Lead Photo Credit: Jim Young-USA TODAY Sports

2. This makes two positive nights at the plate in a row for Moncada who had a pair of very hard-hit doubles, and nearly had a third double in the second inning. Unfortunately, Indians’ left fielder Michael Brantley made a nice running catch on the warning track in deep left field to turn the line drive into a loud out. Moncada has drawn the ire of a lot of White Sox fans in recent weeks with his struggles since coming off the DL, so it’s important to keep context in mind when evaluating his season’s work. He entered last night’s game as a league average hitter, .257 TAv, at a premium defensive position, all while starting the season at less than 23 years of age. Moncada’s struggles with strikeouts were always going to yield lean periods in the early part of his career, as he works to iron out those issues. Expectations for Moncada have always been sky high, but not every prospect is going to be Kris Bryant right away. Moncada is still going to learn and develop over the rest of this year, and most likely the next couple of years, so let’s table the “bust” talk for say, two to three years, and revisit the issue after the 2021 season. Let’s not forget how well Moncada was playing before his DL stint and also remember that Moncada still has some of the best athleticism in the Majors.  I believe that is eventually going to translate into above average production at the plate.

3. Speaking of unfinished products, the full Carlos Rodon Experience was on display Tuesday night in Cleveland. His slider was electric when he was getting ahead in the count and locating it well, but Rodon’s control was largely erratic and that led to mixed results on the evening. Rodon may have only walked two Cleveland batters (and hit another), but after the first inning, he really wasn’t hitting his spots and looked like he was fighting his own mechanics all night. Still, Rodon managed to make it through 6 1/3 innings allowing only four runs, all of which came in the second inning. Rodon’s ability to go so deep into the game after throwing 46 pitches in the first two innings is really a testament to how good his stuff is, even when he doesn’t have pinpoint control. It seems like this has been said for years now, but the sky is the limit for Rodon if he can harness his control. Unfortunately, Rodon hasn’t been able to do so yet in his career for a variety of reasons. Hopefully he can stay healthy the rest of the season and settle into a grove and finally translate more of his potential into performance.

4. The White Sox had no answer, again, for Mike Clevinger. Once he got through a rocky first inning, Clevinger threw it into cruise control and dominated into the eighth inning. Just five days after he threw seven innings allowing only two runs while striking out eleven White Sox batters, he delivered 7 2/3 innings and struck out ten while allowing only one run. Clevinger truly embodies the “surprise contributor” as a player who has developed into a very solid MLB starter while never being ranked as a top MLB prospect. Hopefully the White Sox can find their own Mike Clevinger over the next couple of seasons, as teams generally need players like this to help support upswings in their competitive cycles.

5. In the third inning, Steve Stone and Jason Benetti started talking about the first major trade of the season, a deal that sent Kansas City Royals’ reliever Kelvin Herrera to the Washington Nationals for a trio of prospects. Stone opined that the Royals were smart to deal Herrera earlier in the season, increasing the amount of time the Nationals would benefit from adding a strong reliever to their bullpen. Stone also added that he thought the Herrera trade may jump start the trade market and lead to more deals in the coming weeks. Herrera is probably better than any reliever on the White Sox, but it’s encouraging to see the Nationals give up a couple of decent prospects for a bullpen upgrade. The White Sox will likely have a few veteran relievers available for trade, most notably Joakim Soria, who is having a very good year. It’s unlikely that any reliever brings back a top prospect, but if the White Sox are able to hit on just one prospect they bring in by trading some of the veterans on this squad, they could significantly improve the long-term outlook of the franchise. In the meantime, I’ll continue to root for positive contributions from the veterans while they’re still on the White Sox and hope that they can pass on valuable lessons to the younger players.

With the loss, the White Sox fall to 24-48 on the season. Up next is the series finale against Cleveland featuring Reynaldo Lopez and Corey Kluber.

Lead Image Credit: Winslow Townson-USA TODAY Sports

2. Moncada’s two runs were enough support for Reynaldo Lopez, who needed 106 pitches to get through seven scoreless innings. Lopez’s start was once again something of an enigma as he struck out only four batters while also walking four Twins.  Lopez got 11 swinging strikes on the day (10.4 percent), which is just below the league average (10.6 percent) in that department. Lopez didn’t give up any runs in large part because very few Twins were able to put good swings on the baseball.  Yes, you’d absolutely like to see more strikeouts and fewer walks, but we need to get enjoyment from this season where we can and it is really fun to watch a young starting pitcher throw up goose eggs on the scoreboard against a division rival, and there are certainly other factors at work which are working against Lopez in each of his starts, but more on that later.

3. The two runs, however, were not enough support for the White Sox bullpen. Nate Jones came into the game in the eighth inning and retired the first two batters he saw. Jones then proceeded to allow a “hit” (a generous scoring decision) to Brian Dozier, a walk to Eddie Rosario, a laser single to Miguel Sano which scored the first Twins run, and finally the decisive blow, a three run home run to old friend Eduardo Escobar.  Dozier’s single was a sharply-hit grounder that bounced off of Yolmer Sanchez’s glove. Sanchez then recovered the ball with a nifty barehanded grab, but was unable to get the ball over to first on a fly and Abreu could not pick it out of the dirt, which opened the floodgates for the Twins. Based on the very solid defense we typically see from Sanchez, I’m sure he’ll tell you he should have made that play. Alas, it was not meant to be.

4. In the top of the sixth inning, the White Sox broadcast showed a highlight of Giancarlo Stanton hitting a monstrous home run off of Mike Fiers. The home run itself is nothing new for Stanton, but what was remarkable about it was that it came after Fiers had drilled Stanton with a pitch earlier in the game. This led to an enjoyable dialogue between Jason Benetti and Steve Stone in which Stone revealed that he was not a fan of Major League Baseball teams getting into beanball wars. I couldn’t agree more with Stone on this, and certainly do hope that MLB teams can move away from this frontier-style of justice. It’s really dangerous for the players and no one wants to see their players get hurt.

5. Calling back to No. 2, Lopez got very little help on the day from Omar Narvaez behind the plate. Narvaez has been worth a staggering -9.8 FRAA on the season and White Sox catchers have been worth nearly -15 FRAA as a unit, worst in the majors by a significant margin. Tuesday was no exception. On several occasions, Lopez threw borderline pitches that could very easily have been called strike threes, but instead were called balls because of poor catcher positioning/framing. Catcher framing has been a huge concern for the White Sox for a number of years now, and I certainly hope that they can find a catcher in the near future that can accentuate their young starters instead of actively harming them on a pitch-by-pitch basis.

6. After a short recess, the White Sox and Twins were back at it again for game two of their doubleheader. The Sox jumped all over Twins starter Zack Littell, who was making his Major League debut, and put up a big crooked number on the scoreboard with four runs in the first inning. Abreu kept up his hot hitting with a two-run blast. Tim Anderson got his first hit of the day with a double, Kevan Smith (welcome back!) drove in Anderson with a single and Adam Engel kept the party pumping with a line shot over left-fielder Eddie Rosario’s head to score smith.  Lucas Giolito followed up the big first inning by getting the Twins to go 1-2-3 in the bottom of the first. Why can’t the entire game be made out of the first inning?

7. Speaking of Engel, he’s really been hitting the ball well as of late. Since his OPS hit its season low of .396(!) on April 25, Engel has put together 111 plate appearances with a triple slash line of .275/.321/.422. His OPS on the season is now up to .621.  Engel’s speed defense has always been his calling card with the big league club and his bat an afterthought, but it’s nice to see him start to come around with the bat and make the most of his extended opportunity on the big league club.  When the White Sox are competitive again, they’ll need players like the more recent version of Engel to provide positive value off of the bench and guard against season-sinking injury replacements like the J.B. Shuck experiment.

8. As with most Giolito starts this season, I was skeptical that four runs would be enough for the White Sox to have the lead after Giolito departed. I ended up being wrong, but Giolito was not as sharp as his two runs allowed over six innings would indicate. He got some batted ball luck to get out of trouble in the second inning after he allowed the first two batters to reach, and then he benefitted greatly from a Twins base running blunder in the third. Eddie Rosario sent a towering fly ball to right field with no outs and runners on first and second base. Neither of the runners nor White Sox right fielder, Trayce Thompson, seemed to be able to pick up the baseball which ended up hitting the top of the right field wall. The runners were only able to advance one base and Sano bounced Giolito’s next pitch to short for an incredibly well timed double play. The Twins would get one run on the double play and Escobar would drive in the remaining runner on base with a double to the left-center gap.  Giolito may have only walked two Twins on the evening, but his control was largely erratic, as he threw only 56 of 95 pitches for strikes. While it’s good to see Giolito make it through six innings allowing only two runs, it was mostly lipstick on a pig. At some point he needs to limit the amount of solid contact he is giving up and start striking out more batters than he walks (he only got one strike out over the six innings) if he’s going to see his ERA fall significantly from its 7.08 mark.

10. Sanchez continues to have a very solid season at the plate. He added another double in the top of the fourth inning that drove in two more runs and chased Littell from the game. Sanchez doesn’t get the hype that Moncada or Anderson do, but he may very well be a great fit for the next White Sox contender and watching him on a nightly basis continues to be very enjoyable.

Sanchez’s double in the fourth was actually the last run scoring plate appearance of the game for the White Sox as their bats would fall silent against the Twins bullpen. Luckily enough for everyone invested in White Sox baseball, six runs would be enough as the White Sox took the nightcap in the doubleheader, 6-3. Chris Volstad was able to throw a scoreless seventh, and four relievers, Jace Fry, Bruce Rondon, Luis Avilan, and Joakim Soria, combined to allow only one run in the bottom of the eighth inning. Soria would stay on for the ninth, where the Twins would get runners on the corners with two outs, but he retired the final batter to preserve the win.  With the split, the White Sox start an amazing 21-games-in-20-nights streak of baseball on a relatively positive note. Next up is another match-up with the Twins. The probable starters are Jake Odorizzi and Hector Santiago.

11. As a bonus item, it was nice to see both the Twins and the White Sox wear their Jackie Robinson uniforms in the opener of the doubleheader.  The first game, of course, was a make-up game from the last time the White Sox traveled to Minnesota and were treated to some extended time off because of the early April snow. The two teams would have worn their Robinson jerseys on the original scheduled date, so I’m glad they decided to sport them again today to honor one of the most important players in MLB history.

Lead Photo Credit: Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports

For instance, Jose Abreu is like the Sun. His steadying presence and warmth gives hope and life to the Earth (White Sox Fans). Day-in and day-out, Abreu is there, working hard to outshine all the other stars in the galaxy, constantly reminding us that he’s going to be here tomorrow when things finally get better.

Yoan Moncada is like the Blue Giant, Rigel. The brightest star in the constellation of Orion. A star capable of producing as much as 120,000 times the luminosity output of the sun. But also a dangerous and volatile star that may vaporize itself completely (because of its large K-rate) and wipe out everything in its sector of the galaxy.

Carson Fulmer is…well, Carson Fulmer is currently like the hypothetical Brown Dwarf star, Nemesis, that sits at the edge of our solar system, occasionally flinging comets and asteroids toward the inner planets with limited accuracy. Every now and then, an asteroid is so wild that it crashes into the Earth and ends 90% of life on the planet (bye-bye dinosaurs), but most of the time the star just sits there, too dim to see from Earth, needing to refine its aim and make sure it’s only throwing its asteroids into deep space.

All this introduction brings me to the White Sox player I want to talk about today: Yolmer Sanchez. Sanchez has repeatedly been a bright spot on an otherwise dim team. A little over a week ago, he had a big night against the Orioles, tallying three hits, including the go-ahead single in the eighth inning.  Yesterday, the White Sox were only able to muster 4 hits off of Indians starter Mike Clevenger, but, of course, Yolmer was one of them, hitting a triple and raising his slash line to a very solid .280/.316/.415 on the season, good enough for a TAv of .254. Aside from Yolmer’s value as a positive contributor in the clubhouse (and excellent Gatorade user), it seems like he’s been on the White Sox forever, but he won’t turn 26 until late June.  Throw in a solid bat, and most importantly, his defensive versatility, and you have potentially a very valuable player to future White Sox teams. So many would-be contenders see their seasons get derailed by injuries to important players. The major league baseball season is a grind, and rarely do players make it all the way through the whole year without bumps and bruises. This is why teams need a guy like Yolmer, who can cover multiple positions and provide positive value, instead of replacement or below replacement value, in times of need. Players like Yolmer help steady teams when everything appears ready to collapse.

That’s why Yolmer is the Moon of tomorrow’s White Sox. The Moon is incredibly important to the Earth. Its gravitational pull steadies the Earth’s own axial tilt and prevents sections of the Earth from spending decades in ice ages that would wipe out life as we know it. Without the Moon, the Earth may not have ever developed life nor been able to sustain it.

A player like Sanchez helps fill a void when a star goes down and prevents a black hole from forming and destroying the Earth. Yolmer may not provide the energy that the Sun does, and he doesn’t shine as bright as Rigel, but Yolmer adds stability, which is incredibly important for any team trying to compete. As Ben Franklin once said: “a small leak will sink a great ship.” We’ve seen past White Sox teams sink to the very bottom of the ocean because they’ve had no depth. In 2016, Austin Jackson went down and the White Sox had to turn to JB Shuck to horrific results. In 2012 Brent Morel was very bad and the White Sox had to turn first to the shell of Orlando Hudson (yikes) before trading for what was left in Kevin Youkilis’ bat. However, with Yolmer in the fold, the White Sox can rest a little easier knowing they have injury insurance for any of their future infielders. There’s still a long way to go to get back to the playoffs, but having a player like Yolmer helps ensure that the White Sox can sustain life once they find a way to create it. With this season as bleak as it has been, it’s necessary to recognize some of the small victories the White Sox find along the way. Sanchez has turned himself into one of those victories, and we should all take a little time to appreciate what he has done and will do for the White Sox.

Lead Image Credit: Mike DiNovo-USA TODAY Sports

The White Sox chose not to spend exuberantly on their last contention cycle and they paid the price (no pun intended) for it by missing the playoffs in both 2015 and 2016.  Knowing that the White Sox lacked talent in their farm system during those years, I consistently advocated that the White Sox should add talent to their rosters through top-tier free agent acquisitions. The White Sox didn’t have prospect capital to improve the team, but they did have cash to utilize and the easiest way to use that cash and improve the team is not just free agency, but the most talented free agents available.  But by now, if you haven’t figured it out, it’s clear the White Sox are particularly allergic to large free agent acquisitions — the evidence is abundant. The White Sox are one of very few teams to have never given out a $100 million contract to a free agent. In 2015, the White Sox passed on getting involved in free agent derbies for top free agents like Max Scherzer and Nelson Cruz, instead turning their focus to more modest acquisitions. When presented with the opportunity to greatly upgrade their club’s outfield before the 2016 season the White Sox again passed on adding top free agents like Yoenis Cespedes, Justin Upton, or Dexter Fowler because they didn’t see enough value in the signings. And Rick Hahn has even gone on record saying that free agency is where teams see the worst return on investment.  You start to add all of these things together and it becomes clear that the White Sox would prefer to avoid free agency as much as possible and looking to the future, expecting the White Sox to add a top-tier player, say Bryce Harper, to their team through free agency is a fool’s errand.

So if the White Sox continue to shut themselves off from free agency as a vector for talent, they need to find other ways to invest in the team. They started on that path with a big amateur free agent acquisition in Luis Robert (though the total monetary cost of that move was mitigated by a reduced team payroll, which continued throughout the 2017 season), but now they need to continue following that mold to help the team.  Luckily, the Giancarlo Stanton trade has created an opportunity for the White Sox of all teams.

The Yankees came into the 2017-2018 offseason prioritizing trimming the payroll below the luxury tax. They didn’t anticipate acquiring Stanton from the Marlins, but Stanton wasn’t willing to go to the St. Louis Cardinals or San Francisco Giants, leaving very few teams as options for his services. When the Yankees realized the marginal cost that they would have to pay to acquire such a talented player (he was worth an amazing 8.5 WARP last season and has averaged moer than 6 WARP during the last four seasons) they couldn’t help but jump at the opportunity. This maneuver, while very valuable in a baseball sense, pushed their payroll to greater heights and has put more pressure on them to move other contracts off of the roster.  Their first move to relieve this pressure was to trade Chase Headley along with pitcher Bryan Mitchell to the Padres for non-prospect Jabari Blash.  The Padres effectively bought Mitchell by taking on Chase Headley and this is exactly what I propose the White Sox do for another Yankee: Jacoby Ellsbury.

Over at Fangraphs, Travis Sawchik wrote about Ellsbury and his estimated negative surplus value to the Yankees as a player due nearly $70 million, including his contract buyout, over the next 3 years. Sawchik concluded that a prospect like Clint Frazier, Baseball Prospectus’s 16th ranked prospect entering the 2017 season, would be the cost of making an Ellsbury salary dump possible. Given the additional context that Frazier, a corner outfielder, is now blocked on the Yankees by both Aaron Judge, the newly acquired Stanton, and even the perfectly solid Brett Gardner, one has to believe the Yankees would be willing to part with him if an opportunity to improve their club’s financial situation arose. The White Sox should absolutely be willing to provide the Yankees this opportunity.

Earlier this winter, Hahn had said the White Sox were likely going to have a payroll around $70 million. The White Sox haven’t had a payroll that low in more than a decade, 2005 to be exact. The White Sox also have incredibly limited future payroll commitments in 2019 and 2020, the last two years of Ellsbury’s contract. Suffice it to say that the White Sox would easily be able to absorb the entire Ellsbury contract without issue.  The White Sox also enter the 2018 season without a true center fielder on the roster, assuming they want to continue to deploy Leury Garcia in a super-utility role. They could use this roster vacancy as a selling point to Ellsbury who would have to waive his no-trade clause in order to be dealt, which should be the biggest impediment to the consummation of this deal. The real prize for the White Sox would be adding a prospect of Frazier’s caliber who would be under team control for six more seasons at very reasonable price, fitting perfectly into the next contention window. It’s an opportunity that’s almost too good to be true for a team that wants to compete with a modest budget and avoid massive free agent contracts. I just hope the White Sox are able to take advantage of this opportunity while they have a chance.

