Before Jose Abreu beat out Matt Shoemaker and Dellin Betances for the 2014 American League Rookie of the Year Award, no White Sox player had won an award worth noting since Frank Thomas took home MVP in 1994. Twenty years of nothing.

Every team in the AL other than Tampa, Baltimore, Kansas City, and Cleveland has managed to have an MVP in that time frame. It gets even more depressing when you look at the last 22 years of AL Cy Young winners. Since Jack McDowell won it in 1993, every team but the White Sox, Orioles, and Rangers have had a winner. It seems almost impossible that a franchise that managed to avoid stacking abysmal seasons on top of one another until lately could have such a stretch, but here we are. At least for now.

Chris Sale‘s 2016 season has not been as fun to watch as his 2014 and 2015 seasons were. His strikeouts are down, he’s giving up more home runs, and he’s seemed to abandoned his changeup for reasons unknown to most. And somehow that has been good enough to finish the first half of the season with a 14-3 record and get the nod to start the All-Star Game. Starting the ASG is in no way a promise that a pitcher will win the Cy Young that year, but other than Dan Haren in 2007 no pitcher who started for the AL in the ASG finished any lower than 5th in the voting.

This makes a great deal of sense, of course. If your first half was strong enough to warrant the honor of starting the ASG, you’ll probably have a strong enough second half to be a solid candidate for the Cy Young. Which is why it’s so fun (and also terrifying) to see Chris Sale go. The last time a White Sox pitcher started the ASG was Mark Buehrle in 2005. Buehrle would finish 5th in the Cy Young voting, ultimately losing to Bartolo Colon on the strength of Colon’s 21 wins. Chris Sale is a mere two wins away from reaching Buehrle’s 2005 season wins total. It is July.

Wins are ultimately meaningless, but they’re a damn fine tiebreaker for writers voting on awards. Sale currently leads the AL with 14. His next closest realistic Cy Young competitors Steven Wright and Danny Salazar are both sitting at 10. His 3.38 ERA has him just outside the top 10. His 123 strikeouts currently ranks third. He leads the league in innings. His traditional resume is looking very strong.

He’s a known entity throughout the league and throughout the country to baseball fans. He’s not having his strongest season and it seems almost unfair that he might finally breakthrough and win the Cy Young in what counts as an off year for him. But an off year from Chris Sale is better than an on year from the vast majority of pitchers in baseball. And it’s about damn time to end that drought.

Lead Image Credit: Kirby Lee // USA Today Sports Images