Despite the complete roster overhaul over the last year, the White Sox are pretty definitively ahead of two of their rivals both entering 2018 and in terms of future projections. The Tigers tanked the second half of the season, and the Royals’ magic ending culminated in the likely departures of Eric Hosmer, Lorenzo Cain, and Mike Moustakas, all three of whom remain free agents.

The Indians remain the divisional front runners, even after downgrading at first base from Carlos Santana to Yonder Alonso (and maybe a platoon partner?), while the Twins have yet to parlay their surprising playoff appearance in 2017 into any meaningful offseason gains, and are simultaneously dealing with whatever fallout comes from the accusations against one of their presumed building blocks.

This is simplifying things a bit, so let’s go in reverse of the teams I just mentioned.

The Tigers are set up to be bad for a while. Miguel Cabrera (still owed $184M(!) over the next six(!) years is the last vestige of their most recent contention cycle, and even if he returns to even 50 percent of his MVP form (he’ll be 35 at the start of the season), he’s surrounded by a lot of bad and a farm system that’s going to take a lot more than the 2018 No. 1 pick to restock. The returns for Justin Verlander, J.D. Martinez, and Ian Kinsler may have been underwhelming to some, but it was a necessary step and at least a start in building depth to a system that ranked among the five worst in baseball a year ago.

The Royals are kind of in limbo until we learn the fate of the aforementioned three free agents. Kansas City isn’t expected to retain any of their services, which makes sense considering they were even worse than their 80-82 record a year ago indicated. Like Detroit, their farm system is in need of an overhaul. But hey, they got a ring out of it, right?

The Indians are likely still in fine shape even with the departure of Santana, and are the kings of the division for the foreseeable future. Their entire core is locked up for at least the next two seasons, and the fact that none of them are under the age of 30 with the exception of the 25-year-old Jose Ramirez and 24-year-old Francisco Lindor, they will obviously be very well motivated to do everything in their power to snap the longest World Series drought in the league before the likes of Corey Kluber, Carlos Carrasco, Andrew Miller, and Edwin Encarnacion begin showing noticeable decline.

The Twins are the wild card (no pun intended) of the bunch and the toughest team to project both for 2018 and beyond. In Sano, Byron Buxton, and Jose Berrios, they have three talented former top prospects about to enter their presumed primes who have also shown obvious flaws in their game. Their pitching staff is currently Berrios, 35-year-old Ervin Santana, and, uh … Adalberto Mejia? The reason Minnesota is hard to predict, of course, is that they’re the team with the most obvious places to upgrade, including that rotation. The Twins’ front office has shown a willingness to spend money AT TIMES, and with Yu Darvish, Jake Arrieta, and a number of pitchers and position players still hanging out in free agency looking for whatever the hell they’re looking for, the opportunity to upgrade is there. If they’re able to spend wisely and their youngsters take a step forward, the Twins could be dangerous, but the IF in that sentence is a big one.

It’s easy to nitpick teams in the middle of a slow and still incomplete offseason, of course. And none of this is to say the White Sox are the team best set up for sustained success when they look to contend again. If projecting the future were as simple as looking at farm system rankings, you’d see major publications correctly predicting World Series champions four years from now. OK, bad example. But while many things need to go right for the White Sox to fully transform from middle-of-the-road purgatory to rebuilders to hopefully one day contenders, their main competitors are traipsing differently-shaped but tricky paths themselves.

Lead Photo Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

In a sense, the Royals had some of the same tough decisions to make as the White Sox did coming into this winter. The farm was depleted after shipping off considerable talent to obtain James Shields, Ben Zobrist, and Johnny Cueto.  Obviously, back-to-back World Series appearances, including a victory, are a worthy return for such an investment, but now they’re on the other side, already bumping up against budget constraints with a middling major league roster.  And while they did sign Jason Hammel, sadly, he merely serves to soak up the innings that would have gone to Yordano Ventura.

Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain, and Alcides Escobar will all be free agents at the end of the season, and the Royals largely opted to add short-term supporting pieces to make one last run with this group, and how 2018-2020 play out will hinge largely on whether or not they are competing around the deadline. If they have fallen out of the race, they may be able to inject some talent back into the system by trading these players off.  They’re rentals, but it’s better than losing them for nothing, or the greatly diminished compensatory pick system under the new CBA.

