Sunday, however, was not a day for positives. Instead it was a reminder that this team needs to be fixed drastically if it is to contend any time soon.

1. On paper, the pitching matchup looked like it could lead to an enjoyable contest between a pair of good left-handed starters. The Royals’ Danny Duffy–who is putting together quite a nice season this year (he headed into Sunday 11th in the AL in DRA among qualified starters)–held up his end of the bargain, twirling seven innings with eight strikeouts, two walks and eight hit, and allowing just two runs on a Todd Frazier home run.

Jose Quintana, however, did not do his part in making the game a pitchers duel. Quintana went a season-low four innings while allowing six earned runs, striking out just one, walking three and giving up a season-high 10 hits. While his season ERA is still a very respectable 3.26, it seems the hopes of the Sox breaking their 49-year AL ERA title drought rest solely on Sale.

2. As bad as Quintana was, his replacements over the next four innings were hardly better. Chris Beck and Jacob Turner both allowed two runs over two innings of work, highlighting a very real issue of bullpen depth in the Sox organization. Of the relievers in their organization, there are at most three (Nate Jones, David Robertson, and Dan Jennings) that I have any confidence in being serviceable next season. With the premium that is being put on elite relief talent, it is unlikely the sox will be able to afford any top-of-the-line arms for the pen next year, and will likely have to hope some high risk arms can provide them important innings.

3. Frazier hit his 37th home run of the year Sunday, which is good. His batting average and OBP are less good, but Frazier has not been the problem for the 2016 White Sox. What is a problem, and maybe the problem, is that Frazier is one of just two White Sox with 15 or more home runs this season. In a newly power-happy run environment where 132 players have hit 15 or more home runs this year, the White Sox are the only AL team with two or fewer such players and one of just three such teams in MLB. For a team that plays half of their games in a bandbox, there is simply no way they can have an offense capable of contending without adding significantly more power.

4. The White Sox started both Carlos Sanchez and Leury Garcia Sunday, two players whose respective OPS (On Base Plus Slugging Plus On Base Plus Slugging) sum to .863, just .032 points more than team-leading Jose Abreu’s OPS. While Tyler Saladino has been a bit of a revelation as player who can both field and hit a bit, watching Sanchez and Garcia look completely lost at the plate is a good reminder of how thin the White Sox major league-quality depth is. Any contention plan in 2017 will have to be on the back of a litany of acquisitions of major league players (yeah, right) or prayers that there are no injuries or under-performances from players set to start everyday.

5. While I went into this post planning on five negative points, I feel the need to sing the praises of Anderson. After a misplay on an attempted double play turn in the second inning cost the Sox an out at second, Anderson made a couple of fine plays in the field Sunday that showed off both his arm and range. Despite the occasional miscues, Anderson looks miles better than the guy who regularly botched routine plays early in his professional career. If he can continue to come into his own at the position, the physical tools could allow him to be a pretty special defensive player.

Team Record: 72-77

Next game is Monday at Kansas City at 1:15pm CT on CSN

Lead Image Credit: Denny Medley // USA Today Sports Images

1. As Jose Quintana finished a scoreless top half of the sixth inning, Jason Benneti went to break describing today’s game as “a bona fide pitchers’ duel”. At the time, it was.  The game was 1-1 going to the bottom of the sixth. Very quickly, however, it turned into a blowout – Trevor Bauer would be chased after allowing five base runners while only recording a single out in the frame and his replacement, Dan Otero, allowed three more while only recording one more out. When the dust had settled, the Sox had sent 12 men to the plate and converted 7 into runs, their most fruitful inning so far this season.
2. After a couple of uncharacteristically shaky starts, Jose Quintana returned to form today, going 8 innings and striking out six and allowing just a single run on a Brandon Guyer solo shot. With the win, Quintana increased his career high win total to 12, and is now within 8 IP of a fourth straight 200 IP season.
3. Quintana’s start was the eighth consecutive start by a White Sox pitcher of at least 6 IP, a welcome stretch after the team started the month of September with a 3 game series in Minnesota where their starters combined for 13 IP. This, combined with consecutive blowout wins and Chris Sale’s consistent 8 inning performances has granted much needed rest to the bullpen and particularly Nate Jones and David Robertson, who have been called upon excessively as the only two reliable pitchers in the pen.
4. The White Sox and their fans set a Guinness World Record for most dogs attending a sporting event tonight at US Cellular Field. The jokes about them having to resort to canines because they’d never set a human attendance record will trickle in at a Guaranteed Rate
5. With a win today or tomorrow, the White Sox would win a series against Cleveland for the first time all season. Couple that with no series wins against Kansas City and one series win against Detroit in 2016 and it’s easy to see how the Sox got to this point of noncontention.

