Time for last-place White Sox to weigh their long-shot chances

"Right now we're trying to find our way, and nobody knows what the calendar looks like more than me. And there may come a time when we have to make some decisions, and some very hard decisions." -- White Sox executive vice president Kenny Williams in the Chicago Tribune on June 26, 2015, two days before the White Sox became one of the hottest teams in baseball

Hope by definition is an aspiration, a desire, a wish. The intent -- if possible -- to do something.

It is also sometimes all teams have left, the only available concept on which they can hinge their season. Leaving it possible to feed on itself in such a way that hope literally becomes a team's only hope.

The Chicago White Sox are about to feed on themselves. As the second half of the baseball season begins they -- being in last place of a division that has the team with the second-best record in all of baseball (Kansas City Royals) -- must face the hard reality of choosing not to write off the remainder of this season.

Their hope: They are only 5.5 games out of a wild-card spot. Their reality: There are seven teams ahead of them that they'd have to outplay over the next 76 games just to get that wild-card spot.

Their division hopes aren't much better. According to Elias, the largest deficit overcome by a team at the All-Star break to make the playoffs (division title or wild-card berth) was 11.0 games by the 2006 Twins, who won the AL Central. The White Sox are sitting at 11 games out in the AL Central.

To most observers, hope for the White Sox isn't even a reality.

But unlike the other teams that stand in their way, the White Sox can rest their hopes on how they've played leading up to this break. The belief that they've (finally) hit their stride. Winning nine of their last 12, playing .667 baseball in the month of July, playing at a pace that has been matched and/or bested by only four other AL teams in the last 10 games, having the second-best record (behind only the Pittsburgh Pirates) in MLB games played since June 30.

Is that recent play enough of a sample to "keep hope alive"? Enough for Williams and general manager Rick Hahn to believe that stretch is truer to what their team really is than what the White Sox presented themselves to be over the first 3 months of this season?

Conventional reason and rationale say no. Tradition and history say the same. Despite FanGraphs claiming the White Sox have just a 7.7 percent chance to make the playoffs (third lowest in the AL) and Baseball Prospectus giving them only a 4.9 percent chance (the lowest in the AL), it is not those mathematical improbabilities that make the postseason inconceivable. It is the White Sox's season-long inability to hit (last in the AL in hits, average, OBP, slugging percentage, extra-base hits and OPS), inability to score runs (last in the AL in runs, RBI and at-bats per home runs) and the realization that a pitching staff (even one that has been as strong as the White Sox's staff has been of late) that has to carry a team this long without substantial run support is going to be toast even if it miraculously gets the team to a Game 163.

Williams' comment of "hard decisions" was made right after he vindicated Hahn and manager Robin Ventura for their roles in the team's sorry performance up to that point of the season and placed the onus on himself and the effort he wasn't seeing from the players. And now the moment he spoke of has arrived.

Six games. That's what it has come down to. That's all that stands between now and Williams' decision on whether or not to pull the plug on this White Sox season.

Hope for the White Sox rests solely in the outcome of these next six games against the two best teams in baseball: the Royals and the St. Louis Cardinals. All games at the Cell. No excuses. What the White Sox have leaning in their favor is a solid home record of 23-17 and the fact that in one-run games (surprisingly with their hitting and ability to create runs being so undependable) they are 19-15 so far this year.

Those are not stats to a vice president, general manager and manager, those are signs. Numbers that will force the White Sox to go into the first two series after the All-Star break (and even the third series against the Cleveland Indians if meaningful) with an optimism that a wild-card spot is more probable for them than it is for the seven teams they have to leapfrog to get there.

If they win at least four of the next six, Williams needs to continue to ride this out just to see if this team he put together is really made of something special. If not, he needs to listen to all and any teams in the buyers' market and get what he can forJeff Samardzijaand any other player on the roster whose name is not Sale, Chris; Abreu, Jose; or Shuck, J.B. (clutch). Cease the season. Immediately.

There is a very fine line between "playing it smart" and "giving in." "Sticking with the plan" or "succumbing to inevitable failure." "Staying the course" or "going out like punks." Every season teams have to face this. More wrong decisions and choices are made than right. For the White Sox the time to choose has come. Williams said he knew what the calendar looked like.

With hope comes expectation and expectancy. With hope comes promise and possibility. Reality is often the reason for divorce. As life has taught us all at one point: "You can't stop reality from being real."

Pliny the Elder, the philosopher and architect of the modern encyclopedia, made famous a quote of hope, saying, "Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. Hope is the dream of a waking man."

For the White Sox, they have the next six games to either walk tall with conviction or start running in the other direction.