Back on April 22, Jose Abreu greeted Corey Kluber with a solo shot in the first inning. It was the second consecutive game in which he hit a first-inning home run.
It's also the most recent home run hit by a White Sox this season.
Saturday's singles-laden loss to the Minnesota Twins at Target Field stretched their homerless streak to seven games, which is encroaching on rare and undesirable territory.
It wasn't all that long ago that the White Sox failed to homer in seven straight games. You only have to go back to 2013, when the Sox had a dinger drought that lasted from May 27 to June 3. Those Sox went 0-7. These Sox have at least won two of these games, even if the celebrations were contained to one calendar day.
But should they go without a homer for one more game, they'll own a share of the longest homer drought by a White Sox team in the New Comiskey Park/U.S. Cellular Field. That was back in 2010, when the Sox failed to homer in any game from June 12 to June 20.
I bring this up for two reasons:
- Usually when I write about the White Sox having some kind of historically noteworthy tendency, regression kicks in. The Sox will probably hit two of them today, just to spite me.
- Those Sox weren't as bad as they first looked, either.
Let's also get one key difference out of the way -- the White Sox went 7-1 during that homerless stretch. Perhaps you could say they were testing the heights of their National League dominance. The Sox swept Pittsburgh and Washington* on the road without hitting one out of the park, which was part of a greater stretch in which they won 15 of 16 games.
(*Including the most memorable game I've ever attended -- Gavin Floyd and pre-surgery Steven Strasburg battling each other to a draw in front of Barack Obama.)
In the process, the Sox went from a colossally disappointing 24-33 to 39-34, closing the gap from 9½ games to 1½ games. They ended up winning 88 games. It wasn't good enough to make the playoffs, but it wasn't all that bad, either, considering they started 8-13.