Indeed, unless the Royals do surprisingly well selling off their pending free agents, the cupboard is awfully bare. Sal Perez and Danny Duffy are still young and signed long term, but Alex Gordon and Ian Kennedy are on the wrong side of 30, and Gordon is coming off arguably the worst season of his career. That’s about it, although Raul Mondesi Jr. could at least ensure they don’t miss Escobar too much.

The farm is weak.  Their top prospect is pretty much ready, but his ceiling is limited, and the next two behind him are relievers. So despite the front office’s creativity and recent track record of performing greater than the sum of their parts, their system lacks impact potential. And, for all that the Royals did successfully building a team that competed for three years, it took a long time to accumulate it, and the talent is leaving faster than they can bring it in.

Update: On March 1st, the mother site published its Organizational Rankings, and Kansas City weighs in at 27th, only ahead of a troika of truly desolate systems.

Lead Photo Credit: Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports

Why are we continuing to play? Right, because there is a 162-game schedule to fulfill, win or lose.

Though most have kept their feelings pent up or only let them seep out in appropriate tones and settings, baseball people know that if there is one person who is the pinnacle of a the ‘no holds barred’ mentality, it’s now-part-time broadcast announcer Ken “Hawk” Harrelson.

Harrelson, who was a guest on 670 AM The Score with Mully and Hanley last Thursday, bluntly came out with the accusation that “the schedule makers stuck it up our behind this year” as the purported reason behind the White Sox epic collapse in May.

“The whole thing — and it’s not an excuse — was the way the schedule started off, with one off day in April,” Harrelson said.

Sure, having one day off in April will do a number on the bullpen, and the club as a whole. But by now, with the All-Star Break a decent three weeks behind them, teams have bounced back from some of the wear-and-tear. This isn’t the first, nor the only team, that’s been subjected to a brutal schedule.

The White Sox offense collapsed, with Jose Abreu, the former AL Rookie of the Year becoming a shell of himself that hit .229/.303/.354 in April. Sure, the chill of April in Chicago often suppresses the dominance of hitters such as Abreu early on in the season, but he also hit just .252/.306/.405 during May. The starting pitching, save for Chris Sale and Jose Quintana, was a disaster of epic proportions that even when the Sox attempted to rectify it, went into a worse tailspin. Chief among the problems was tragedy of James Shields, who had an ERA of 11.07 during his first month of starts on the South side. Losing Austin Jackson to injury, which moved Adam Eaton back to center field didn’t do wonders from a defensive standpoint, and no schedule nor excuse could veil the guest-who-wouldn’t-leave tale of Avisail Garcia’s stay in right field and at DH. This team’s true talent just showed through.

Did the schedule affect some of these things? Sure. Perhaps Jackson may have been saved if hadn’t played nearly two months-straight of baseball. But the disaster of Shields and the struggle for consistency seen from Carlos Rodon can’t be blamed on that. Pitchers don’t play everyday, and Shields came from an entirely different organization.

Hawk claimed that the Diamondbacks were the only other team in baseball that had one day off in April, but the Red Sox did as well, and they seem to be doing just fine. They may have had two rainouts in April, but those were not anticipated days off. (If we’re playing that game, the White Sox had a rainout on April 10 as well.)

There was also the quality of opponents issue on the schedule. Back in the end of May, when the downfall of the season was just a tiny twinge of apprehension in the minds of White Sox fans, I wrote this about the impending May schedule:

“The White Sox are currently on a stretch in which they face three series in a row against intra-division rivals; the Kansas City Royals, Cleveland Indians, and then the Royals yet again. After those three sets, they will face the defending NL pennant-winning New York Mets and then continue their intra-divisional play in Detroit with the Tigers. All of that with just a single day of rest in between. So, no, this is not an easy portion of the schedule by any means, and it looks even worse for a scuffling team. When looking into the fine details of this team’s recent struggles, the scheduling has certainly been a big red flag.”

When a team is suffering from the alleged fatigue of the first month schedule, and then goes into the second month of the season to face a relentless stretch of games against tough opponents, it’ll be sure to hurt any club. That’s a one-two punch that would put almost anyone down. That has to do with the strength of opponent more than anything, and the problem is the Sox just weren’t the stronger team.

