Will Venable won the 2026 American League Manager of the Year award on November 10, after a season in which the Chicago White Sox improved by 24 wins and returned to the postseason for the first time since 2021. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America gave Venable 111 points, ahead of Tampa Bay’s Kevin Cash on 98 and Boston’s Chad Tracy on 47. The decision rewards the regular season of a team that finished 84–78, one game behind Cleveland in the AL Central, and entered October as the league’s sixth seed.

The White Sox were only six games above .500, but their starting point was unusually low. They had lost at least 100 games in each of the previous three seasons, including a modern-era record 121 defeats in 2024. They became the first major league club to reach the postseason immediately after consecutive seasons of at least 100 losses. Those two measures tell different parts of the story. Chicago had a narrow margin in the current standings and had traveled an exceptional distance to get there.

The race on the ballot

Venable received 15 first-place votes, 11 second-place votes and three third-place votes. Cash received 12 firsts, 12 seconds and two thirds, while Tracy took the remaining three first-place votes. Each ballot carried five points for first, three for second and one for third. Venable appeared on 29 of 30 ballots and Cash on 26. The winning margin came from a combination of more top rankings and support across most of the electorate. Half the voters put Venable first, while nearly all included him among their three choices.

Cash presented a strong case on regular-season performance. The Rays won 98 games, best in the American League, and took the AL East after finishing fourth in 2025. CBS Sports calculated a 21-win improvement for Tampa Bay. The comparison is especially revealing because both leading candidates oversaw major gains. Cash brought his club to the top of the league, and Venable brought a team with a much lower starting point into the playoff field. Voters could emphasize either the destination or the distance traveled, and the first-place votes showed substantial support for each.

Tracy offered a third version of a turnaround. He replaced Alex Cora on April 25 after Boston began 10–17 and went 77–58 the rest of the way, according to CBS Sports. Boston finished 87–75 and earned the second AL wild card. That gave the writers a midseason recovery to consider alongside the two year-over-year improvements. Cleveland’s Stephen Vogt, who managed the AL Central winner and had won the award in the previous two seasons, finished fourth. A single ballot thus included a league leader, a division winner and two wild-card teams with markedly different paths to October.

How the White Sox closed the gap

Chicago went from 41 wins in 2024 to 60 in Venable’s first season and then to 84. Major League Baseball counted only two other managers since 1901 who oversaw gains of at least 19 wins in consecutive full seasons. John McGraw did it with the New York Giants in the early 1900s and Miller Huggins with the Yankees in the 1920s. That comparison describes the rate of improvement. The next question for this White Sox team is whether it can sustain a winning record once the benchmark becomes 84 victories.

The season opened with five defeats in six road games against Milwaukee and Miami. Chicago lost 13 of its first 19 games, a start that put the team seven games below .500. From that point it went 78–65, a 13-game positive margin across 143 games. That span is long enough to show how substantially the season changed after April. MLB reported that the White Sox spent 96 days atop the division, although Cleveland eventually finished first at 85–77. Chicago secured a playoff berth with a 9–1 win over Kansas City on September 24 and closed the regular season with a 4–2 win over Colorado.

The scoring record also explains why the finish was plausible. The White Sox scored 776 runs and allowed 720, a differential of plus 56. MLB’s standings show an expected record of 87–75 based on runs scored and allowed. That estimate suggests the team’s overall scoring margin was consistent with a winning record, even though the games produced three fewer victories. The split between a 48–33 home record and a 36–45 road record identifies an area for improvement over a full season. The same club then won its first four October games away from home, a separate result over a much smaller sample.

The lineup behind the improvement

Three White Sox hitters reached 30 home runs. Munetaka Murakami hit 35, Miguel Vargas 33 and Colson Montgomery 31. Together they accounted for 99, and Montgomery led American League shortstops in home runs according to MLB’s division-series preview. That distribution gave Chicago multiple sources of power. It also sharpened the importance of the opportunities created by the hitters around them. A lineup that sends runners to the bases before its biggest swings has more ways to turn a close inning into a multi-run advantage.

