By Morris Phillips

Sure, it’s partly due to a road-heavy schedule and the All-Star break, but the Giants return home to AT&T Park with this sobering reality: they’ve won just one home game since July 13–a full month’s time–which is surely no way to put an imprint on a playoff race that has reached the final quarter.

So after being swept in Kansas City over the weekend, it’s no stretch to say that the biggest home games of the season are Tuesday and Wednesday against the White Sox, in an abbreviated, interleague series.

The Giants find themselves just a half-game out of the second wild card spot—behind the Cardinals—with 44 games remaining. Certainly, an enviable spot when all 30 major league team’s fortunes are taken into account at this stage of the season, but the Giants are trending bad to worse, with losses in 35 of their previous 55 games.

So the first order of business is tiding up that home record (29-30) on Tuesday when suddenly hot starter, Ryan Vogelsong takes the mound against the White Sox’s two-time All-Star Chris Sale. The pitcher with the funky but effective delivery has been a bright spot for a White Sox team that has spent almost all of 2014 with a losing record. But Sale is 10-2 on the year, and couldn’t be licking his chops any more vigorously seeing the Giants than if you put a pair of steakhouse dinners in front of him and handed him utensils.

Vogelsong’s coming off a win at Milwaukee following his first ever complete-game win at New York on the now completed road trip. But at AT&T Park, Vogey’s been the poster child for all that ails the Giants along McCovey Cove. In his last four home starts, the Giants have been shut out by the Dodgers, Cardinals and Diamondbacks, and before that, scored just one run against the Reds.

A closer look at the numbers in those four starts show that Giants’ fans may have to worry about the 37-year old pitcher calling in sick on Tuesday: Vogelsong took the loss in all four of those starts despite allowing one home run and two walks in 25 1/3 innings of work.

One win in a month at home, a Giants’ starter who obviously might be wary of his surroundings, and an opposing pitcher who has struck out 138 while walking only 22 batters on the season means the Giants will need some serious mojo on Tuesday.