So sure, Hawk. The schedule makers may have metaphorically stuck it up the Sox behind this season, but the reason that it hurt so much more than it should have was because this team wasn’t constructed to handle the pressure. The schedule simply served to expose the weakest parts of the organization, as well as it’s true talent level, and then continued to brutally exploit them. The White Sox turned into a pumpkin again, and the schedule was perhaps just the Fairy Godmother who set the spell to expire at midnight.

Lead photo courtesy of Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports

In a similar tortured context, the Sox are in the thick of it right now. They, like everyone one else in the known universe, are within five games of a playoff spot in the middle of June, their Chairman just reaffirmed their intentions to try compete in 2016, and it’s technically true that it’s the same 33-36 record either way, even if they are on a 10-26 kick at present.

But where 2015 had the Blue Jays and their looming, monstrous offense breakout from 50-50 in late July to 93-69, the Sox are not a juggernaut waiting to overwhelm inferior competition, but a fringe contender that needed a hot start to cover up the holes that needed patching.

Even sidestepping a rumination of how they had that hot start and watched it quickly vaporize, in aggregate the Sox have simply not gotten what they needed and are not where they need to be as the midseason market rounds in to shape. They are in fourth place in the AL Central with a poor 12-18 mark against in-division opponents, and have five teams between them and the final Wild Card spot. The Houston Astros, the archetypal team with superior core talent that trashed their chances with an awful start, have already overtaken them. Their slow start against the AL Central has been largely in a landscape removed of Michael Brantley, Alex Gordon, Mike Moustakas, and until recently, Carlos Carrasco. They have had the natural advantages they needed preseason to prop up this work-in-progress roster, and simply blown it.

Worse yet, their first step into patching the roster has been a step onto a landmine. Rather than a solution for a relatively small issue of a finding a No. 4 starter, James Shields is a crisis entirely of his own. Plenty of trade acquisitions have been bad, or struggled in the early going of a multi-year commitment only to normalize eventually. But Shields is struggling at an unprecedented level, because no one who pitches like they just got called up from High-A is typically thrown out to the wolves four consecutive times. No one would normally consider moving a pitcher with Shields’ resume and a commitment through 2018 out of the rotation, but he’s forcing the issue in a truly remarkable way. As bad as Mat Latos was, he wasn’t tasking the Sox with a 6-0 deficit every single night.

Losing two games in Cleveland where outstanding work from Jose Quintana and Carlos Rodon was not good enough to put the Sox in anything better than a tossup situation, is the product of an offense having slipped to 12th in the AL with a .252 TAv. They are not good enough to spend much time finding out how long Shields will make one out of every five games an automatic loss (barring seven-run comebacks), when they are still forcing Robin Ventura into using J.B. Shuck and Avisail Garcia as regulars, with only the low-ceiling aid of Justin Morneau immediately on the horizon.

If this seems negatively skewed, that’s on purpose. Jose Abreu has a an OPS over 1.000 for June, Rodon was thrilling for much of Sunday and could find All-Star level form soon, and Chris Sale is still in working order. They’re not hopeless, but the demands on the Sox have moved seemingly overnight from what they need to do to hold a lead over hard-charging competitors, to what makes them capable over overtaking the pack that they now sit behind.

Will they upgrade the scale of the roster upgrades they are seeking, and the talent and money they would have to cede, to match their sudden plight? Given what it will cost and the chances of success, do they even want to? It’s hard to envision a surrender with this roster, but is it any easier to see how they can do what’s necessary to transform this team over the next two months?

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

Since the second Wild Card was brought into play in 2012, the team to win the fewest games and make the playoffs was the 2015 Houston Astros, who won 86 games. Currently, PECOTA projects the White Sox to go 54-50 the rest of the season and end up with 83 wins on the year. That 54-50 record is good enough for a .519 winning percentage.

If we pretend for a second that 86 wins is the magic number that the White Sox have to reach, then the White Sox have to go 57-47 the rest of the way which translates to a .548 winning percentage. If we assume that the standard deviation of projected performance over a whole season is six wins, then the standard deviation of projected performance as a percentage of games played is something like 3.7 percent (or a difference in winning percentage of .03703). Simplifying the process, if we use a traditional one-tailed test assuming a normal distribution, based on the White Sox expected winning percentage and the necessary winning percentage required for 86 wins, the probability the White Sox win 86 or more games is roughly 21.68%.

Unfortunately for the White Sox, 86 wins is the lowest of all the bars to clear, so even that 21.7 percent chance looks like it may be optimistic. Only two of 40 teams since 2012 have made the playoffs while winning less than 88 games, with the Astros being the only team to win 86 games and make the playoffs. So if we move our bar to 88 wins, or 59-45 the rest of the way for our White Sox, using this new winning percentage of .567, the probability the White Sox make the playoffs drops all the way down to 9.75 percent. This second iteration suggests that you’re probably better off watching Requiem for a Dream and expecting to feel happy and lighthearted after the movie than you are to expect the White Sox to get into the playoffs. *Audible groan*

A look at the current standings does offer some more hope. If we add the wins from the current standings to the rest of season PECOTA projection for wins, we get the following playoff picture:

AL Central Winners: Cleveland Indians, 91 Wins (32 currently, 59 projected)
AL East Winners: Boston Red Sox. 89 Wins (34 currently, 55 projected)
AL West Winners: Texas Rangers, 87 Wins (36 currently, 51 projected)
Wild Card #1: Seattle Mariners, 87 Wins (32 currently, 55 projected)
Wild Card #2: Toronto Blue Jays, 85 Wins (31 currently, 54 projected)

So, this information is a bit bittersweet. It’s bad in the sense that the White Sox odds of winning the central division have taken a pretty drastic hit over the past month. Cleveland is a solid team that’s playing well right now and if they reach 91 wins, there’s roughly a 1.9 percent chance the White Sox could reach that win total with their current roster. Oh boy.

But it’s better news in the sense that PECOTA doesn’t see any excellent teams in either of the wild card spots and 86 wins could very well vault the White Sox into the playoffs. Again, this isn’t great news as there’s currently only a 21.7 percent chance this happens, but when you compare that number with the other two percentages I’ve calculated, it starts looking a lot better.

However, there’s one last wrinkle I’d like to add to this somewhat painful probability calculation sheet. The White Sox are currently mired in a 6-20 slump that’s not exactly showing any signs of slowing down. As it stands, none, NONE, of the forty teams that have made the playoffs since 2012 have had a 26 game span where they’ve lost 20 or more games. So, if the White Sox do indeed make the playoffs, it will be the most impressive turnaround against adversity that Major League Baseball will have seen since the implementation of the second Wild Card. All records are meant to be broken! The Golden State Warriors taught me that, so maybe this is the White Sox team to do that!

To offer some hope, there have been five teams, the 2012 Oakland A’s, the 2013 Los Angeles Dodgers, the 2014 Pittsburgh Pirates and San Francisco Giants, and the 2015 Texas Rangers that have all had 25 game stretches where their records were 7-18, so there is some precedent of teams playing pretty darn awful and then going on to find some success in the postseason. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the White Sox play, but at least it offers some proof that bad things happen to good teams.

The bottom line is, like Ethan Spalding said, is that the White Sox aren’t complete toast at this point in time. Hey, maybe the White Sox turn around, fire Robin Ventura, turn Carson Fulmer into Jonathan Lucroy, sign Justin Morneau, and promote Tim Anderson and everything comes up Millhouse! It could happen. I just wouldn’t bet on it.

*Han’s odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field were 3,720 to 1 and he did it. Maybe the White Sox can too.

Lead Photo Credit: Rick Osentoski – USA Today Sports Images

Sure, he had awful command and a slip-up night where middling hitters suddenly were able to foul off an infinite number of pitches was bound to snag him at some point, but this was not just a bad night: it was a disaster start. He excoriated himself in his post-game interview and even claimed to review video of the start when he was pulled to check for pitch-tipping, which seems like a bizarre place to start unless Sale was particularly suspicious of how the Indians were able to read and foul off so many two strike putaway pitches.

There was always potential for hiccups and inconsistency when Sale would need to ramp things back up, but there was a disconnect between this outing’s seemingly unharnessed aggression and the discipline and focus that marked his earlier work.

2. Tuesday afternoon was a quietly intriguing build of tension if you’re obsessed with the back end of the White Sox roster. It started with a boil from the lower depths of the organization.