The Chicago White Sox have packed up their things from Camelback Ranch and are now en route to Milwaukee, where they’ll take the field on Thursday afternoon to kick off the 2026 Major League Baseball season.

Opening Day is here, and the roster is set. Now that we have a clear idea of who’s on this team, how players looked in spring training, and how things settled across the rest of baseball, there’s no better time to officially go on the record and make some predictions.

I’m going to shoot my shot and try to project how the White Sox will fare this year—from their regular season record, to the team’s All-Stars, the biggest overachiever, the biggest disappointment, and even what the defining storyline of 2026 will be.

Here are my official predictions for the 2026 White Sox.

The projected win total has been fluctuating all offseason, but the current mark on Caesars Sportsbook has the White Sox at 67.5 wins. I think that’s a pretty dead on line, and I’ve got the Sox finishing 68–94 during the 2026 season.

That would be an eight-win improvement from 2025, and it would mean Chicago avoids a fourth consecutive 100-loss season—even if they still fall short of the 70-win threshold that many fans are setting as a benchmark for success.

There are areas of this roster that I do believe are improved, and I’m confident they’ll be more fun to watch this season. But I still have concerns—particularly when it comes to the starting pitching.

More on that later. 

There’s a version of this where everything clicks and the White Sox are significantly better than a 68-win team. But as we often learn in baseball—and especially with White Sox baseball—reality is usually far less glamorous than the version of the story we romanticize in March.

In addition to three straight 100-loss seasons, the White Sox have also gone three consecutive years with just one representative in the MLB All-Star Game. I think that changes this season with two players making the American League roster.

Seranthony Domínguez will be the team’s closer, coming off the best season of his career. If he can replicate that production, I think he’ll be among the American League saves leaders by the All-Star break—if for no other reason than the White Sox are likely to play a lot of close games rather than blowing teams out.

But I’m also going to go out on a limb and predict Munetaka Murakami to take the league by storm in the first half and earn his place on the All-Star roster with a barrage of early-season home runs.

We’ve seen Major League Baseball go to some pretty aggressive lengths to promote stars in the All-Star Game—whether it’s international representation or fast-tracking young talent onto the stage like when Jacob Misiorowski made the NL All-Star team with just five career appearances in the big leagues.

If Murakami produces early, I think the league will lean into that story quickly.

And for White Sox fans, it would be refreshing to have multiple players representing the organization on a national stage.

Combining everything we saw from Edgar Quero at the end of 2025, through the offseason, and into spring training, I couldn’t be more bullish on Chicago’s 22-year-old catcher heading into 2026.

There was a 48-game stretch from early July through mid-September last year where Quero had 10 doubles, five home runs, hit .301, and posted an .809 OPS. And during that second half, you could really start to see more slug in his swing to go along with his switch-hitting ability and elite feel for the strike zone.

As a rookie, Quero was in the 97th percentile in chase rate and the 95th percentile in squared-up percentage. That’s not normal for a 22-year-old catcher.

Then he spent the entire offseason working at Driveline with the goal of improving his slugging output and adding more power to his game.

We got a glimpse of that in spring training, where he had a really strong 15-game stretch. And with Kyle Teel beginning the season on the injured list, Quero is going to have a real opportunity to play every day and get off to a hot start.

While a lot of White Sox fans still view him as somewhat of an afterthought in the long-term catching picture—mostly because of how highly Teel is regarded—I just can’t get past the fact that Quero is still only 22 years old.

I think he’s going to be more of a factor this season than people expect.

His biggest defensive weakness, pitch framing, should also be helped by the ABS challenge system. And if things break right, I think he hits for more power, gets a little more favorable batted-ball luck, has consistent playing time, and pushes toward (or above) a 3.0 fWAR season.

I want to preface this by saying that being labeled a “disappointment” doesn’t mean a player is going to be bad. It just means they might not live up to the expectations that are currently being placed on them.

And I do have some reservations about Shane Smith.

Not because I don’t think he can be a good big league pitcher—we saw in 2025 that he can be productive, and there are elements of his game that are sustainable. But there are also some underlying indicators that give me pause.

Smith was in the 13th percentile in hard-hit rate last season. He was in the 22nd percentile in average exit velocity allowed, 14th percentile in chase rate, and 26th percentile in walk rate.

If you translate that, he gave up a lot of loud contact, he was inconsistent with his command at times, and he didn’t generate a ton of swings and misses outside the zone.

That’s a profile that can lead to volatility, and we saw that at different points during the 2025 season.

Now, to his credit, Smith was a Rule 5 pick still learning how to navigate the major leagues. With a full year under his belt and another offseason of development, you’d expect him to be better equipped in 2026.

But I didn’t see much in spring training to ease those concerns.

In 10.2 innings during Cactus League play, Smith allowed 13 runs, 11 hits, issued nine walks, five hit batters, and finished with a 10.13 ERA. Spring stats aren’t everything, but when struggles look like that, they can sometimes be more telling than a dominant spring is predictive.

For a pitcher who leans so heavily on his fastball, command is critical. If he doesn’t find more consistency there, I think there’s a real chance he takes a step back in 2026—something closer to a mid-4.00 ERA rather than the low-3.00 range many fans are hoping for.

And again, that doesn’t mean he can’t still be a valuable part of this rotation or have a strong future. But for fans expecting an All-Star repeat or a jump into ace territory, this might not be that year.

For all of the same reasons I’m concerned about Shane Smith, I think the story of this White Sox season will be a pitching staff that holds back what could be a really fun and explosive offense.

The underlying metrics that raise concerns about Smith are even more troubling when you look at Davis Martin and Sean Burke.

Erick Fedde is a complete wild card after posting a 5.49 ERA with three different organizations in 2025. The White Sox are hoping to get the 2024 version of him back, but at 33 years old, that’s far from a guarantee.

Anthony Kay might be the pitcher I feel the most confident in—but even he comes with uncertainty, carrying a 5.59 career MLB ERA and trying to translate success from Japan back to this level.

It’s hard to make a strong case that this rotation is better than the one the White Sox had in 2025—and that group was nowhere near good enough.

They got valuable innings from Adrian Houser, strong production from Martin Pérez in a limited sample, and Mike Vasil was arguably their most all-in-all effective pitcher before his injury. That’s a lot of production to replace, and I’m not sure they’ve done it.

And that might just be intentional by the front office. Noah Schultz, Hagen Smith, and others will likely factor in at some point, and the future is bright. But unless those young arms come up and immediately produce, this has the potential to be one of the weakest rotations in baseball.

That’s enough to cap this team in the high-60s in wins—even if the offense takes a step forward and becomes a real strength.

At the same time, I think there’s a bigger-picture takeaway here.

White Sox fans want to believe that development will continue trending upward across the board, and I’m bullish on the young core too, but development is not linear.

Just because Colson Montgomery broke out in the second half of 2025 with 21 home runs does not mean he'll maintain that pace in 2026. Just because Miguel Vargas took a step forward to be a league average hitter doesn’t guarantee continued improvement. And just because the White Sox love what they got in Luisangel Acuña from the Luis Robert Jr. trade...doesn't mean they're right.

Some players will be better. Some will be worse. Some will stay the same. That’s not a pessimistic view of things either. It just the reality of professional baseball and it's exactly why teams in this phase give opportunities to so many young players. Because over the course of a full season, you find out what you actually have.

I think 2026 will be the year the White Sox start getting real answers—figuring out which players are part of the long-term core, and which ones might have been fool’s gold. 

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