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 season).
This has to be the season a century mark of losses ceases, right?
Right?
‘‘I mean, we are a good team,’’ Venable said. ‘‘We are finding different ways to win, getting contributions from everybody. With the way our group is set up, that’s how we are going to have to win games. It’s going to have to be with defense, with different guys on offense and, obviously, with the pitching staff.’’
Martin provided solid starting pitching. The offense rallied enough in the first, third and fourth innings to provide a cushion, and left-hander Chris Murphy pitched a flawless ninth for his first save.
Shortstop Tanner Murray, making his MLB debut, provided the defense with an acrobatic, inning-ending play up the middle in the second to kill the Jays’ only rally.
‘‘You look at the turning point of that game,’’ Martin said. ‘‘[Murray] solidified that win for us.’’
There are some red flags. The Sox entered play Sunday with MLB’s worst team ERA at 7.01. The Nationals were the closest at 6.04. The Sox’ eight errors put them at 27th among 30 teams.
There is plenty of work for this always-rebuilding team to do.
‘‘You look at what we did [after the All-Star break last season] — some of the teams we beat, some of the series we won, in the places that we played — that young group matured, and it’s only going to get better,’’ Martin said.
‘‘There are still going to be growing pains. I don’t think anybody is going to have it figured out. But if we are just continuing to push this group and continue to get better every day, I think we can be in a really good spot later in the year.’’