Lead Image Credit: Shanna Lockwood-USA TODAY Sports

The White Sox have historically favored putting all of their available resources into veteran players to increasingly poor results over the last few years. In the age of analytics, teams are getting smarter and smarter about the value of young players, in turn allowing fewer and fewer talented players to reach free agency.  When talented players did enter the free agent market, their markets were inflated due to a lack of supply in the marketplace, and with recent CBAs cutting off avenues of leveraging financial advantages elsewhere.  The White Sox were unwilling to pay this premium for talent and the return on their free agent investments suffered dearly. Their old strategy of under-investing in amateur talent while simultaneously avoiding the highest priced free agents was becoming more and more archaic as evidenced by eight (and soon to be nine) seasons without a playoff berth, and four-going-on-five consecutive seasons without a winning record. My hope is that the Robert signing signifies a paradigm shift in how the White Sox operate as a franchise and how they value talent, because they desperately needed to adapt in order to keep up with the changing landscape of the league.

The White Sox will also need to continue to adapt if they want to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. And that starts with ownership continuing to invest in the team.  Yes, the Robert signing was a huge undertaking to the tune of nearly $50 million, but it should be noted that White Sox ownership had plenty of money to burn, and this move in no way jeopardized the organization’s profitability.  When Forbes released their Major League Baseball valuations for 2017, they estimated that not only did the White Sox produce an operating income* of $41.9 million in 2016, but they also saw the value of the franchise balloon from $1.05 billion to $1.35 billion, an equity increase of $300 million. These numbers would certainly not be indicative of an organization that is strapped for cash.

It is always very important to caveat that these Forbes financial numbers are just estimates and shouldn’t be taken as gospel, but the folks at Forbes are all professionals and they do put a great deal of time and effort into their calculations. As a result, their work has become the best publicly available resource for financial information on teams. MLB organizations are all privately owned, which means they are not required to publish a year-end financial report, and all MLB organizations take full advantage of this. This has become a strategic tool that these franchises utilize to keep individuals like myself busy arguing about whether or not teams have made money, perhaps instead of asking the more important question of whether or not these organizations should make money.

Looking specifically at the White Sox, by almost any measure of on-field success, they have been a failure for nearly a decade, and yet, according to Forbes, they’ve posted a cumulative total of $223.4 million in operating income during that time period and seen the equity of the franchise increase in value from $443 million in 2008 to $1.35 billion today. It is the rare business that consistently produces a well below average product to its consumers and not only survives for a decade but thrives.

Built into the Forbes’ numbers are estimates for team board members’ (owners) salaries which are treated as expenses and reduce the operating profit, and more importantly,  even without the operating profits of years past, ownership would have still realized more than $1 billion in equity gains in the franchise under Reinsdorf’s tenure. The current White Sox ownership group bought the team for $19 million in 1981 and now have a more than $1.3 billion investment.  MLB teams are gigantic equity enterprises, so even if they were to run at a loss from an operating income standpoint, it’s virtually impossible for them to lose money in a given year.This is why the move to sign Robert was so important to the White Sox. The team had plenty of money. The team had a lack of prospect depth, especially in the outfield. It was a no-brainer.

But the investments from ownership cannot stop with Robert.  There still is an opportunity for the White Sox to turn things around and seriously invest in the team, even though they’ve chosen the rebuilding path. They should be willing to eat 100 percent of the money left on veterans like David Robertson, Todd Frazier, and Melky Cabrera in trades in order to improve upon their potential prospect return. They made money last year, and this year’s team payroll is lower than the previous years, so they should capitalize and treat their player expenses as sunk costs and use that to make their trade chips look more enticing.  They should also be actively seeking out salary dumps from other cash-strapped teams, similar to the strategy the Braves employed, in order to add a marginal prospect or two. The White Sox need to be exhausting every opportunity they have to use financial flexibility as a tool to improve the team. It’s the biggest asset they currently have as an organization outside of Jose Quintana.

Purely going off of past experience, it’s far more likely they’re looking to dump the salaries of their own players like they did years back with Alex Rios and Jake Peavy.  So although things appear to be changing in many respects, until they actually undertake a financial investment that pushes the organization out of its comfortable profit zone, there is reason to be concerned for the White Sox’ future. The Luis Robert signing was a refreshing change of pace, and a good start to a brighter tomorrow for the team.  But the White Sox cannot stop there. It’s time for the White Sox back up rhetoric such as “White Sox will spend on free agents when time is right, Hahn says” with resources and actions. They’ve failed to capitalize on this in the recent past and the results have been disastrous, it’s time for a new, more competitive approach.

*Operating income represents a party’s earnings before interest is accrued and taxes are paid.

Lead Photo Credit: Joe Nicholson-USA TODAY Sports

The White Sox implication here is obvious: the Sox are not winning right now with their overall mediocre team, so the pragmatic course is to trade their brightest stars for packages of young players in the hopes that 2019 (or some date even farther in the future) will bring better days to the South Side. I’ve said this before and will stress it again: the 2016 White Sox and the 2011 Cubs (the year prior to Theo Epstein’s arrival) are not the same team and are not in the same situations as organizations, and we should dispel the idea that the Cubs’ path of the past few years is something the White Sox should emulate. Completely rebuilding a team from the ground up is a risky gambit in any scenario, something Nick Schaefer wrote about here, but it’s a risky move with less incentive for a White Sox team that already has a really good group of core players anchoring the roster.

Patrick Nolan of South Side Sox wrote an excellent piece on the current composition of the White Sox’ “core”.  The White Sox four best players in terms of surplus value by WARP, Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, Adam Eaton, and Carlos Rodon, essentially gave the White Sox 18.92 WARP above and beyond what those guys cost the team in monetary value.  This was good enough for fifth best in MLB last season, which is undoubtedly excellent.

Expanding upon his analysis, I looked into the Cubs roster from 2011 because I was curious about the surplus value of the Cubs’ four best players after that season. I amended his assumption and decided the value of a win in 2011 was closer to $6 million instead of $7 million (which is probably an overly conservative estimate as this 2014 Fangraphs article labeled the cost of a win at roughly $6 million and moving back further in time would only lower this). The Cubs top four players in terms of surplus value were Starlin Castro (4.31 Surplus WARP), Geovany Soto (2.76 Surplus WARP), Matt Garza (2.46 Surplus WARP), and Sean Marshall (1.84 Surplus WARP) who combined for a total of 11.37 Surplus WARP, well below the White Sox 2016 total.

In addition, the only player in this group that the Cubs had cost controlled for more than two more seasons was Castro, which is in stark contrast to the current White Sox, who have Sale controlled for three more seasons, Quintana for four, and Eaton and Rodon for five, not to mention all of these players will be 28 or younger in the 2017 season. On top of this, the Cubs’ rebuild didn’t even feature a trade of their best asset, Castro, until his surplus value and team control were greatly reduced. They saw their best asset as something to build around, not something to trade for more future uncertainty.

The 2011 Cubs also had a lot of dead weight on the back end of their roster and very few players beyond the top four who made significant, positive contributions to the team’s surplus value, so it’s not as if that Cubs team had a ton of depth to help offset their complete lack of star power. That team did only win 71 games, after all. Because of the lack of star power, surplus value, and depth, all told, it was an easy call for Theo and the new Cubs brass to tear the whole thing down because there really wasn’t much of anything to tear down.

The Cubs weren’t mired in mediocrity, they were about to be Entrenched in Awfulness™ with everything trending downward. This is an important difference between the two teams. If you wanted to tear apart the 2011 Cubs core, you’d essentially be tearing apart a 1982 Ford POS truck with a wheel missing, while in the case of the White Sox core, you’d be ripping up a pretty well-run Cadillac that even included a spare tire.

The whole point of the Cubs big rebuild was to assemble a core like the White Sox for their organization. This is the hardest part of a rebuild because it involves finding very good players that are also inexpensive. The Cubs were really awful for a couple of years and did really well on several draft picks and they ended up with some of the best, most valuable players in the majors this past season. Luckily for the 2017 White Sox, they have already accomplished the most difficult part of a rebuild, their core is going to be awesome (and cheap) again next year. They don’t need to find several, rare, incredibly good players as those guys already exist on the roster. All the White Sox have to do to compete in 2017 (and this same thing was even more true 12 months ago) is fill out the roster with players that are better than Dioner Navarro.

The White Sox inability/unwillingness to supplement their team’s core is another important difference between the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox if you’re strongly considering the rebuilding path. When the Cubs had finally amassed the elusive “excellent team core,” they went out and signed Jon Lester, Jason Hammel, Jason Heyward, Ben Zobrist, and John Lackey to lucrative contracts to help reinforce the team’s chances for ultimate success. And then, on top of that, the team went out and signed Dexter Fowler, when they didn’t even have a desperate need for him just because they understood that talented roster depth is an incredibly important thing! This pushed the Cubs total payroll over $170 million on opening day in 2016, which was sixth in the majors. The Cubs even pushed that payroll higher during the season, acquiring a few pieces for their bullpen and rotation.

Meanwhile, the White Sox flopped around like a fish out of water and ended up with their most lucrative free agent contract being the one year, $5 million deal they handed out to Austin Jackson. The White Sox, with a prime opportunity to go all in, went about as all in as I do when I stick my foot in the water of a cold hotel pool. In the most predictable fashion, things went belly-up mid-season and the White Sox slid under the low bar of 80 wins in the 2016 season for the fourth year in a row.

Armed with the knowledge that the White Sox are unwilling to increase their payroll above the league median, rebuilding now does nothing for the team in the future except push their window of mediocre baseball back a few years, unless, of course, the White Sox get incredibly lucky with the players they are getting in return. If you’ve been paying any attention to the White Sox in the last decade, you should know by now that luck-based plans are not a smart way to run an organization. There’s a reason why “exceptions to the rule” don’t come around very often: they simply aren’t likely. If the White Sox trade away their best players in 2017, the team will likely end up hardly watchable in the very near future and the future beyond that wouldn’t realistically look much better.

To quote Mr. Nolan: “With knowledge that the White Sox’ four best major league assets from 2016 were among the best in the game, it’s probably not reasonable to expect a rebuild to produce a better quartet than Sale, Quintana, Eaton, and Rodon.”  That’s the unfortunate reality the White Sox find themselves in. Teams won’t be offering the type of deals that would allow them to get a more valuable “core” of players, which is why trading Sale is so difficult for the White Sox as they’d likely be selling their best assets for less than they are actually worth. The Red Sox aren’t going to be surrendering both Yoan Moncada and Andrew Benintendi for Sale, so deals that are overly favorable to the White Sox just won’t happen, and those are the only type of trades that should motivate a team to trade a controllable seven-win pitcher

Rebuilding would likely get the White Sox a larger base of inexpensive major league average baseball players, which would indeed help the White Sox address the massive black holes they continue to play on a regular basis. However, it would also cut down on the star power on the roster, and in the end, the Sox arrive at the same status quo. One seven-win pitcher and one sub-replacement position player is theoretically equal to one three-win pitcher and one three-win position player, but having the seven-win pitcher is actually better, because there should be plenty of reasonable replacements available that are much better than a sub-replacement player.

The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of options available for the White Sox, they just cost the team money. Even with all of the tearing down the Cubs did, even with five consecutive years of top-10 draft picks, they still had to reach into their pocketbooks in order to put the finishing touches on their World Series championship. The Cubs probably don’t win without Lester or Lackey or Fowler. At some point, in all likelihood, the White Sox will have to make their payroll uncomfortably (for them, not for any other team in a major market) high if they want a reasonable shot at a championship, this is true for most teams, as that’s just how a competitive cycle works. There are certainly examples contrarian to this, but again I caution against attempting to be the exception to the rule, rather than following the rule.

Nothing fundamentally changes for the White Sox, unless they adjust how they attack their upswings in the competitive cycle. If they didn’t support their best chance at a winner in 2016, why would they go out of their way in 2020 to do the same? Furthermore, if they are willing to change their strategy, why are they waiting for 2020 to do so when they probably won’t have one of the five best pitchers in the game of baseball then? They had a window of opportunity to bring in talented free agents last season and they chose not to. It was a very bad decision. They’ll have that opportunity again this winter and I hope they don’t miss it.

