The Chicago White Sox, arguably the worst offensive team in the American League, are on pace right now to win 107 games. If they play .500 ball the rest of the season, they’ll win 95 games. That’s more than impressive – it’s pretty much unprecedented. Every winning team claims to be driven by pitching and defense, but the White Sox actually are.

A claim that the White Sox are a terrible offensive club should, rightly, be met with skepticism. The team is, after all, sixth in the league in runs scored, first in stolen bases, and on pace to win 107 games, this last number being the best evidence against the Sox being notably bad at the plate. There are a few mitigating factors, though. The most important among them is that they play in U.S. Cellular Field, which is one of the better hitter’s parks in baseball. The team’s last place ranking in runs scored on the road is more telling than that sixth-place ranking in total runs scored.

Another factor obscuring their offensive weakness is that their underlying statistics don’t quite match up with the number of runs they’ve scored. The Sox are second from last in the league in batting average, third from last in on base average, and eighth in slugging average. They are fourth in the league in home runs, but since its renovation prior to the 2003 season, U.S. Cellular has been a better home run park than even Coors Field in Colorado.

Last, it should be noted that the Sox play in an especially weak offensive division, something that happens to match up quite well to their strength in pitching. Playing teams like the Twins, Royals, Indians, and Tigers as much as the Sox do, you don’t have to have a great offense to win, especially if you have starters and relievers as good as Chicago’s.

All this being so, the Sox are a lot worse than you’d think at the plate. Measuring by Equivalent Average, a Baseball Prospectus statistic that measures total offense, adjusted for park and league effects, on a scale approximating batting average – .260 is average, .300 is excellent – the White Sox have the worst mark in the American League, at .248. (The Yankees, to give a yardstick, are tied with the Florida Marlins for the best mark in the game at .275.)

Running up and down Chicago’s lineup, it’s not hard to see why. First baseman Paul Konerko – the team’s best hitter – has a fairly unimpressive batting line of .258 BA/.355 OBA/.487 SLG – respectable, but not what you’d expect from the best hitter on the best team in the league. Most of the team’s other starters fit the same profile; Jermaine Dye, Aaron Rowand, A.J.Pierzynski, and Scott Podsednik are perfectly solid bats but not much more. Some, like third baseman Joe Crede (.250/.303/.435), approach outright ineptitude.

None of this is to say that the White Sox are a fluke, or don’t deserve their record, or anything of the sort. The team’s pitching has been genuinely extraordinary this year in every regard, the best seen in the majors in many years. The Sox have gotten timely hits, key steals, and superb defense from the same cast of players who have put up the hitting lines so easily derided as subpar – clearly, as three-dimensional players, everyone from Konerko to Crede is contributing to the team’s success. A team on pace to win 90 games might be written off as lucky; a team on pace to win 107 cannot be as simply dismissed.

Still, it’s beyond unusual for a team this good to be so light on offense. In the wild-card era, only four 100-win teams have been remotely close to being this weak at the plate. Using Equivalent Average as a point of comparison, the 2003 Giants came in at .266, the 2002 and 1999 Braves came in at .261, and the 1995 Braves (who were on pace to win 100 in a strike-shortened season) came in at .253. The Giants were well above average, and anyway no team featuring Barry Bonds at the height of his powers can realistically be called weak offensively.

Those Braves teams, of course, are what the current Sox team was modeled on, and they featured a pitching staff of a quality never before seen in major league history. Still, two of those teams were league-average offensively; the 1995 Braves are the only recent 100-win team that was downright weak at the plate, and they ended that season with the only World Series title in the team’s 14-year run of dominance in the National League East.

Going back a bit further, it’s still incredibly rare for a team without a strong offense to win 100.The 1985 Cardinals, who famously featured seven leadoff hitters and Jack Clark, come to mind, but their .273 Equivalent Average was the best in the league.(The seven leadoff hitters were all actually pretty good.) The 1962 Dodgers also come to mind, but their .277 mark was second-best in the league. Like the Cardinals, that team garnered a lasting reputation as a no-hit squad largely due to a misunderstanding of park effects and a lack of eye-popping raw power numbers, but was actually quite impressive in context.

The only 100-win team of the post-integration era that approaches the current White Sox for plate futility is, of all teams, the 1969 Mets, whose .249 Equivalent Average was second-worst in the National League. On that team, no one save Tommie Agee and Cleon Jones could hit worth a lick, and their formula was very close to that of the current White Sox – pitching, defense, pitching, timely hits and steals, a healthy dose of the simply inexplicable, and a lot more pitching.

Just as the other precedents for the current Sox team are, this is an encouraging one – like the 2003 Giants and the 1999 and 1995 Braves, the Mets won the pennant, and like the 1995 Braves, they won the World Series. All of this, however, should be taken with a few grains of salt. Statistics like Equivalent Average have their flaws, and one of the biggest ones is their inability to account for things like shrewd managing and timing. Chicago’s gross totals of steals, walks, and so forth aren’t particularly impressive, but the timing of them is.

In close and late situations – the seventh inning or later, with the game tied or one team leading by a run or with the tying run on base, at the plate, or on deck – the Sox are one off the league lead in runs scored, first in steals, and second in OPS. If there’s any secret to their manufacturing of runs, it’s that they’ve been good in the clutch, and that can make up for a fair amount of crummy hitting.

The Sox’ curse – they haven’t won a World Series since their 1919 edition shamefully handed one away – is for whatever reason by far the least glamorous in baseball, but judging from the past, they have a great shot this year at putting it to bed forever, no matter how little they hit.