With less than a month to betting play in the Major League Baseball regular season, the gap has opened to six games or more for the leave in two of the six divisions. Despite losing four games in a row, the Texas Rangers have a seven-game lead on the Oakland Athletics for top spot in the AL West, while in the NL Central the Cincinnati Reds lead the St. Louis Cardinals by six games. The rest of the division races are much closer, with the Philadelphia Phillies and San Francisco Giants within one game of the Atlanta Braves and San Diego Padres respectively. The division race that has perhaps becomes the most intriguing in recent weeks is in the AL Central, where the Chicago White Sox have closed the gap between themselves and the Minnesota Twins to less than four games. Chicago has shown no signs of letting up after winning its last seven contests, and at this time is baseball’s hottest team.

Late-season MLB betting acquisition Manny Ramirez has played a big part in the team’s turnaround, including Monday night’s 5-4 win over the Detroit Tigers in which the veteran slugger reached base three times, with the third hit leading to an AJ Pierzynski RBI single in the tenth inning that secured the victory. The win came in the first of a four-game set at Detroit, which will wrap up a season-high 11 game road trip. The White Sox are currently undefeated during their run, taking three games against the Cleveland Indians, before securing three more against the Boston Red Sox, with the fourth to be replayed at a later date after being postponed due to rain. Chicago has proven that it can perform in the clutch, with all but one of their wins during this current streak being secured by two runs or less.

The only sports betting problem the White Sox have encountered in the past two weeks is that the Twins have been nearly as hot over that span going 8-2 in their last ten to keep the White Sox just over three games back. The last time these AL Central division rivals met it was the Twins taking two of three games in the Windy City. Minnesota took the first of a three-game set against the lowly Kansas City Royals on Monday night, and will travel to face the only team in the AL Central with a worse record than Kansas City when they head to Cleveland to face the Indians this weekend.

The White Sox will need to keep pace with the Twins during these next five games at the minimum if they are to have any chance of making noise in the AL Central this year. Chicago has three more tough contests at Detroit before finally heading home to face the Royals, with the most important series of the year following in three games against Minnesota. The White Sox have shown that they are a contender in the division, but now it is time to prove they belong as the hottest team in baseball betting continues its streak.