One Win From the ALCS: White Sox and Rays Can Finish Sweeps Wednesday

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2026 — Wednesday is the kind of October day baseball dreams about: two Division Series Game 3s, both with sweeps on the table, both with the home team’s season hanging by a thread. At 4 p.m. ET, the Chicago White Sox — the team that lost 121 games two years ago — can punch their first ticket to the American League Championship Series since 2005 by beating Cleveland at Rate Field. At 8 p.m. ET, the Tampa Bay Rays can finish off the New York Yankees in the Bronx. The favorites flew home Monday night with the same sinking feeling: one more loss and the winter starts early.

This is not how October was supposed to look. The Guardians won the AL Central. The Yankees are the Yankees. And yet both trail 0-2 to clubs that have spent the postseason playing like they have nothing to lose — because, not long ago, they had nothing at all.

Chicago: the homecoming nobody saw coming

The White Sox might not be ready for the homecoming Chicago is about to give them. The South Side club hasn’t played at home since Sept. 27, and it returns as the story of the postseason: four consecutive road playoff wins, a 3-0 shutout in Game 1 behind Munetaka Murakami’s 440-foot home run, and a 4-3 comeback in Game 2 powered by Braden Montgomery’s go-ahead two-run double in the sixth and 5⅓ innings of one-hit relief from Sean Burke.

Monday’s Game 2 was the first time Chicago has trailed in four playoff games — the Guardians jumped ahead 2-0 in the first — and the response was instant. Murakami’s RBI single in the fourth made it 2-1, Montgomery’s double down the right-field line flipped the lead in the sixth, and Chase Meidroth’s RBI single made it 4-2. When Jo Adell crushed a first-pitch RBI triple off the left-center wall in the eighth — missing a game-tying home run by roughly 10 feet — Grant Taylor stranded him at third and closed out his second straight save.

The pitching matchup for Game 3 carries a caveat. MLB’s listed probables have Cleveland’s Gavin Williams (14-8, 3.76 ERA), who led the league with 248 strikeouts, facing Chicago’s Anthony Kay (10-9, 4.44 ERA). But as of Tuesday morning the Guardians had not made a definitive announcement, and the Akron Beacon Journal reported the most likely options were Tanner Bibee or Joey Cantillo, possibly behind an opener. Whoever gets the ball inherits the same problem: a lineup that has gone quiet at the worst possible time. Adell entered his eighth-inning at-bat 0-for-6 in the series with six strikeouts and a walk before his near-miss.

“A lot of them didn’t land,” Adell said afterward. “We had a lot of balls that — mine included, I for sure thought it was out — it’s one of those days where it didn’t travel that way, and that’s the way the game is. But we’re convicted in our approach and our bats and we have a bunch of really good players here, so we’re going to continue to fight.”

Manager Stephen Vogt wasn’t sugarcoating the math. “Backs against the wall,” he said of the club’s mindset heading to Chicago. “This is where this team thrives. You don’t want to be in this position, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. We’ve backed ourselves into a corner. We know that.”

The corner is real. Teams with a 2-0 lead in a best-of-five have gone on to win the series 89 percent of the time (83-93), and teams that won the first two games on the road have won 17 of 19. The White Sox — the first club ever to reach the postseason after three straight 100-loss seasons — have also never clinched a postseason series at home since 1906. Wednesday afternoon is their chance to end both droughts at once.

The Bronx: the Yankees’ self-inflicted October

If the White Sox have been the postseason’s fairy tale, the Yankees have been its blooper reel. Tampa Bay’s 5-2 win in Game 2 on Monday wasn’t decided by the Rays’ talent so much as by New York’s generosity: four errors, three of them in a five-run fifth inning that turned a 1-1 tie into a 5-1 Tampa Bay lead.

The sequence was almost hard to believe. Third baseman Ryan McMahon couldn’t handle Yandy Díaz’s tapper. Jazz Chisholm Jr. overthrew first trying to turn two on Junior Caminero’s dribbler. Catcher Austin Wells was called for interference when Liam Hicks’ bat grazed his mitt. Then, in the fifth, rookie shortstop George Lombard Jr. airmailed a throw to first, and Richie Palacios ripped a two-run single to center to cap the four-run frame. Likely AL Cy Young winner Cam Schlittler was chased after 4⅓ innings, charged with four runs, only two of them earned.

“We’ve got to play clean against this club, against any club in the playoffs, but we have to be better than that, obviously,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said.

Ben Rice homered twice in the loss — the only Yankee offense across two games against the AL East champion Rays — but New York has scored just two runs in the series, and three-time AL MVP Aaron Judge remains out with a calf injury. The Rays, meanwhile, keep doing Rays things: Freddy Peralta allowed one run in 4⅓ innings in Game 2, Cam Booser escaped a bases-loaded jam in the fifth, Ian Seymour bridged three innings, and Bryan Baker threw a perfect ninth for his second save in two games. Game 1 was even tighter — a 1-0 Tampa Bay win with Drew Rasmussen flirting with a no-hitter.

Wednesday, the Yankees turn to Max Fried for Game 3 at Yankee Stadium, pitching on six days’ rest, with Carlos Rodón lined up for a potential Game 4 on the same rest — though Boone left the door open to using Rodón in relief in Game 3 and starting Gerrit Cole in Game 4 if desperation demands it. “Just like how it lines up for Max 3 and Carlos 4, how we’ve been building them out,” Boone said. “It keeps certain guys available in certain situations. Obviously, it’s always subject to change based on how the series unfolds.”

There is one ghost in the Bronx’s favor: in 2017, these Yankees lost the first two games of the ALDS in Cleveland and won three straight. Ryan McMahon, one of Monday’s culprits, sounded like a man who knows the script. “Frustration. Maybe a little bit of anger in there,” he said. “We’re in a hole. That’s on us.” Boone put it more simply: “You’ve got to find out what you’re made of. It’s gut check time.”

The bigger picture

If Wednesday goes chalk for the underdogs, the American League Championship Series starts Monday, Oct. 12 on TBS and TruTV with a White Sox-Rays matchup nobody predicted in April — or in August, for that matter. If the favorites survive, Game 4s go Thursday (Guardians at White Sox, 5 p.m. ET; Rays at Yankees, 8 p.m. ET) and winner-take-all Game 5s land Saturday.

The stakes split cleanly. For Chicago, it’s the completion of the most improbable two-year turnaround in modern baseball: from a major-league-record 121 losses in 2024 and 102 more in 2025 to the doorstep of the ALCS. For Tampa Bay, it’s a return to the ALCS for the first time since the 2020 pennant — and a chance to do it by burying the Yankees. For New York, it’s survival: a loss Wednesday ends the season and stretches the World Series drought to 17 years.

Two games. Two sweeps on the table. Two fan bases — one in Chicago that hasn’t hosted a game like this in a generation, one in the Bronx that has seen too many Octobers end exactly like this — holding their breath at the same time. First pitch in Chicago is 4 p.m. ET. Don’t be late.

Full postseason coverage: Monday’s ALDS Game 2 recap, White Sox Game 1 shutout, and Rays-Yankees Game 2.