At roughly the halfway point, some interesting W-L team comparisons between Detroit, Minnesota and our White Sox:

Detroit
vs. .500 or better: 25-18, .581
vs. under .500: 31-10, .756

Minnesota
vs. .500 or better: 21-20, .512
vs. under .500: 25-16, .610

White Sox
vs. .500 or better: 28-10, .737
vs. under .500: 26-19, .578

The Sox and Tigers, separated only by 1 1/2 games, have taken starkly different paths to their records. As some here have suspected, the Sox have a tendency to sometimes "play down" to the level of their weaker opponents (failing to finish off recent series, for example, against both Pittsburgh and the Flubs). Detroit, by contrast, is a beefy 14-0 vs. Seattle, KC and the Flubs.

As a Sox fan, one can look at the second half of the schedule optimistically or pessimistically; the Sox play 46 of their final 79 games against teams currently .500 or better. Should their first-half trend continue, they will be sitting pretty at the end of the season. However, Detroit plays only 33 of it's final 78 against teams currently over the .500 mark.

Finally, the two teams have 14 games against each other, which will (obviously) go a long way toward determining who will take the division.

The hard-charging Twins notwithstanding.

Today I was thinking about how much the Sox depend on Thome, Konerko and Dye to drive in runs, so I decided to take a look at how they stack up against other teams' three top RBI guys.  Looking at the numbers, I wonder if there any long-term implications of having such a dependence on these three.  The Sox are not in very good company at the top of that list.  In fact, there is a group of very solid teams whose "Big 3" are around the 40% range:

Team (Top 3)    Total RBI    Team Total      %
Tampa Bay          109          213      51.2%
LA Angels          109          223      48.9%
Chicago Sox        134          278      48.2%
Oakland            110          232      47.4%
Seattle            107          232      46.1%
Toronto            125          280      44.6%
Baltimore          109          263      41.4%
Boston             111          269      41.3%
Minnesota           95          231      41.1%
NY Yankees         123          304      40.5%
Detroit             99          255      38.8%
Texas              102          263      38.8%
Cleveland          110          290      37.9%
Kansas City         68          192      35.4%

Apologies for the formatting...it looks ok in the box but not when posted.