Out of 30 major-league teams, the White Sox have the 16th-best record on Sept. 3. They are a .500 baseball team. They remain just three games out of first place in the AL Central somehow.

“Let’s be honest, we shouldn’t have an opportunity,” closer Liam Hendriks said to The Athletic. “With the way we’ve played, there should be no chance of us winning this division. And fortunately for us, we’re still in a position where it’s quite (possible). And now we just need to make sure we take advantage of every strike we got.”

This, and regrouping after the sudden loss of their manager to health issues, would be the reasons they were having Thursday morning players-only meetings in a season that would be a lost campaign in another division. But even those gatherings are tinged with the knowledge that this team has been through this routine a few times before. The idea that the initial good feelings of an open and honest meeting are not a magic bullet has long since been drilled home.

“We’ve had times where we felt like we were going to get on a roll and it just never happened,” AJ Pollock said Thursday. “It probably deflated us a little bit. We’re trying to light that spark. When you get guys talking real and you get guys just sharing what’s really going on and not faking it, it felt good. We’ll see what happens. It’d be cool to look back and say that was a turning point. But we know we’ve got work to do. We know we’ve got to show up and just keep getting after it and keep pushing and put pressure on the teams above us. Maybe they fold and we can get hot, too.”

A meeting to rally the troops can feel like too little, too late at this point. Hendriks, who often refers to “complacency” as “the mind-killer” in baseball, remarked that the Sox probably reached the point where there was no more time to waste and they needed to start playing their best baseball “a month and a half ago.” Even a cathartic, 4-3 walk-off victory over the rival Twins on Friday night, complete with a benches-clearing shoving match after Andrew Vaughn took a fastball off his left shoulder, can’t flip the switch of a season on its own.

“Walk-off wins are big, just got to keep the energy from it,” Vaughn said. “We’ve just got to keep going day by day. Learn from what we’ve been doing and try to get better at it. I think we’ve got 30 left, a little push.”

With that in mind, acting manager Miguel Cairo’s emphasis on “having fun” could feel a little out of place as Tony La Russa was departing amid a stretch of 10 losses in 12 games. But this team has clearly not had much fun in 2022, and the message sounds a lot better after Cairo was in the middle of the scrum barking at Twins manager Rocco Baldelli minutes before his team walked off the field a winner Friday. And as Hendriks explained, the message that it’s time to get super serious and turn things around right now has already been bandied about and tried out a few times this summer on the South Side. He would say it has produced problems for him and the group.

“You get to that ninth inning, and we’ve been grinding a little bit, and it’s ‘I’ve gotta make sure I do this,’ instead of just being ‘Fuck it, let’s go, this is what I do normally,'” Hendriks said, referencing his blown save in Baltimore last week.