The White Sox are ran their record to 14-4, by beating the Royals today, 4-3 in ten innings. Oddly, the Sox were a team that many had written off (including me) after their young pitching prospects failed to develop, for the most part, and they picked up a couple of ex-Yankees (Orlando Hernandez and Jose Contreras).

They also entered the season with the putative best offensive player Frank Thomas on the DL and Magglio Ordonez left in the offseason as a free agent. If anyone was told that they would have just a .707 team OPS through 18 games and that only two regulars have OPS's over .775, they would shrug and say that this fit their expectations. However, they would also think that the Sox would be more likely to be 4-14 than 14-4. This was a team with a 4.91 team ERA last year, for goodness sake!

The Sox have a rotation with a 2.89 ERA and a staff with a 3.20 ERA. The Sox have not had a team ERA that low since 1972. In their history, in almost third of their seasons (29) they had an ERA lower than 3.20. However, only ten of those 29 seasons have come since World War II. Here are the lowest:

Now look at their last ten years:

So could this sudden turnaround be for real? One really has to wonder when their closer, Shingo Takatsu, has a 9.64 ERA and Dustin Hermanson and Cliff Politte are picking up the slack. A 1.70 one-year turnaround in ERA is pretty rare. There are only 13 teams in major-league history to have done it, and all but the '97 Tigers were from before World War II. Here are the best one-year improvements in staff ERA: