That said … 190 strikeouts with most of a month to play is really quite a lot of strikeouts. Mark Reynolds’s MLB record of 223 in 2009 has already withstood one challenge from a White Sox, with Adam Dunn totaling 222 in 2012. 33 strikeouts in the last 23 games seems like a lot for Moncada, but how (un)likely is it really? Let’s do some math and figure it out.

We can, for purposes of this exercise, treat each PA for Moncada like the flip of a weighted coin (with heads equating to a strikeout), making his total strikeouts for the rest of the season a binomial random variable. If those words don’t mean anything to you, just take away that it’s easy to the estimate the chances that Moncada strikes out 33 or more times if we know his “true talent” strikeout percentage and the number of PA he will have for the rest of the year.

I used a range of estimates for both of these parameters; for PA, I looked at every multiple of 5 from 75 to 105, which is about 3 PA per team game (a very low number) to 4.5 per team game (Moncada has averaged about 4.35 PA per appearance, so this is a high estimate). For K%, I used as the low number his ZiPS projection of 30.5% (from FanGraphs), which was the most optimistic projection I could find; for a mid-range estimate, his PECOTA estimate of 31.9%; for a high estimate, his season-to-date number, which is 33.7%. The two tables below show the different estimates of Moncada first tying or exceeding the record, then strictly exceeding. (Note that the chances of tying or breaking the MLB record are the same as the chances of breaking the Sox team record.)

Chances of Tying or Breaking K Record

Chances of Breaking K Record 

A glance at the tables shows there’s tremendous variation here, ranging from almost a zero % chance to an over 50% chance. My personal conclusion is that the most likely estimate is in the 5-10% range, since the White Sox are likely to hold him out of a game or two at the end of the year if he’s within striking range, as they did with Adam Dunn in 2012. I’d therefore expect his most likely PA remaining to be closer to 85, which gets us to the 5-10% range depending on how bullish you are on his K%.

With no Eloy Jimenez, there are fewer hitting prospect storylines this September than some of us were hoping for. Whether Moncada clocks in just above or below the record won’t change the overall value of his season, or alter what we expect from him going forward, but in a season that’s often felt like treading water at best, it’s at least some sort of narrative to look at.

Data from the mothership, FanGraphs, and baseball-reference. Code backing the analysis can be found here.

Lead Image Credit: Patrick Gorski-USA TODAY Sports

(Note that I couldn’t find any decent photos of Lucas Giolito, Tyler Saladino, Adam Engel, or Nicky Delmonico, all of whom were in attendance. From a low-quality wide shot, I’d rate them as good, poor, meh, and fair, respectively.)

Squad goals. #CWSBeyondTheDiamond pic.twitter.com/WSeTROJQ1u

— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) April 10, 2018

José Abreu

Suit-without-tie isn’t a high-ceiling look, as it plays it safe by reducing one’s opportunities for both flair and matching issues, but it plays up for athletes. Abreu does pretty well with it, though — he rocks the thinner lapels well, the suit fit is very good (though the break on the pants could be cleaned up a tad), and the shoes don’t take anything away from the outfit. I give him a small bump because, like me, he’s right-handed but wears his watch on the (atypical) right hand.

Style grade: 55

Yoan Moncada

Where Abreu took a subdued look and did almost everything right, Moncada makes some rookie mistakes with his outfit and looks generally ill-at-ease. The pants look wrinkled (?), those shoes don’t go with any suit, button-down collars are generally best avoided with suits, and he’s got both buttons of his jacket buttoned, which is to clothing fundamentals what Joakim Noah is to shooting fundamentals. On the bright side: he’s still young, the natural good looks are there, and maybe Abreu’s veteran mentorship will help him grow.

Style grade: 30

Joakim Soria, Miguel González and @hecsantiago53 all looking! #CWSBeyondTheDiamond pic.twitter.com/XHhQydcXn3

— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) April 11, 2018

Joakim Soria

This isn’t a great photo to work with, but Soria’s look is pretty bland. I can’t quite tell the suit color (navy would be good, black would be bad) or shirt color (white good, gray bad). What I can tell is that the overall approach is less “gala” than “sales conference at the airport Hilton,” so while nothing’s horribly off, there’s nothing really right, either.

Style grade: 40

Miguel González

Same photo, same low quality. Migo’s pulled off a slightly more ostentatious version of Abreu’s look — bolder suit pattern, extra button undone, textured white shirt. From the photo I can’t fully judge the suit pattern (too bold and he’ll look like Jay Wright) or the shirt texture, but I’d grade him out as slightly better than Abreu, but in the same tier.

Style grade: 55

Hector Santiago

He cleans up nice! Santiago is one of the only guys around who throws a screwball, and probably not many would go for a suit like this. There are some nice details in here — the subtler shirt (possibly French cuffed? Photo is unclear) and tie play well with the suit, the peak lapels work, I’m a sucker for vests — but the core aspect is that he goes bold while still looking comfortable and totally uncontrived. If he pitches like he dresses, Carson Fulmer’s moving to the pen for sure.

Style grade: 70

The players and wives are looking amazing tonight for #CWSBeyondTheDiamond! @TimAnderson7 says he takes the prize for Best Dressed. pic.twitter.com/5lxsbmPYTT

— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) April 10, 2018

Matt Davidson

The look is very “junior formal”; the jacket fit isn’t great, black shirts with ties should be approached with extreme trepidation, and both the suit and the tie are a bit too shiny. The loafers are the carrying tool here, for sure.

Style grade: 40

James Shields

90% of this is really strong. The brown shoes, while slightly too burnished, match the suit quite well; pocket squares are always the right decision; the lapel flower is a nice, playful touch. The suit is a nice color and fits well. That scarf, though, is just incredibly out of place. I can’t tell if Shields wore it all night — he’s clearly in some sort of coat check place, but it’s not a candid photo and his coat is nowhere to be seen. I think I’ll have to give two grades for this one.

Style grade (no scarf):

60 Style grade (with scarf): 50

Yolmer Sánchez

Yolmer takes a pretty standard route for a gala and does it some justice. There’s a reason tuxes are the go-to, and so he’s got a pretty high floor, but, with the exception of his lapel pin, he doesn’t nail any of the details — black tie isn’t the right time for loafers without socks, his jacket is just dying for a pocket square, that sleeve looks too long, notch lapels are never right for a tux, he’s wearing a plain white shirt. Easy stuff to fix, but still a lot to work on.

Style grade: 45

According to @jasonbenetti, tonight’s game show prize is @TimAnderson7’s jacket. #CWSBeyondTheDiamond pic.twitter.com/OXrrmAsHSR

— White Sox Charities (@soxcharities) April 11, 2018

Tim Anderson

I…don’t even know what to call that fabric. Technobrocade? It’s a very bold decision and could very easily have gone totally off the rails. It’s a testament to Timmy nailing seemingly every other detail in the outfit that I’m not particularly concerned about the very odd choice. The jacket fit is about perfect, the contrast shawl lapels were 100% the way to go, the studs in the shirt contrast very nicely, the short pants / no socks / loud loafers look fits the jacket vibe to a t, the puff of the handkerchief in the breast pocket is *chef kissing fingers*. He starts with a very bold jacket — that I don’t love — but gets the fit right and has enough sprezzatura to bring the whole thing home. Bravo, Tim! You get best-dressed.

Style grade: 70

Lead Photo via Chicago White Sox Twitter

Adam Engel and Nicky Delmonico mirror each other in many ways — long shots (Engel a 19th rounder, Delmonico on his second organization after a trip to rehab) whose performances outshone their pedigree, hoping that their one obvious strength (Engel’s athleticism, Delmonico’s hitting ability) played up enough to mask their clear drawbacks (Engel’s bat, Delmonico’s glove).

In other words, the sorts of guys you don’t mind giving some playing time to in a rebuilding year.

It went pretty well for Delmonico. At a high level, he graded out at about a win above replacement in 166 plate appearances according to the various metrics, which is pretty good! He achieved his .295 tAV in a fairly promising manner, with a 13.9 percent walk rate and 18.7 percent strikeout rate, each on the good side of league average, and a .277 BABIP, while not embarrassing himself in left field (FRAA even has him above average in the field). Even assuming some regression, that start ought to be enough to get him an extended look in left field in 2018. Not bad, for a guy who didn’t make the BP Annual last year.

Looking at the details, though, it was a lot better than “not bad.” It’s a mistake to presume we know players, especially young ones, but it’s hard to be anything other than excited for a guy who beat addiction having one of the best starts to a career of any player in franchise history; it’s even harder given Delmonico’s friendly, telegenic air and clear excitement to be in the bigs. It remains to be seen if he can really stick in left, or if the bat is for real, but he’ll always have this second half. Given where he started, he might have done better relative to expectations than anyone in the organization this year.

It didn’t go so well for Engel, however. The metrics liked the defense less than the eye test did, as he was below average by DRS, UZR, and FRAA (though above average according to MLBAM’s new catch probability/outs above average stats). There wasn’t any dispute about the quality of his offense; a tAV of .199 and a nearly 35 percent K rate tends to remove all doubt.

The all-in-one metrics had him slightly below replacement, and that seems about right. It’s not a guarantee that he’ll improve with the bat, but it’s not unlikely, either — he doesn’t have the profile of a guy who’d be locked in immediately, and you’d expect a BABIP uptick (.247 isn’t sustainable for anyone, much less a burner like Engel). He probably needs to figure it out quickly, or he risks losing a step on defense (a real concern for a guy turning 26 whose carrying tool is his speed), getting overtaken by a different White Sox project, or both.

If he can fend off Leury Garcia et al. for playing time, and more plate appearances help him improve as they have at other levels, and those improvements give him a little boost on offense, then he’s probably a decent, glove-heavy fourth outfielder for the next few years. That’s not a sexy outcome, and he will have to improve to get there, but it’s still pretty good for a 19th rounder. And hey, 336 PA would have been DeWayne Wise’s career high.

Lead Photo Credit: Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports

This was my third time in attendance, and Hahn’s talk was a cut above those of the past GM presenters. While he obviously wasn’t going to veer into the territory of trade secrets, he was more willing to relate anecdotes that give some flavor of how he approaches his job than the other GMs I’ve seen speak have been. A dump of my notes from the 45 minute talk:

• Hahn said that the first offer they were willing to accept for Jose Quintana didn’t come from the Cubs, but once they had one he quickly moved to see if Theo Epstein was interested in making the deal. He mentioned having forgotten the typical start time for Sunday Cubs games and texting to offer some starting pitching … right after Jon Lester had given up 10 runs. Epstein didn’t take it too personally, it seems.
• He expressed a lot of skepticism about teams that are willing to put a single number valuation on a player (whether veteran or prospect), saying he thinks there’s too much uncertainty and too many different player profiles for him to take such ratings particularly seriously. He said it’s frustrating to hear in trade talks that “this player is worth $100 million and my prospect is worth $120 million, so there’s no way we’re doing this deal.”
• He praised the quality of public scouting, and said the greater attention paid to prospects has made his job harder, as both fans and ownership are more attached to their prospects and accordingly skeptical of dealing them. That’s something I hadn’t heard before, and has a ring of truth to it, but I’m mostly relaying it because I like the mental image of Jerry Reinsdorf hitting refresh every thirty seconds to see how many Sox made the BP Midseason Top 50.
• He told a very funny story about dealing with A.J. Preller that David Laurila wrote up at FanGraphs.
• Hahn mentioned multiple times using scouts as a data source, i.e. evaluating players in part not just by how much the scouts like them but which scouts and how they’ve done with similar players in the past. This isn’t a novel idea by any means, but given the amount of skepticism that’s been directed toward White Sox scouts both pro and amateur over the past few years it’s good to see them be introspective. (It’s also a classic example of an analytical project probably every team has done that’s impossible to do with public data.)
• With respect to Statcast, Hahn mentioned that they’re still working out what’s useful from the reams of data, but mentioned he thought their analytical advantages were with respect to “foot speed and defense.” I’m not sure what he’s alluding to with respect to speed (though their current major league roster has a lot more than past iterations), but the point about defense does align with the White Sox going from 21st to 15th to fifth in shifts over the last three years, per Fangraphs.
• Hahn referred to the White Sox as a “mid-upper-small market team.” I don’t know what he meant by that.
• As made the rounds on Twitter and in some beat writer reports, Hahn casually but pointedly suggested Reynaldo Lopez would be starting Friday against the Royals. He said he’d done everything they asked, but they thought it was unfair to have him make his major league debut against either the Red Sox (on the road) or the Astros. That’s a good point, but then again he didn’t have to pay good money on Saturday night to see James Shields give up 4 runs in 6 innings and still lower his ERA.
• It’s nothing new, but Hahn emphasized Don Cooper and Herm Schneider’s importance to the organization repeatedly, saying they keep pitchers healthy and effective, dictate development strategy for the entire organization, and serve as a lure for pitchers who realize they could use some help. He jokingly said it helped cancel out the advantages that a team like the Padres gets from a warm climate and a pitcher’s park.
• Hahn explained the Sox reputation as a team opposed to leaks by saying he thinks it makes it harder to make deals and that he hates what leaked trade discussions do to a player.