The arrivals of Montgomery, Chase Meidroth and several other young players had already given Chicago parts of its next lineup in 2025. MLB’s review of Venable’s first season identified Kyle Teel and Edgar Quero among the young players gaining major league experience, along with pitchers Shane Smith and Grant Taylor. By the next October, Meidroth and Taylor had both made decisive contributions. The connection between those seasons is an important piece of the manager’s case. Chicago could retain knowledge of the players’ major league strengths and weaknesses while still asking them to handle bigger assignments.

Chicago’s choices during games were unusually visible. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the club led MLB in relief innings, ranked third in its use of pinch hitters and fourth in its use of pinch runners. A substitution can improve a matchup or put more speed on base, while also removing a player who might be useful later. That trade-off was a recurring feature of Venable’s games, and the frequency of those moves gives the award discussion a more concrete dimension than the standings alone.

The personnel gains also clarify where credit belongs. The coaching staff sets roles and makes game decisions, the front office assembles the roster, and the players have to turn those choices into results against major league opponents. A manager award recognizes the work done in the dugout within that larger operation. Chicago’s year-to-year gains had visible contributions from all three places. The results give the club a better basis for deciding which roles can be built around and where more depth could protect it against a long season.

What October added

The White Sox opened the postseason against Houston, the AL West champion, and won 6–3 and 7–3 at Daikin Park. That secured their first postseason series victory since the 2005 World Series. Chicago built a four-run first-inning lead in the clincher. Houston cut into it with three solo homers before Meidroth hit a three-run homer off Bryan Abreu in the sixth. Meidroth’s swing restored a four-run cushion and changed the final innings of a game in which the Astros had closed to within one run. Grant Taylor had already thrown 54 pitches in the opening game of the series, MLB reported.

Chicago then won 3–0 and 4–3 in Cleveland to take a two-game lead in the best-of-five AL Division Series. Taylor saved both games, including a four-inning assignment in Game 1. The structure of a short series can make such a workload valuable when a manager has a lead and sees an opportunity to close a game early in the series. Over six months, an extended relief outing carries implications for availability in the days that follow. The different time horizons are part of why the regular season and October offer distinct evidence about the same pitching staff.

Cleveland won the next two games in Chicago, 9–3 and 9–5, and then took Game 5 at home 2–0. The Guardians had beaten the White Sox by one game in the division standings and needed all five to separate themselves in the series. They then lost the AL Championship Series to Cash’s Rays. The sequence gave the three clubs several ways to distinguish their seasons. Chicago made the biggest jump from its 2025 record, Cleveland won the division and the head-to-head series, and Tampa Bay took the pennant. By the time any of that happened in October, the award ballots were already in.

A new standard in Chicago

Venable’s route to the White Sox included nine major league seasons as an outfielder, a spell as a coach with the Cubs, two seasons as Boston’s bench coach and two with Texas as associate manager under Bruce Bochy. He was on the Rangers’ staff for their 2023 championship. At Princeton he played baseball and basketball and earned first-team Ivy League honors in both. That background put him in a range of dugout roles before he took charge of a club on the heels of its worst season. His second year with the White Sox produced his first winning record as a major league manager.

Venable is the sixth White Sox manager to receive the BBWAA award. Ozzie Guillén was the previous Chicago winner in 2005, when the White Sox won the World Series. Earlier recipients for the club were Tony La Russa, Jeff Torborg, Gene Lamont and Jerry Manuel. In the broader American League, Frank Robinson with Baltimore and Paul Molitor with Minnesota also won the award a year after their clubs lost at least 100 games. Both of those turnarounds ended with more wins than Chicago’s 84, which helps explain how competitive the field for a wild card can be even during a historical recovery.

Chicago enters its next season with a clearer reference point than the one it had when Venable arrived. The offense scored at a rate that supported a winning record, three hitters supplied substantial power and the team reached the Division Series. It also finished with a losing road record and fell just short of Cleveland across 162 games. The challenge is to retain the gains from the young core while building enough depth to handle the parts of the schedule that tested it. The vote now puts a name to the manager’s role in getting the White Sox back into that conversation.

Sources

Archive photograph of Will Venable with the Chicago Cubs in Philadelphia, September 2018. Ian D’Andrea via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. The original photograph is displayed without cropping.

Talal Osman

Source: bbwaa.com