A's at White Sox, July 10: Six Straight Losses and Jacob Lopez's 7.04 ERA Walk Into Chicago
The Athletics roll into Guaranteed Rate Field on a six-game skid at 41-52, and they are trusting a 7.04 ERA to stop the bleeding against Sean Burke. First pitch is 7:40 Central. The White Sox are a coin-flip team on paper and still opened as clear favorites, which tells you everything about where this A's season sits.
The Athletics get to leave Detroit, and that is about the only good news attached to this road trip. They arrive in Chicago on Friday night carrying a six-game losing streak, a 41-52 record, and the general aura of a team that has stopped believing the next game is going to go any differently than the last six did. First pitch is 7:40 Central at Guaranteed Rate Field, and if you are an A's fan who has watched this stretch, you already know the feeling in your stomach before Jacob Lopez throws a single pitch.
Let us start with that, because it is the headline whether anyone in the organization wants it to be or not. Lopez gets the ball for his eleventh start of the year, and he brings a 7.04 ERA into a game the A's badly need to win. Seven-oh-four. That is not a rough patch, that is a season-long alarm bell, and the Athletics are handing him the assignment of stopping a six-game slide on the road against a lineup that has swung the bat better than its reputation. You do not need to be a projection system to see the problem here. When your stopper is a guy running an ERA north of seven, you do not really have a stopper. You have a hope.
Across the diamond, the White Sox counter with Sean Burke, and this is where the mismatch stops being subtle. Burke is 5-4 with a 3.56 ERA over 18 appearances, he owns a strikeout-to-walk ratio better than three-to-one, and he keeps runners off base at a 1.22 WHIP clip. That is a legitimate, functional big-league starter, the kind of arm that eats a struggling lineup alive. The A's have scored a grand total of two runs across the last two games of the Detroit sweep, and now they get to face a pitcher who actually misses bats. The math on that is not friendly.
The oddsmakers agree, and they were not shy about it. Chicago opened as a solid favorite, White Sox -170 on the moneyline against the A's at +140, with the run line pinned at White Sox -1.5 and a total sitting at nine. Read that again and let it land. The White Sox, a team that spent the last two years as a national punchline, are laying nearly two-to-one on the Athletics and nobody is calling it a trap. That is the going rate on a six-game losing streak. When you lose this many in a row, the market stops giving you the benefit of the doubt, and it stops quietly.
The record tells the rest of it. The A's are 41-52, ten games under .500, sitting fourth in the AL West with the third-worst record in the entire American League. They have lost ten of eleven and fourteen of their last seventeen, which is not a slump so much as a collapse in slow motion. The maddening part is that this same group was in first place in the West earlier in the year. First place. Now they are watching the standings from the bottom of the division while the losses pile up in cities that are not even their home, because home is a Triple-A park in Sacramento while everyone waits on Las Vegas.
There is talent on this roster, which is what makes the whole thing hurt more. Nick Kurtz and Shea Langeliers are both starting in this year's All-Star Game, and Brent Rooker is still the kind of middle-of-the-order bat who can change a game with one swing. That is the cruel joke of the 2026 Athletics. This is not a barren, talentless roster running out four Quad-A hitters a night. There are real major-leaguers in this lineup, All-Stars even, and they are losing anyway, which means the problem is bigger than any one bat. The offense goes cold in stretches, the pitching cannot hold a lead, and the whole thing sags at once. Kurtz and Langeliers earned their trip to the Midsummer Classic, and they earned it for a last-place team.
So what has to happen for the A's to snap this on Friday? The honest answer is that Lopez has to pitch the best game of his season, and the bats that went quiet in Detroit have to wake up against a good arm on the road, and both of those things have to happen on the same night. That is a lot of ifs stacked on top of a six-game losing streak. It is not impossible. Baseball is not that tidy, and even a bad team wins a road game it has no business winning every so often. But you would be lying if you said the setup looked anything other than grim.
Here is the preview in one sentence, then, and you already knew it before you clicked. A 41-52 team on a six-game skid is sending a 7.04 ERA to the mound against a functional big-league starter, on the road, as a clear underdog, with an offense that has managed two runs in two days. Maybe the A's surprise everybody and steal one in Chicago. Maybe Kurtz runs into a fastball and Lopez finds something he has not found all year. Or maybe it is Friday night, it is the White Sox, and the A's do what the A's have done all week. We will find out at 7:40 Central. Nobody in the Town is holding their breath.
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