The first eight games of the 2026 season have shown White Sox fans that the floor and the ceiling for this team might be very far apart.

The opening road trip was a near-perfect disaster; the Sox looked hapless in Milwaukee and were little better when they traveled to Miami. After the first six games, the offense had the second-highest strikeout rate in the league and the worst ERA by three runs per nine innings.

If that was the floor, things on the south side will get ugly quickly.

The good news is the first two games of the homestand have provided a glimpse into what the Sox’ ceiling might be. Against the defending American League champion Blue Jays, they won their home opener on a walk-off on Friday and then secured a series win with a solid offensive performance and strong pitching on Saturday.

On paper at least, the White Sox should be taking a notable forward this season. They have what should be a much stronger offense than the past two seasons and a pitching staff that’s in better shape too. The difference between how the team looked on the road to open the 2026 campaign and how they’ve looked the first two games in Chicago might come down to simply getting through the nerves of the first few games of the season.

“Credit to being back home,” Colson Montgomery said of the team’s play the past two days. “Being here, we’re all very familiar. We all feel like we play the best at home. We’re most comfortable at home playing in front of these fans. It’s easy for them to hype us up.

“Progressively each game everyone’s been getting better. Settling down, realizing that this is a marathon and you’re not going to swing your way out of slumps or whatever with what swing or one at bat, so you just gotta trust the process, and I feel like we’re doing that.”

Montgomery provided a valuable insurance run in the sixth inning with a solo homer to right field after Munetaka Murakami put the White Sox ahead with a two-run blast to center field. Both left-handed batters went up against a tough lefty reliever in Brendon Little and gave the south side fans a boost after Vlad Guerrero, Jr. hit a go-ahead two-run shot in the top half of the inning.

“That last inning, they got to us. So definitely I wanted to get a run in,” Murakami said via team interpreter Kenzo Yagi. “It was more less I wanted to move the runner forward and not too much of it. It was the best result coming off the bat. I was really glad we were able to push that lead.”

Before this homestand, Murakami was the only member of the lineup who looked ready for the season. He homered in his first three games and had at least a base hit in his first five games.

For their part, the pitching staff that looked so rough in the first six games has also settled in at home. On Friday, they limited the Blue Jays to three runs through the first nine innings, and on Saturday, White Sox pitchers held all but Guerrero, Jr. in check.

For the second game in a row, manager Will Venable used Grant Taylor as his opener, a move that’s worked like a charm both times. On Saturday, it took Taylor less than three minutes to retire George Springer, Davis Schneider, and Guerrero, Jr. From there, Venable used five different arms — including Anthony Kay for 4 1/3 innings — to put together a collective quality start.

It’s too early to gauge which version of the White Sox is the real one, and the better thought is that they are something in between the struggles of the first six games on the road and the successes of the first two at Rate Field. Every baseball season contains ebbs and flows that show a team at their best and at their worst, but White Sox fans are understandably itching just a little to see if this year’s group can at least get them closer to 81 wins, a mark they haven’t reached since 2022.

For what it’s worth, pitcher Erick Fedde was with the White Sox through the first half of 2024, when things were at their worst for this organization, and he senses a difference in the team this April compared to what he experienced two years ago.

“When I came into camp, there was a lot of hope, a lot of optimism,” Fedde told CHGO. “Some of the first things guys [told me] was ‘Oh, you’re going to love it here right now. Things are going really well; we like the way things are run.’

“So I think it’s just a lot of people in a good head space and a good place to be.”

Even through the mire of the first six games, Fedde said he and his White Sox teammates maintained an attitude of not jumping to conclusions and settling in to get back to .500 and then go from there.

“As a team, we have a goal of making sure we’re playing important games in July, August, and September. So you start battling now to make sure we get important games then.”

An April series win against the Blue Jays is a good place to start. Maybe the first six games could be chalked up to season-opening jitters. Starting off in Milwaukee against a team that made it to the National League Championship series and is hoping to win their division for the fifth straight year isn’t an easy way to begin a season. There’s a long way to go before we can know if the White Sox of 2026 are going to be significantly better than the previous years, but their first two games back in Chicago were a promising sign.