Other White Sox-related notes from the weekend:

• Ben Cherington called Hahn “one of the smartest and best guys in baseball.”
• Julia Prusaczyk, an MLBAM intern, presented on modeling sacrifice flies using Statcast data, including a table showing Avisail Garcia as being the seventh hardest throwing outfielder in the big leagues.
• Tyler Clippard showed up on a couple leaderboards, being the eighth most distinctive right-handed pitcher in 2016 per the metric Glenn Healey presented based on research he’s done with Shiyuan Zhao and Dan Brooks (which was presented on the mothership a few weeks ago). He is also the sixth worst high leverage reliever in the bigs this year, per Paul Mammino’s talk.
• Mammino also had Ronald Belisario’s 2014 season as the second worst high leverage season of the last 10 years, which only goes to show how silly it was for Chief Keef to use him as an example of getting hitters out (link has NSFW language).
• As I mentioned above, Benetti was the MC, and I’d be remiss not to mention that he did a fantastic job. As on broadcasts, he knows when to be funny and when to be serious, and made thoughtful comments all weekend without getting in anyone’s way. He also was clearly paying close attention to the talks with an eye on including the results or ways of thinking in broadcasts when opportunities arise. A couple other folks came up to me and mentioned how fortunate White Sox fans are to get him for most of the team’s games. He also teased a few games with a three man booth next year, which I’m sure will be an interesting viewing experience.

Lead Photo Credit: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

The picture isn’t much clearer than it was in March for Joses Quintana and Abreu — both are under contract for a couple more years, so they don’t have to be dealt this year. Moreover, trying to size a deadline package for a star who’s not a rental is next to impossible from the outside, since it’s much harder to rule teams in or out on a player that demands a bigger return. For better or for worse, Quintana’s tepid start and Abreu’s solid-but-spiky first six weeks don’t mean much.

For the two proper rentals on the team, the first six weeks haven’t been kind to their trade values. Melky Cabrera’s tAV of .226 would be a career-worst by 25 points, and while he’s due for a bit of a bounce back just based on BABIP luck, it’s not out of the question the power’s just gone. He probably always needed to get off to a hot start to get something more than a lotto ticket on the trade market, but barring a huge streak he’s now more likely to bring back a Nolan Sanburn than a Leury Garcia. (He’s not helped that there aren’t many contenders that need help in left field or a so-so bench bat. The Diamondbacks sort of fit the bill, but for now it’s hard to guess what shape they’ll be in at the deadline.)

The market for third basemen is at least a bit more open, with the Cardinals, Mets, and Red Sox all teams with reason for skepticism about their current situations at the hot corner and some shot at the playoff chase. (Amusingly enough, depending on how teams decide to value Melky’s switch-hitting, Todd Frazier might actually be a better left field/bench bat than Cabrera for the rest of the year.) The issue with Frazier is that there’s uncertainty for him at the hot corner — he just hasn’t been very good, though he’s got even more room for positive regression than Cabrera. While the White Sox won’t be as damaged by Frazier’s walk year slump as he likely will be, it does seem unlikely he brings back a bad piece, but they’re in better shape to get something interesting back for him than they are with Cabrera.

With the White Sox current rolling out Mike Pelfrey and Dylan Covey, it seems a little foolish to talk about trading starting pitching “depth,” but the peripherals suggest they might not have any takers anyhow — Miguel Gonzalez and Derek Holland’s respective cFIPs of 105 and 111 are pretty bad, and while Gonzalez threw a couple gems in April, neither guy has the recent track record to make him an appealing pickup at the deadline.

At least I have a couple positive nuggets to save for last, which is that the White Sox bullpen has been dominant thus far. Before Tuesday’s game against the Angels, David Robertson, Tommy Kahnle, and Anthony Swarzak were each in the top 30 in all of baseball by cFIP, and each of them (along with Nate Jones, if he gets well soon) are likely available to any contender. Right now it’d almost be more surprising if the Nationals didn’t trade for Robertson, but having three or four high-end relievers to deal, encompassing a range of contract situations and track records, means the White Sox are sitting somewhat pretty in this regard. None of the quartet will bring back what Andrew Miller or Aroldis Chapman did last season, but in Kahnle and Swarzak the White Sox appear to have found some lottery tickets worth cashing in (either for innings or in trade), and Jones and Robertson have good pedigrees that might attract a premium. It’s still early, but it’s a couple rays of sunshine peeking through the otherwise overcast trade outlook.

Lead Photo Credit: Caylor Arnold-USA TODAY Sports

So what might that regression look like? Thankfully, it’s not so hard to pick a couple assumptions and recalculate his batting line (currently .423/.483/.654) to see how a less fortunate Garcia would have done in April. As I see it, we have a few main numbers we can play with: BB%, K%, HR%, BABIP, and the outcomes within the hits on balls in play. Let’s pull some levers.

I’m going to be generous to Garcia and assume that he has actually improved his plate discipline, increasing his walk rate to 8.6 percent (up a point from last year) and dropping his K% nearly 5 percent to 20.7. I’m also going to assume that his BABIP, when it declines from its current .514, will land at .320, which is on the high end of plausible and is the number he posted in 2015. Right now, that’s the equivalent of taking seven singles and turning them into outs.

There’s some luck involved in home runs, too. Garcia has three homers in 58 PA, a 5.2 percent HR rate. Let’s make one of those into an out; that leaves a 3.4 percent home run rate, which is still a large tick up from his career rate, but a more plausible one. If we strip out only the obvious luck (i.e., seven singles and a homer) from Avi’s slash line and give him all the credit for the rest, the slash line is now .270/.345/.442.

That line is almost exactly Willson Contreras’s preseason PECOTA line, which works out to a .280 tAV. A .280 tAV and a bad glove in right field is 2016 Kole Calhoun, or 1.7 WARP. On the one hand, that’s pretty good for a guy with 1.3 WARP in 1,550 career plate appearances coming into the season; on the other hand, if the incredibly optimistic take on your age 26 breakout season only gets you that far…you might be Avisail Garcia.

I hope he keeps it up, even in a lost season, because positive surprises are nice, and maybe he brings something back in a trade. In the much more likely event that he doesn’t keep mashing, this ought to be his last round with the White Sox (if the pattern is for the Sox to hold onto guys one year past their sell date, it matches him perfectly), but at least he’ll have had that nice, nice start to the season.

Lead Photo Credit: Noah K. Murray-USA TODAY Sports

The idea that a rebuilding team doesn’t need depth doesn’t hold in the same way for starting pitching. No matter how you slice it, a team needs to get at least 850 innings or so from its starters in a year. If it has trouble picking that many up then there’s a likely increase in bullpen injury risk from overuse — plus whatever psychic toll that many four-hour blowouts has on fans and players.

In the same way that some in this space were critical of the White Sox failure to bring in a veteran catcher who could perhaps stabilize the pitching staff and prevent catastrophe in the event of Omar Narvaez playing like PECOTA expects, there’s some room for concern — not a ton, but some — that there’s no backup plan if something befalls the Sox rotation.

This has become even more apparent after last week’s revelation that Carlos Rodon may start the season on the disabled list. Even before that injury, each of the other four starters breaking camp with the major league club either are likely to be traded (Jose Quintana, Miguel Gonzalez), have injury concerns above even a normal pitcher (Gonzalez, Derek Holland), or are quite possibly finished (Holland and Big Inning James Shields).

While the Sox have Carson Fulmer, Lucas Giolito, and Reynaldo Lopez waiting in the wings, nobody really wants to see them called up earlier than planned because Shields gets brutally mauled by a gopher. As Rick Hahn put it last week:

“You don’t want anyone young or any prospect pushing the issue because there is a need in Chicago. What dictates when a player is in Chicago is going to be his ability to succeed in Chicago, as opposed to a need in Chicago.”