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Fast forward six months and the White Sox just finished the season with 78 wins and 84 losses.  This was not a great team nor was it an awful team, and that is exactly what the projections were expecting. This is incredibly troubling on its own as there is often little merit to being average instead of being very good or very bad, but it is even more concerning when you combine that with Rick Hahn’s declaration on Monday that “We underachieved. We absolutely underachieved.” Unfortunately for Hahn, looking at this from a purely mathematical standpoint, his statement is actually false.

Projection systems like PECOTA are best used to evaluate the range of possible outcomes, not just the single, most likely outcome. These projections usually come with a standard deviation of roughly five wins and when viewed through that lens, the White Sox actual performance of 78 wins is right at one standard deviation away from the mean outcome.  This means the difference in actual versus expected wins is not statistically significant. This reinforces the idea that the White Sox performance during the year was reasonable and not underachievement.

Maybe Hahn was hoping to appeal to an already disillusioned fan base. However when his words have no merit behind them, and when a few days earlier the front office had gone out of its way to criticize the fan reaction to the news that the organization was interested in retaining embattled manager Robin Ventura, it comes across as empty lip service and a desperate plea to retain whatever fan interest remains after eight consecutive years without the playoffs and four consecutive seasons without reaching 80 wins. There is already a giant disconnect between the front office and the fans and statements like this only make it worse.

Perhaps an even more troubling scenario would be returning to the world where Hahn and the rest of the front office actually believed this team should have been in contention for the playoffs and thus, by extension, underperformed expectations. Just using the available PECOTA projections and performing a one-tailed T test on the White Sox projected win total, using the assumptions of a normal distribution, the standard deviation is five wins, and the expected win total was 83 wins, reveals the odds of the White Sox exceeding 88 wins, the de facto postseason barrier*, was roughly 16 percent. This makes it very clear that the White Sox were a fringe contender at best and having realistic hopes for extended playoff success was extremely misguided. The implication here is that the White Sox brass is either audacious enough to declare a 16 percent chance at the playoffs an actual plan or the team’s internal analytics** are not producing accurate results (reminder: eight years without playoffs, four without a winning team). Either option would be troubling.

I do understand that pre-season projection systems do have their pitfalls and they do not take into account any mid-season acquisitions, but this thought should not be an excuse for the White Sox front office either. The White Sox played 105 of their 162 games before this year’s non-waiver trade deadline.  Based on what the team knew, or should have known, when they started the season, the most likely outcome is a scenario where the White Sox have 53*** wins and 52 losses. At that pace, the White Sox would need a 35-22 finish to end the season in the playoff picture which is essentially the transformation of an 81 win team into a 99-100 win team overnight.

That rarely ever happens and it requires a ton of other things to happen that are beyond the White Sox’ control. They’d need to find willing sellers that have assets that match the White Sox’ own needs and the White Sox would need to have enough expendable prospects (which was likely not the case as the White Sox’ best asset the last few years has been money to spend and welp!) to complete the transaction.  All of this adds up to the conclusion if the White Sox thought buying at the deadline was the best plan for contention, the plan again appears to be the culmination of a lot of low probability events which really isn’t much of a plan at all.

In the end, this White Sox team was exactly what everyone, with the apparent exception of the front office, expected the team to be.  Not bad enough for everyone to lose interest in May, not good enough for everyone to remain interested past mid-July. Until the White Sox front office re-evaluates everything they think they know, buy or sell, I see little reason to be optimistic about a perpetually rudderless ship with three blind mice at the helm.

*Through five years of the two Wild Card system, 16 of 20 teams had 88 wins or more (12 teams had more), and the lowest win total was 86.

**One would also hope that any billion dollar organization would have better analytics than systems that are essentially publicly available.

***In actuality the White Sox had 51 wins and 54 losses which, again, was a high probability outcome based on everything that the White Sox knew heading into the season.

That’s a huge issue in its own right, but there’s no need to beat a dead horse. What I would like to bring to light is the White Sox inability as an organization to move on from the toxic assets that plague their team. Whether it’s their players, their coaches, or their front office staff, they White Sox refuse to shake up their organization and move in a new direction until it’s too late. The White Sox are a living and breathing embodiment of the disposition effect.

The disposition effect comes from the field of behavioral economics. Essentially the disposition effect refers to the backwards behavior that is observed when investors have some assets increase in value and other assets that fall in value. Investors are much less willing to sell assets that have gone down in value but they are more likely to sell assets that have increased in value.

A great deal of investors fail to understand that the future performance of an asset is unrelated to its purchase price. In turn, they believe that an asset that has gone down in value will eventually come back up, and that an asset that has increased in value may come back down, when in reality, the complete opposite is often true. An asset that has gone down in value has likely decreased in value for a concrete reason, and vice versa. Some new information about the company/product/service/etc. has come to light and as a result, the market has shifted to adjust to this new information. The asset has been revealed to be inferior to what prior estimates believed and it’s unlikely the asset ever returns to its original purchase price.

While baseball players and coaches are undoubtedly not stocks and bonds, the same general principle should be applied. For example, Avisail Garcia was a decently-touted prospect who had the raw power that could possibly translate to 30 home runs in a major league season. There was a chance he’d be a valuable player! However, as he played more and more in the major leagues, new information was revealed about him. He was horrible defensively and he had an ugly swing path that led to far too many ground balls for him to ever realize that raw power. After nearly 1100 plate appearances (which is really too many already) Garcia had made it clear that he was a toxic asset that would likely poison the White Sox chances at a playoff berth should they continue to play him. The White Sox chose to ignore the new information and rely on years-old prospect shine, and, utterly predictably, Garcia once again has ended up as a replacement-level player that dampened the White Sox chances to end their playoff drought.*

If giving Garcia so many chances to prove himself while completely failing was an isolated incident, maybe you could give the White Sox organization the benefit of the doubt. However, this is much more of a systemic issue that continues to torpedo the team. Just looking back the past five or six years, the White Sox continue to fall into the familiar trap. The most glaring example of this was the Ozzie Guillen saga that plagued the team in 2010 and 2011. The White Sox’ relationship had turned extremely toxic with Ozzie starting in the Winter of 2009 when he told Jim Thome there wouldn’t be playing time for him in 2010.

Ozzie wanted a rotating DH so he vetoed Kenny Williams’ decision to retain Thome in favor of Mark Kotsay (Side note: ugh that’s a painful memory). The feud worsened throughout the year, eventually culminating in Ozzie going off the rails after being directly questioned about Thome and Ozzie’s son Oney going on Twitter rants calling Kenny Williams a pig. The team, which was now more of a sideshow than a team, would finish 2010 with 88 wins and this was enough to prompt the White Sox to retain Ozzie throughout the entire 2011 season. Predictably, the results were disastrous. The team went “all-in” pushing their payroll to its highest point ever and, the White Sox proceeded to finish under .500 and well out of playoff contention.

Now, again rather predictably, the White Sox have held on to Robin Ventura well past his usefulness as a manager. The White Sox have long known about Ventura’s shortcomings, or incompetence, as an in-game tactician, which have hampered the White Sox ever since he took over in 2012, but they always cited the familiar refrain that he was a stabilizing presence in the clubhouse. That’s been, quite clearly I might add, disproven this season with the Spring Training Drake LaRoche debacle and then the Christopher Scissorhands incident more recently where face-of-the-franchise pitcher Chris Sale directly called out Robin Ventura for not being an advocate for the players. Robin’s in-game decisions have always stacked the deck against the White Sox, but if he can’t even control the clubhouse why is he even here?

Obviously, this trend doesn’t only apply to beloved former players-turned-managers. The White Sox have a strong history of giving playing time to washed-up veterans and failed prospects. I’ve already talked about Garcia. Dayan Viciedo was given 1800 plate appearances to prove that he was as useless as a push-lawnmower on a 20-acre farm. Jimmy Rollins’ corpse was given two months earlier this year to prove he was completed cooked. He’s now a TV studio analyst. Matt Albers, who has failed to hold hitters to an OPS below .884 in any month since April, has been trotted out in high-leverage situations. With the season lost, the White Sox continue to play Dioner Navarro and his putrid pitch framing and ~.600 OPS instead of moving on to other players. And the only thing that prevented the White Sox from desperately trying to squeeze value out of a 36-year-old Adam LaRoche was the fact that he retired before the year started.

The White Sox are stuck in a rut. They’re too obsessed with recouping value from their bad investments that they fail to realize when they’re making the situation completely worse. The front office’s refusal to replace Garcia or even Robin Ventura himself before the year and subsequently, with the season already lost, Robin continuing to play Navarro over young catcher Omar Navarez, or bringing in Albers to Wednesday’s loss instead of a younger pitcher, who also happens to be the team’s top prospect, with the game on the line epitomizes the problem. The organization knows they have the equivalent of Enron stock all over the place, but they continue to willfully delude themselves into thinking these players will rebound or turn into better versions of themselves. No one, especially the organization, benefits from this.

The best thing the team could have done is try to shake things up just to see if that works. Everyone should know by now that Navarro and Albers are awful players and Robin is a poor manager. These individuals represent no value to the organization’s future. Why not try to learn something new about someone else? When the White Sox fell flat early in the year, they could have replaced Robin to see if that would spark the team. Or maybe they could have given Jason Coats regular at-bats over Garcia to see if Coats would be any kind of an asset moving forward. These things would likely not have mattered in the grand scheme of things, but there’s a greater chance that these maneuvers would have produced better results than the status quo, which was virtually guaranteed to fail.

Sometimes little moves like that really work out and help an organization. Look no further than the 2015 White Sox team which gave playing time to Trayce Thompson down the stretch. Or maybe look outside the organization to a team like Houston who gave non-prospect Dallas Keuchel a chance to be a major league starter a few years back when the team was awful. Sometimes these long shot players pan out– look at Colombian baseball deity Jose Quintana! But the important thing is that teams would never know about these players unless they gave them a chance. They didn’t block these players behind veterans that were lost causes.

Instead, we have the White Sox, who’ve continued to try the same thing over and over, clinging to bad investments like their lives depended on them and hoping for a bounce back that’s never coming. They’ve seen the benefits of exploring new young players, yet don’t pursue this when it would benefit them most. It’s almost a perfect fit to the colloquial definition of insanity! I don’t know how much worse it needs to get for things to change, but eight consecutive seasons of missing the playoffs and four-straight losing seasons is well beyond what I would deem acceptable. I hope the White Sox can cut bait from their current approach to their future, instead of hoping that rebounds, too.

*Please don’t think I’m pinning the failure of the 2016 season all on Avisail Garcia. He’s simply one black hole of many that the front office refused to address.

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Alas, if we assume Williams and GM Rick Hahn are, in fact, in sync, the only thing we can reasonably expect is for the team to avoid any acquisitions that only benefit the team in 2016, which is a good idea given how bleak the White Sox current playoff odds are; PECOTA has them at 6.3 percent.  The one line that Hahn dropped that really scared me was that he wouldn’t rule any other course of action out, including a full-scale rebuild, and the full-scale rebuild is something the White Sox should definitely not do.

The full-scale rebuild has been made popular across the league with the success of the Cubs and Astros, and being in Chicago, comparing the White Sox to the Cubs is inevitable. The idea may also be appealing to White Sox fans simply because it is *a* direction and even the franchise’s most die-hard fans (and star player?) are tiring of the aim-for-83-wins-and-hope-you-get-lucky approach. While it is true that the Cubs did go into a complete scorched earth rebuild, in reality a White Sox rebuild would be nothing like what the Cubs did!  If the White Sox went into a full rebuild it would be a much more dangerous play.

When Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer took over the lovable rebuilders, the Cubs best pitcher was, uh, Matt Garza who was worth a whopping 3.5 WARP the prior (2011) season. That’s fine and all, but Chris Sale is a guy who’s routinely been worth nearly twice that in every single season he’s been a starting pitcher!! The Cubs best offensive player in 2011 was Aramis Ramirez, who immediately left via free agency and was not a tradeable asset, and the only other position player that looked like he would be a strong talent to build around was Starlin Castro, and you know what? The Cubs ended up keeping Castro around through the 2015 season because they did think he was a guy they could have built around.

