Everyone is scoreboard watching this time of year. Even White Sox manager Will Venable admits that it’s hard not to keep an eye on what’s happening around baseball lately.

“We’re watching, right? What’s going around in the league, not just with Cleveland, with everybody, it’s hard not to pay attention to it this time of the year. It really is a distraction though, because we know we just want to take care of business,” he said before Saturday’s game.

That 6-4 loss to the Twins, coupled with a Guardians 6-0 loss to the Tigers, keeps the White Sox 2.5 games ahead of Cleveland. With 20 games left to play, three of those in Cleveland the week after next, every step Venable’s team can stay ahead of the Guardians is precious because doing so means they win the division and have a shot at a first-round bye.

Especially because the Guardians are a hard team to ever count out, something Venable and the guys in his locker room are keenly aware of. All the more reason for the White Sox to turn their attention internally.

“Cleveland is always winning. You feel like they’re going to win every game,” Venable said. “So if we just kind of put them to the side, put everyone else to the side and focus on our stuff, that’s all that matters. But yeah, it’s hard not to be scoreboard watching. And not just Cleveland, but everybody in the league.”

Saturday’s loss was a missed opportunity to widen the gap between the Sox and the Guardians. Starter Anthony Kay pitched three essentially perfect innings to begin the game, bolstered by a three-run first inning from his offense.

But Kay’s command slipped in the fourth inning to the tune of two runs allowed, and then he couldn’t get out of a fifth-inning jam and gave up the lead on a three-run homer by Ryan Jeffers.

“[I] got in a groove early and then kind of just fell apart the second and third times around. They put a couple good swings on it and wasn’t able to hold the lead,” Kay said.

This marks the third consecutive start that Kay couldn’t get through five innings. He’s not alone in that struggle on the Sox starting staff, which is posing a problem in the final weeks of the season for Venable. Managing a bullpen is a challenge all season, but that gets amplified in September.

“You’re going to expose some guys to some spots, like we did today in the fifth there with Kay facing Jeffers,” Venable said of how he’ll have to navigate the next three weeks. “Where you’re going to have some trouble [and] you gotta be able to work through. Obviously it didn’t work out tonight, but that’s going to be a part of this. Got to find ways to make pitches and get outs.”

Because games in September seem to carry more weight, Venable and his coaching staff have to make more decisions with future ramifications in mind. For example, Sean Burke was originally slated to start Sunday’s finale against the Twins, but he was pushed to Tuesday night to face the Pirates.

Venable said the decision was made primarily in hopes of giving Burke and some of the other starters — like Davis Martin, who will now pitch on Wednesday — more rest.

At the same time, it’s hard not to count ahead to the following week when the Sox go to Cleveland and attempt to figure out if this means Burke would get a crucial start against the Guardians. That’s tough to determine for sure, given that Thursday’s starter against Pittsburgh is now TBA, but it would make sense to line up against Cleveland with the best rotation possible.

But true to how the Sox have operated all season, and found a lot of success in doing so, the focus is on the here and now. Whether or not Venable has the Guardians at least in the back of his mind when choosing to push Burke’s start back, he’s not saying.

“There’s a bunch of different factors. You could look at a lot of different things,” Venable said of the Burke decision. “That’s way down the road [and] we’ve got a lot going on before that. It’s really what it means mostly up front here to rest some guys.”

If the Sox have an antidote to some of their pitching problems, it’s the offense. With Munetaka Murakami’s two-run homer in the first inning Saturday, he joined Miguel Vargas and Colson Montgomery to form a trio of Sox batters with at least 30 home runs this season. No other team in baseball has even two.

“It’s really cool, it’s special. Obviously, all these guys have done a great job really throughout our lineup,” Venable said. “To have three guys in the middle of your lineup that have 30 homers, it means a lot. Obviously, it speaks to what we do well. These guys hit the ball hard, hit the ball over the fence, and it’s cool to have three guys with 30.”

The Sox rank fifth in baseball in home runs and seventh in runs scored. Putting points on the board has rarely been an issue for them, and if they are going to win their division and even more, make a deep playoff run, that might come down to whether they can keep scoring.

Other than the three games in Cleveland just over a week from now, the Sox do have the advantage of playing one of the weakest schedules to finish out the regular season. The Cardinals are the only other team who might have a winning record when the Sox face them in St. Louis next weekend.

But one of the reasons Venable’s White Sox have been so successful this year is because they’ve never gotten ahead of themselves. An organization-wide mindset of operating one day at a time has served them well since the beginning of the season, so like he’s done all year, Venable will have his team focused on just the game that’s in front of them.