Not counting the prospects, the next set of starters on the depth chart are a pretty unsightly batch, even by the standards of a team that cycled through Mat Latos, John Danks, Erik Johnson, and Anthony Ranaudo last season. There’s nobody bringing even the guarantee of a Scott Carroll or a Dylan Axelrod.

There’s Tyler Danish, who’s young, still has some upside, and didn’t acquit himself last year in his emergency call-up. (Hahn suggested Danish is their most likely option.) While Rule 5 pick Dylan Covey has started in the past, he’s never pitched above Double-A, and it’s not clear he’ll break camp with the team anyhow. Chris Volstad is 30 and posted an ERA close to 5 in Charlotte last year; Cory Leubke is 32 and hasn’t started anywhere in years. (There’s also the free agent market, in case you wanted an even sadder end to John Danks’s tenure with the franchise.)

Bluntly, none of those seem like good bets to make more than one start in April or May without the wheels falling off, but that doesn’t make a real catastrophe particularly likely. (It wouldn’t take a “Homer at the Bat” level collapse, but it does require at least two or three players becoming totally unusable.) Even if one or two of the front five take a hit, one of the backup options should be able to do enough to merit a couple of turns; if nothing else, giving each of the four listed above a start or two soaks up enough turns through the rotation to take care of any early DL stints. Thinking more broadly, if none of Fulmer, Giolito, and Lopez is ready by mid-June then the organization has bigger problems to worry about.

Even before Rodon went down, I was concerned about their having to rush prospects. Hopefully — maybe — if the rebuild goes as planned there can be a few years’ hiatus on articles referring to a “crippling lack of depth” on either side of the ball; God knows the White Sox have run that trope into the ground this decade.

Lead Photo Credit: Ken Blaze/USA Today Sports Images

The first one is the simplest: any of Adam Eaton, Frazier, Tyler Saladino, and Tim Anderson might lead the team, with the standings currently sitting at 12, 11, 11, and 10, respectively. As I wrote about in June, if Frazier leads the team in swipes this year, he’ll be the first player to lead the team in both home runs and steals since Jorge Orta in 1976, and if he finishes with 38 or more home runs, no player in franchise history will have had a season with more steals and more homers. He’d also be the first third baseman to lead the White Sox in steals since Don Buford in 1967 (The White Sox haven’t had too many players like Frazier in their history).

With the team leader likely to land in the area of 15 steals, that would also be a low-water mark for recent White Sox history, as the last White Sox team without a player with 15 steals was in 1970. Last year’s squad, led by Eaton’s 18, tied with the 2003 Sox, paced by Carlos Lee, for the previous diminutive superlative in the Reinsdorf Era.

Of course, raw stolen bases relate more to excitement than they do to team quality, since they don’t adjust for pickoffs and caught stealing. Using BP’s stolen base runs stat, the White Sox are sitting at about 1.2 runs above average, buoyed by Anderson (+1.1) and Frazier (+0.9) and brought down by the outfield quadrumvirate of Eaton, Austin Jackson, J.B. Shuck, and Avisail Garcia, each in the -0.2 to -0.4 range. (FanGraphs, which measures base-stealing differently—it penalizes players for not attempting steals at all if they’re on base—has the Sox below average overall, though still led by Anderson and Frazier.)

Astonishingly, this would be the first White Sox season above water by BP’s SBR since 2003; the thirteen consecutive seasons below average is the longest such streak in baseball history. (The streak is the same with FanGraphs’ metric, though with a year at exactly average in 2013.) In the grand scheme of things, that’s not very meaningful; in this era and in this park, the White Sox probably get more out of power bats than out of speedsters, and their roster construction has reflected that.

Regardless, at the tail end of a season that has seemed like a rehash of White Sox cliches—excellent pitching brought down by a handful of black holes in the lineup—it’s nice to see them break out of one long-term holding pattern. If that presages Anderson’s role in ending some other current ongoing ignominies, like the decade-plus stretch without a successful drafted position player or the eight-year playoff drought, then maybe there’s hope for a more exciting 2017.

Numbers via Baseball Prospectus, Baseball-Reference, FanGraphs, and the Lahman database. Code can be found here.

