Learning to win means, for the White Sox on the rise, learning to lose



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The White Sox lost Saturday night.

It's baseball, of course, they will not all be winners. And this franchise in reconstruction has suffered many losses. But the feelings have been so good lately – whether it's Eloy Jimenez's 400-foot races or Lucas Giolito's Cy Young's season so far, or a variety of other signs positives that make the future of the White Sox so promising – The first place of the New York Yankees seemed rather acid.

Obviously, there will be many more losses for this White Sox team before the closing of the 2019 campaign book. Back under, 500, these South Siders should not become elites until all the pieces arrive, and it would not be a shock if they are pulled out of the AHL playoff race before the end of September.

But do not tell these White Sox that an 8-4 defeat is a return to reality or a reminder that this team is still a work in progress. Even though, for many players, the development still occurs at the major leagues level, the "learning experiences" that have been such a big part of the conversation around this team in recent seasons and their daily goal of winning baseball games are not & # 39; t mutually exclusive.

"The Yankees are sitting in first place and they have lost two games in a row," receiver James McCann said Saturday night, recalling the first two games of the series. "It's not because you're supposed to win and if you want to be World Series contenders that you will not lose a match. That's how you bounce.

"And that does not mean you're going to win tomorrow either. It's just, how do you handle a defeat? How do you handle a bad attacker? How do you manage a bad exit, what is it? But that does not mean we're going back and saying, "Oh, we're back under .500, we're supposed to lose."

"We expect to win when we go to the stadium. You can take learning experiences, whether you win or lose. Do I think that a game like tonight reminds us that we are supposed to be in rebuild mode? No, we are still expecting to win and we are going to present ourselves tomorrow with this mentality. "

This may be a description of the much talked about "learning to win" supposedly supposed to be done by young teams in order to gain competitor status. This may not happen until a team does not know how to bounce back after a defeat – until it learns to lose and act as a result of a defeat .

Despite McCann's certainty about the team's expectations on a daily basis, his explanation was full of questions. He said he saw the club's response to "how do you bounce?", And his three-point run in the eighth inning on Saturday night was pretty convincing proof that the White Sox had not exhausted all their fair fight returning to .500.

So, even if the White Sox know they will not win every game – no team will – they need to know how they handle defeat. It seems that losing could be more instructive as to when this team is ready to win.

"I think we did a good job (rebound)," McCann said. "You see the road trip to Houston and Minnesota where we took two out of four of a good Houston team and then played baseball really not very good for three days in Minnesota just to go home. and have a very good homestand.

"It's the big picture. It is not the next day. It's not, "We have to bounce back and win." This is not a win-win situation in mid-June. But that's how are you doing? How is a match like tonight, do you run flat tomorrow and let it snowball in a spiral three, four games? Or are you fighting?

"And that's what this team did really well: fight and not give in."

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