Even after a thrilling win last night against one of the AL’s best teams, a weekend three-game sweep at the hands of the Indians has the Sox sitting 5.5 out of first place, and the early season optimism has been replaced with a dulled pessimism that White Sox fans have grown all too accustomed to over the last half-decade. This isn’t to say the Sox are assuredly out of it–their PECOTA playoff odds sit at around 14.1 percent–but contending would certainly take a major turnaround. Even if we assume that the Sox are closer to a .500 team going forward rather than the miserable one they’ve been since mid-May, contention would necessitate a good deal of luck.

If that luck doesn’t come, the White Sox will have to face some tough questions, most of which boil down to “what do we do now?”

A failure to make the playoffs would be the eighth consecutive for the South Siders (the second longest active streak in the AL), and a whiff on yet another chance with the current core of Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, Jose Abreu, and Adam Eaton. While Carlos Rodon and Tim Anderson could conceivably supplement that core, the farm system lacks much more impact talent that will contribute before the core reaches its decline phase (or free agency). The possibility of never capitalizing on that talent with a playoff appearance looms large.

Naturally, there will be calls for the Sox to trade their core players. Before getting into the logistics of such a sell off, I think it is prudent to at least question who is in charge of such moves. Despite their playoff drought, the Sox front office has seen almost no turnover in the last decade plus, and it’s at least worth considering the fact that that needs to change. While Rick Hahn didn’t exactly inherit the easiest task when he took over the Sox after the 2012 season, it can’t be ignored that a decent percentage of his moves- including the Adam LaRoche signing and Matt Davidson trade- have completely flopped. Hahn may be a good GM yet, but if the Sox end up truly rebuilding, it may be best for both the org and him for a parting of ways.

But no matter who is in charge, a path to such a rebuild isn’t particularly obvious. While the first reaction may be to sell off a core they can’t win with, the logistics of baseball trades make that route quite unappealing. Even if the Sox are unlikely to contend for the years where their current core is in its prime, it’d be nearly impossible to get fair return for players as ridiculously valuable as Sale and Quintana. Contending teams simply cannot afford to give up the present Major League talent they would have to for such a deal to be even. The Sox could trade players like Eaton or Todd Frazier and get some return, but that still probably doesn’t bring enough talent back to put a playoff appearance on the horizon.

With all this said, the answer to “what now?” may be more of the status quo, something that will not be easy to stomach for a fanbase that has endured as much as the Sox have for almost a decade. Unfortunately, this is the position the Sox have put themselves in with years of half measures, and for now they will have to reap what they sowed.

Lead Photo Credit: David Banks – USA Today Sports Images

Team Record: 27-24

Next game will be far too soon

Lead Image Credit: John Rieger // USA Today Sports Images

Just 22 games into the season,the Sox already find themselves in an enviable position. The team sits in first place in the AL Central by 3.5 games over the defending World Series champion Royals, the largest current division lead in MLB. Even if the team was to play exactly .500 ball for the rest of the year (PECOTA has their expected win percentage at .518) they would finish with a record of 86-76, their best record since 2010 (and right in the thick of the playoff hunt).

Obviously, no definitive conclusions should be drawn from 22 games (162 games is oftentimes insufficient for such). Furthermore, there are certain performances that are utterly unsustainable — Mat Latos isn’t going to set a modern era ERA record this year — nor will the bullpen maintain its minuscule 1.32 ERA. While the offense should tick up a bit as Jose Abreu re-finds his power stroke, it’s pretty safe to say the White Sox won’t sustain their current .727 win percentage.

However, it stands to reason that a 16-6 start says more about a team than simply a number of banked wins. Using a Bayesian lens — in other words, using new data to further our understanding of an underlying distribution — we can update our priors for a new expectation of rest-of-season performance.

Projection systems like PECOTA do just this — expected win percentage is dynamic and updated based on player performance. But, for the sake of argument, let’s throw out PECOTA and all specific information about this White Sox team. Instead, let’s ask the following: What does a hot streak like this say about a team?

To answer this question in a relatively naive manner, I looked at every team in the modern era (1920 on) that won at least 16 of their first 22 ballgames. Of the 88 such teams, the median end-of-season win percentage was .590. This is not particularly useful, however, as these results include the first 22 games. We would like to know the true talent of these teams, which is better approximated by how they did in the rest of their games.

As it turns out, most of these teams did very well. Looking at how teams performed for the rest of the season, the median win percentage was a robust .556. Only 15 of the 88 teams played at a below .500 clip for the rest of the season (and four more at exactly .500). 60 of the 88 teams played at or above .528, the rate at which the Sox will need to win to achieve 90 wins.

With this in mind, we can safely claim that teams that start off as hot as the White Sox tend to be good teams, oftentimes exceptionally so. While it is certainly too early to claim the same about the White Sox, what we can claim is that this is more likely to be the case. And for a team that has failed to make the playoffs for the duration of the Obama administration, it’s encouraging to see that GM Rick Hahn may have Made The White Sox Great Again.

Top Photo Credit: John E. Sokolowski-USA TODAY Sports