Lead Image Credit: Jordan Johnson // USA Today Sports Images

Getting the practical side of things out of the way: with the White Sox not disclosing the terms of the deal, we’re forced to guess at the exact magnitude, but the number getting kicked around was $88 million, or which would be a bit less than $7 million per year. That’s about twice what they were getting from U.S. Cellular, though the opacity of the deals (what the actual yearly rate on the current deal was, what sort of buy-out was involved, what the switching costs are) means there’s some uncertainty.

If that $3 million in marginal gain or so goes to baseball ops, it’s neither hugely substantial nor a drop in the bucket. It’s filling a roster spot with a minor contributor like Alex Avila or Zach Duke, or it’s a few new front office personnel and a couple extra bonuses to international free agents. Of course, the White Sox have still never given out a $70 million contract and have refused to spend either on free agency or player development, so it’s hard to justify expecting them to get much out of this money, but at least it shouldn’t reduce their spending. The only unambiguous upside to this deal is that some of it will go to the state to replace the rent the White Sox don’t pay, slightly reducing the ongoing sting of seeing taxpayer money spent on a profitable private enterprise–and this enterprise in particular.

The downside manifests in less tangible ways. With the tacky name and unfortunately apropos logo, the White Sox are the butt of national jokes for the third time this year, following L’affaires LaRoche et Sale. Adding insult to insult, Guaranteed Rate joins fellow mortgage company stadium sponsors Quicken Loans and Ameriquest in having compliance problems in its past. The jokes won’t last 13 years, and people will figure out a nice nickname (there’s always Comiskey Park), but proper names matter—that’s why we fight about terminology regardless the subject. It’ll be a small blow every time I hear Jason Benetti read off “Guaranteed Rate Field” on the air, and a slightly larger one every time it slips into a conversation among fans. It’s especially grating when two of the other major Chicago franchises play in stadia that haven’t changed names in 90 years and the other two play in maybe the least-obtrusively sponsored stadium in sports courtesy of United’s very generic name.

It’s not a causal relationship, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the franchises that don’t have proper corporate sponsorship on the stadium—the Yankees, the Red Sox, the Cardinals, the Dodgers, even the Cubs—have stronger national profiles and greater prestige than nearly all the teams that have ceded some dignity for annual seven-figure payments. Not all traditions are worth preserving, but the ones that don’t involve corporate defacing usually are. Names that have been around decades give the franchise a touch of gravitas that the White Sox are sorely lacking.

What makes this so disappointing is that the White Sox have foregone an obvious opportunity to inexpensively stand on principle and start a new tradition. Comiskey has the history, but given the many black marks on his record, he shouldn’t be the first choice to go back on the marquee. Why would he, when the White Sox could honor someone with an even longer association with the franchise, who made a more unambiguously positive impact on the game, who’s been largely underappreciated on a national level? One whose name wouldn’t represent either corporate greed nor an owner’s egotism, but instead a recognition that the players are the reason the game means anything to anyone? Sadly, it seems like a pipe dream to think that at some point in my life I’ll go back to Chicago and get to see a game at Minnie Minoso Stadium.

Lead Image Credit: David Banks // USA Today Sports Images

In the interest of full disclosure: Baseball Prospectus is a prominent sponsor of Saberseminar; Saberseminar is co-organized by Dan Brooks, a member of the BP stats team; several of the talks were given by people currently or formerly employed by Baseball Prospectus; and I presented research at a past iteration of the conference.

–Glenn Healey presented some research regarding expected runs based on quality of contact–i.e. launch angle and exit speed–they were largely summaries of two articles he published at the Hardball Times earlier this year. He showed results relying on data from the 2014 season, and two White Sox showed up as players who outperformed expectations given their quality of contact: Adam Eaton and Jose Abreu. Given that most players who outperform expectations are either fast, lucky, or both, Abreu’s presence on that list was a bit alarming, As was discussed at some length at the time, a lot of his home runs barely cleared the wall, which is reflected in Healey’s numbers. Chris Sale also clocked in as the fourth-best pitcher in terms of contact allowed, though this skill is generally much less persistent than the analogous trait for hitters.

