It’s Well Past Time To Cut Bait With Avisail Garcia

With every passing series, the 2016 Chicago White Sox season slips further away from “new, exciting, and full of promise” and closer towards “how are we seriously looking at four consecutive years of garbage?”, which is fun in a “we’re all slowly dying so it doesn’t actually matter” kind of way. But baseball is supposed to be fun and enjoyable, not a half year long slog that gives you your late summer evenings back sooner than you figured it would. But that’s what happens with a team full of holes and a manager ill-equipped to try plugging them. And the most persistently annoying of those holes is Avisail Garcia.

Garcia was never going to live up to the incredibly lazy “Mini Miggy” comparison. The list of things they have in common is fairly decent: similar size, right-handed, played for the Tigers, and from Venezuela. The only thing missing is the whole “actually being good at baseball” part. Depending on which valuing system you prefer, since joining the White Sox in the middle of the 2013 season Garcia has been either a replacement level nothing (0.7 WARP) or an unmitigated disaster (-1.8 fWAR, -0.6 bWAR). There’s really no way to put lipstick on that pig.

His hitting has managed to get worse every year he’s played for the White Sox, with his OPS+ dropping from 109 to 105 to a pathetic 90 in both 2015 and 2016. Maybe you prefer TAv? He’s gone from .272 to .257 to .245 to .252. His ISO peaked at .169 in his injury shortened 2014 before bottoming out at .108 last season. He’s currently sitting at .124, which is the same as Elvis Andrus‘. Your RF should not have the same power profile as a notoriously weak-hitting shortstop having a career year. And while it’s somewhat fair to hypothesize that Avi’s unfortunate shoulder injury in early 2014 ruined his chances of hitting anything close to useful power numbers, it was realistically only a matter of time before he hurt himself diving for a ball in the outfield seeing as his idea of laying out for a catch most closely resembled a lawn dart viciously thrown into the turf by a drunk.

And while he’s no longer throwing himself around in the outfield like a punch-drunk stuntman, his defensive prowess remains as unimpressive as ever. The Tigers have abused Garcia’s confused idea of playing right field multiple times this series alone. His career UZR in RF for the Sox is -14.4. He’s been worth -21 Rdrs. A whopping -3.6 dWAR over 287 games.

I’ve been calling Garcia “Dayan Viciedo 2.0″ for two years now because the name fits like Cinderella’s slipper. Talented young corner OF prospect who never lives up to the hype and slowly drains White Sox fans of all their hopes and dreams while the team gives him more than 1,100 PA before admitting it’s not going to work? Which player am I talking about?

It gets even more sad when you start comparing their White Sox career numbers.

Before the start of the 2016 season, all Garcia had left in his favor was the fact that he’s now in his age 25 season. I get it when teams are reluctant to give up on young players who were supposed to be great. Calling it quits right before a guy breaks out and watching it happen for someone else sucks. Look at the Twins with David Ortiz. Or the Twins with Carlos Gomez. And I understand that there really isn’t anyone the Sox can call up to replace him right now. But the team had a chance to fix this problem in the offseason by adding any outfielder and the best they managed to do was Austin Jackson.

The White Sox as currently constructed are a mediocre team. Continuing to start Avisail Garcia in right shifts them down the spectrum to simply a bad one.