Some of the finer details are fuzzy, but Chris Getz distinctly remembers the sound and the emotion.At some point late last season, in one venue or another, the Chicago White Sox general manager was holding one of his occasional fan Q&A events. Getz is a personable guy, and he’s tried to be open about the direction of his ballclub, but when your team sets a modern-day record for losses one season and remains in the bottom of the American League the next, fan events tend not to be feel-good affairs.“The last couple years,” Getz said, “it’s not exactly something you’re sprinting to.”But late last year, there were some good things happening on the South Side. The White Sox were still losing most of their games, but their offense was pretty good in the second half, and they had a positive run differential after the All-Star break. Touted prospects Colson Montgomery and Kyle Teel came up from the minors and were immediate impact players. They swept a series in Pittsburgh, took two of three against the Phillies, and put together a six-game winning streak in early September.At some point late in the season, Getz walked into one of those fan-filled venues, and — get this — the fans actually cheered.“So many people were clapping,” Getz said. “Like, I almost got this ovation. It was welcoming. It was warm. And I was completely shocked. That was kind of the first sign of, oh wait, people are starting to notice.”It’s not just the diehards who are noticing this year. Two years after that embarrassing 41-win 2024 season, the White Sox are competitive in 2026. They’re not necessarily World Series favorites, but a 6-2 win against the Minnesota Twins on Thursday pushed the White Sox to two games above .500. They haven’t been below .500 in more than two weeks, and if the season ended today, they’d be a wild-card team in the playoffs.In a 40-minute phone conversation with The Athletic on Thursday, Getz, the 42-year-old, third-year GM, discussed his franchise’s quiet improvements. They began percolating behind the scenes in 2024, showed some tangible results in late 2025, and moved this winter from strict rebuilding toward something far more satisfying.“We starting to really have this winning kind of mindset,” Getz said.Thinking it is one thing. Doing it is another. And lately, the White Sox are doing both.When Getz was promoted to general manager in October of 2023, he told White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf that updating the inner workings of the organization would be a priority. The White Sox farm system had not been highly ranked in many years, and not counting the shortened 2020 season, the team had been to the playoffs once in 14 seasons. As Getz studied other teams around the league, he’d grown to believe the White Sox systems were out of date. Their baseball operations lacked cohesion. Ideas trickled down, they didn’t spread from within.“There were just valves that were turned off,” Getz said.When the pipelines began to flow again, a 24-year-old became their cleanup hitter.A first-round pick in 2021, Montgomery had come into the organization with a veteran’s calm and Corey Seager’s upside, but he was a teenager, still raw and growing into his 6-foot-4 frame. For four years, Montgomery’s minor league results were inconsistent, and in 2025 he got off to such a bad start in Triple A that the White Sox sent him to their minor league complex in Arizona for a two-week reset in early May.