–One of the nice things about Saberseminar is that they give time for a half dozen or so talks from students or otherwise non-established researchers, and White Sox popped up in a few of those talks. The most prominent appearance occurred in Jenna Weinstein, Nick Dulchin, and Tyler Graham’s research, which involved using game theory to model which pitches hitters should look for at the plate. They used Sale as one of their examples, and concluded–using last year’s data–that it made sense for a hitter to sit changeup about 90 percent of the time; their model suggested similar tactics toward basically every pitcher that throws an offspeed pitch. Given the brevity of the presentation and the corresponding lack of explanation of some pivotal aspects of their model, I’m taking those numbers with a pound of salt, but it was interesting to see in light of the recurring discussions this year regarding Sale’s decreased use of his changeup.

–Relatedly, Harry Pavlidis and Jonathan Judge of the BP stats team presented some research they’ve been doing on game calling. No White Sox showed up on their lists of worst or best game callers in 2015, but part of their research involved assessing what kinds of pitches a catcher calls for, and last year Tyler Flowers had a greater tendency toward calling non-fastballs than any other catcher in the league. Food for thought from a work-in-progress model, if hard to translate into actionable insight.

–The student talk that closed the conference, given by a recent grad named Jeb Clarke, sought to identify managers whose teams performed worse than the quality of their players would suggest. The methodology was rather sketchy and focused on very broad effects, and I think most White Sox fans would agree that not having Robin Ventura in the bottom fifth of manager quality over the last five years is a sign that the model needs substantial improvement. Terry Collins was rated the worst manager in baseball, though, so that’s a small win for the model.

–Ben Jedlovec of Baseball Info Solutions presented some new data they’ve begun collecting recently on check swings, broken bats, and bunts pulled back. The cover photo of his talk was a picture of Gordon Beckham doing both of the former two on the same pitch in 2012, but nobody from the White Sox showed up on any of his leaderboards for those two stats. For bunts pulled back, which Baseball Info Solutions has only computed for this year, Melky Cabrera is seventh in the majors by count with 31. By rate, he’s second, having pulled back 86 percent of the time he’s shown bunt. (Angel Pagan is at 90 percent, but in substantially fewer attempts.) As with the Flowers game calling statistic, it’s not clearly meaningful but it’s still somewhat interesting.

–Scott Powers, a doctoral candidate in statistics at Stanford, gave one of the stronger student presentations, using a regression model to estimate hitters’ and pitchers’ distributions of vertical launch angle and exit speed after controlling for other factors. Todd Frazier has the highest estimated variation in his launch angle of any hitter in the league, barely edging out Kevin Plawecki, Maikel Franco, and Kevin Kiermaier. Given that popups have launch angles very different from most other batted balls, I suspect that’s the main driving factor there, as Frazier is within 0.1 percent of the major-league lead in pop-up rate and Plawecki’s, Franco’s, and Kiermaier’s rates are all solidly above-average in that area as well. He was one of the few speakers to post his slides, which can be found here.

–A number of teams had baseball operationss representatives at the conference, including at least the Tigers, Indians, Cubs, Red Sox, Brewers, and Phillies, plus presumably other teams whose analysts were either incognito or simply went unrecognized. Anyone from the White Sox fell into the latter category, befitting the near-total opacity of their baseball ops department.

–There was a live taping of Effectively Wild that had a cameo from the alphabetically superlative David Aardsma, a longtime former MLB reliever who spent one year on the South side. He has a very deadpan sense of humor in conversation.

–Each year there are a number of speakers from the Red Sox front office, which is unsurprising, since the conference is in Boston and raises money for the Jimmy Fund. They mostly talk about the Red Sox, and they don’t typically divulge much (for obvious reasons), but two things they said merit mentioning here. The first came from Dave Dombrowski, who started his career in the White Sox front office; as he was going through the positions he’d held throughout his career, he got (deserved) laughs simply for mentioning that Hawk Harrelson had once been the White Sox GM. Not the finest hour for this franchise.

–The other came from Tom Tippett, Senior Baseball Analyst for the Red Sox, who talked about some of his memories of the 2011 Red Sox. He mentioned a nugget I’d forgotten, which was that the Red Sox were discussing acquiring Bruce Chen to pitch a one-game playoff if they’d made it that far, as he was a decent pitcher who’d cleared waivers and whose deal was about to be up. Of course, the only reason Chen looked decent was that he ran up a 1.89 ERA in 5 starts against the White Sox, as opposed to his 4.20 ERA against other opponents. It’s nice to know some things never seem to change.

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