each season since, they have finished with triple-digit losses (101 in 2023, 121 in 2024 and 102 last s