This Cubs team did not have the rock solid foundation the White Sox have right now when Theo and Jed took over. They had maybe one surefire long-term asset when they began their bottoming out and they had a team core that was essentially nonexistent. This is in stark contrast to the White Sox excellent current core of Sale, Jose Quintana, Adam Eaton, and Carlos Rodon, all of whom are under contract for at least three more years, at bargain rates no less, and all of whom are 27-years-old or younger. You could even include Jose Abreu in the White Sox core, though his struggles with the bat this year have been very concerning. Still, Abreu’s price tag moving forward isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, an albatross on the White Sox’ payroll. The situations entering a rebuild are completely different for the White Sox and Cubs, and the organizations’ responses to their different predicaments were also very, very different.

The Cubs, understood exactly what they had following the 2011 season. They didn’t have much to build around, so they attempted to stockpile as many young players as they could in the hopes that they would strike gold…and strike gold they did. They turned Andrew Cashner into Anthony Rizzo and then Scott Feldman into Jake Arrieta and Pedro Strop. These two moves worked out better than anyone could have imagined, and suddenly the Cubs had a budding core. Adding to this core, the Cubs were also able to hit on two top four draft picks in a row in 2013 and 2014 when they took Kris Bryant and Kyle Schwarber back to back. Adding the final piece to their core, in what was perhaps the only true example of the Cubs sending away a major league tested, talented player who would have significant value in a future year, the Cubs were able to trade Jeff Samardzija to Oakland for top shortstop prospect Addison Russell.

The Cubs now had a very good core to build around, and that’s exactly what the team did. In 2015, they made a couple of very savvy trades during the winter bringing in Dexter Fowler (for the low, low cost of Luis Valbuena) and framing ace Miguel Montero for a couple of their non-essential minor league trade assets. The Cubs also understood that they were entering an era of playoff competition, even though that may not have meant 2015, so they opened up their checkbooks and gave Jon Lester a six-year contract worth more than $150 million (more than twice as large as the White Sox largest contract ever). They also brought back Jason Hammel, whom they traded to Oakland the previous July along with Samardzija, on a two-year deal to get another veteran starter for the roster.

As what seems like a recurring theme for the Cubs, their team outperformed expectations in 2015 and they ended up in the playoffs. The season went incredibly well for them as they saw the ascension of Kyle Hendricks into an above-average major league starter, Hector Rondon, Strop, and Justin Grimm were all very solid out of the bullpen, and the young players on offense were proving that they could hit major league pitching. Then the Cubs went all-in the 2016 off-season.

The Cubs now knew they were a playoff team, but instead of just being content with that, they continued to surround their core with great players. They signed Jason Heyward, Ben Zobrist, and John Lackey to very lucrative free agent contracts.  Then, almost as direct beneficiaries from the White Sox unwillingness to spend money, they were able to re-sign Fowler for below market value. The Cubs’ payroll skyrocketed to a number north of $170 million for the 2016 season, no doubt signaling that they were completely committed to winning.

Returning to my salient point, the Cubs total teardown was done in order to get a core as good as what the White Sox have right now. Once the Cubs had a core that good, then every effort was made to augment and attempt to win with *that* core. On paper, the Cubs didn’t need Heyward, Zobrist, Lackey, and Fowler to compete this year, but they understood that not every move they made was going to turn into gold. The Cubs insulated themselves against the possibility of one of their big acquisitions falling flat, and they were exactly right to do so. Somehow, Heyward’s bat completely tanked, but because the Cubs surrounded the team with a ton of talent, they’ve been able to stomach their $20 million-a-year outfielder turning into J.B. Shuck (h/t @WriteSox) and the loss of Schwarber for the entire season because of an ACL injury.

Meanwhile, again in stark contrast, the White Sox continue to surround their core with few talented players and, unfortunately, a large number of black holes. The White Sox operate as a team with no margin for error, but any reasonable organization would understand there’s inevitably going to be something that goes wrong for your team (apparently the year 2005 was an exception). Because the White Sox operate this way, they can’t afford things like losing Austin Jackson and Alex Avila for extended periods of time. That’s insane, especially when you consider that most contending organizations wouldn’t even employ these guys as starters to begin with.The White Sox shouldn’t need to rebuild right now, instead they need to actually attempt to put good players around their already excellent core.

If the White Sox tear down with this group, they’re admitting they can’t win with one of the best and most affordable cores in major league baseball. Tearing this core down would also be trusting an organization to identify and develop young talent in a way that they’ve never proven they can do before. Quite honestly, if the White Sox were to trade Sale and get a player back that was 80 percent of what Sale is right now, that would be out-performing realistic expectations for what value that trade package would produce.  It’s a gigantic risk to move bonafide star players like this; just ask the A’s about Josh Donaldson or the Marlins about Miguel Cabrera. Moving truly elite players almost never produces any players with similar value, and in a game with a finite limit of players, the best way to build a winning team is through talent. One six-WAR player is exponentially more valuable than three two-WAR players.  Chopping up Sale and Quintana to attempt to get the same caliber of players is a fool’s errand, players like this are just too rare.

While all of the risk involved makes me so hesitant to rebuild, the one thing that makes me desperately not want the White Sox to completely rebuild is the fact that they refused to spend money above and beyond their below league median payroll to augment an already awesome core.  The White Sox wouldn’t commit any long term money this year even though they have almost no guaranteed contracts after the 2017 season and they had the benefit of a protected first-round draft pick.  Given this precedent, why should anyone believe that they’ll be willing to spend gigantic amounts of money a few years down the road when they’d ideally have a new core to build around? Why is 2019 going to be any different than 2016? New ownership? Please.

It’s sad to think about, but being “mired in mediocrity” now and actually hoping the White Sox’ ‘half measure and pray’ plan works is actually better than being god awful for the next few years and then returning to the mediocrity we’re all so familiar with. The Sox are in a bad spot now, but going into a full rebuild is likely to make things significantly worse, and no one wants that.

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