Halfway to Halfway to St. Patrick’s Day, the full truth 

The White Sox have eliminated luck and restored meritocracy to baseball 

They say that baseball is a game of inches, and while we should question who exactly “they” are to make such grand pronouncements, they’re right, as far as it goes. The difference between fair and foul, safe and out, a rousing dinger or a deflating warning track catch can be pretty small.

But that isn’t different from any other sport, really. A slap shot clanging the posts or a jumper bouncing off the front of the rim show that in other sports, as in life in general, inches can make a big difference.

What makes baseball so maddening and beautiful is that most of it isn’t a matter of inches, but of milliseconds and millimeters. Being a tenth of a second behind a pitch is the difference between a solid contact and a foul ball. And even if you hit it fair, getting a few millimeters above or below the sweet spot changes solid contact into an easy out.

That’s skill, of course. But it is also luck. We react poorly to the idea of luck in sport, and rail against players who seem to have bad luck with injury or results, as if they are bringing misfortune down upon themselves. We rarely like to think of the role that luck plays in life, because it is disquieting and uncomfortable to think that if we had been walking on that side of the street instead of this when the piano fell from the building, in Warner Brothers cartoon fashion, the great good fortune of health and happiness we earned in this life would have never existed.

It’s emotionally healthy to understand the role of luck in life. It rejects rigidity and Calvinistic Horatio Alger bootstrappery. Understanding luck engenders empathy rather than scorn.

But we reject it in sports. After all, these guys get paid a lot. Luck should have nothing to do with it.

That’s not the case. Luck matters.

The best players in the world, through talent and repetition and muscle memory and genuinely impossible recognition, reaction and coordination can control some of those millimeters. But as fluctuating BABIP shows, there is an unsettling amount of luck in baseball. We’d like to think there isn’t, but every single at-bat is just a little bit lucky, and that luck adds up for players, teams, seasons, franchises.

The 2025 White Sox, however, have worked ruthlessly hard to eliminate the role of luck from the outcome of the season. On this blessed green St. Patrick’s Day, they have pushed a clumsy thumb in the eye of luck. Good luck won’t even factor into this season, as there aren’t enough potential good breaks to break.

It’s not that the White Sox have always rejected luck, like some grim cleric ranting against Celtic superstition. The 2005 team was extremely lucky to have guys like Cliff Politte and Dustin Hermanson and Neal Cotts have career years, not to mention Scott Podsednik. That is managing and coaching as well, but it is also pretty lucky.

On the flip side, the 2008 team, best remembered for the Blackout Game, were a potential World Series team — at least until Carlos Quintin, having an MVP season, fractured his wrist slamming his bat in frustration in August. We needed a historic trio of wins to even limp into the playoffs, and then were bounced quickly out.

Should Q have done that? Of course not. But ballplayers do that every day. He got unlucky. A weirdly exciting season disappeared. Those are the breaks.

At some point this decade, after the excitement of 2020 and 2021, it was clear that luck had nothing to do with what was ailing the White Sox. Sure, you could say it was unlucky that Eloy Jiménez couldn’t stay healthy, or Yoán Moncada never recovered and wasn’t consistent, or Luis Robert Jr. kept getting hurt, or Andrew Vaughn still hasn’t panned out, or Tim Anderson forgot how to hit, etc etc. Each of those could be bad luck. Hell, two or three is rotten luck. But for this to happen with every prospect, every player, every time? That isn’t luck.

In their own generous way, the White Sox, whose Halfway to St. Patrick’s Day is one of the most fun events of the season, have taken away from us the uncomfortable and anti-meritocratic idea of luck in sports. They have established an extremely rigid moral platform for the season. There will be no flukes. There will be no forest sprites bestowing good fortune. There will be no rueing of undeserved good fortune.

The White Sox will be bad because they, as a franchise (not the players or Will Venable) deserve to be this bad.

And honestly, in a era where the worst in this world are running rampant and getting what they want every day? It’s about damn time that deserve has something to do with it.

Seeing the bad be punished might not be emotionally healthy, but it is somewhat relieving.