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.

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Preseason projections are the perfect meal to fill that void, as they provide our first glimpse into how the 2017 is expected, at least by one model, to play out.

In regards to the AL Central and, particularly, the White Sox, this season’s projections were not expected to be, nor were they revelatory. The Indians will be good and the rest of the division will be a muddled mess of mediocrity.

You can split hairs between the Twins, Tigers, White Sox, and Royals if you want, but it’s no secret that, more than any other division in the American League, there’s a clear line of separation between the favorite and the rest.

What’s particularly interesting about the White Sox win total is that it immediately leads to a few different lines of thought:

1. The White Sox aren’t done tearing things down yet. With a bonafide front-end starter in Jose Quintana still in the mix, as well as useful veterans like Todd Frazier, Melky Cabrera, Brett Lawrie, Miguel Gonzalez, David Robertson, and Nate Jones, they can get a whole helluva lot worse between now and the end of the season (they’re only projected to win two fewer games this season than last), something PECOTA obviously can’t predict.
2. The White Sox aren’t much worse off than a lot of other teams. It’s easy to view the White Sox through a microscope. You can easily pick out the team’s flaws, whether it’s the outfielders, catcher, or backend of the rotation, because you follow the team on a daily basis. But the rest of the division has different flaws of varying degrees, whether it be Detroit’s aging core and stars-and-scrubs approach, Minnesota’s youth and train wreck of a pitching staff, or Kansas City’s, well, PECOTA and the Royals have a history. You can nit pick between the four teams, questioning which team’s flaws are more glaring or more detrimental, but it seems clear that from, 1-through-25, there’s not a whole lot separating these teams.
3. The White Sox really screwed up. It’s been shouted from the rooftops in this little corner of the internet over and over again, our face is red and our eyes are bugging out of our heads. But the White Sox flat-out blew it by not successfully building around the cheap, talented core they had the last couple of seasons. It will be fun to follow and dream on the prospects the White Sox have and will acquire over the next few years, but given the division’s dearth of contenders, there wasn’t too much standing in their way on the path to contention.

PECOTA has been within 2-3 wins of projecting the White Sox win total in each of the last three seasons, but the main difference between those seasons and 2017 is that there’s no expectation of them half-assing an attempt at contention this time around. So while these projections are beneficial in setting expectations in most cases, the expectation here for the White Sox is that it’s likely to get a whole lot worse before long.

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Congratulations to the [Cleveland Indians/Chicago Cubs]!!! The drought is over!!!

While it would be sweeter if the Sox were in it themselves, it’s encouraging to see validation that [AL Central baseball is not total garbage like it sometimes seems/the city is not cursed and forever doomed to be unhappy]. Now, we have that. What a relief!

While there is no one way to win a title, the [Indians/Cubs] provided a strong argument for the merits of [securing a small crop of dependable veterans to supplement a inexpensive, effective core/burning everything down and painstakingly rebuilding the organization from the ground up]. The Sox could really stand to take a page out of their book!

Personally, I think it would be foolish to cling to petty grievances and let memories like [Kenny Lofton & Co. dominating the Sox for most of the ’90s and relegating Frank Thomas’ to relative obscurity/that time a Cubs fan puked on the Red Line and it smelled real bad] dominate our minds and detract from the enjoyment of an incredible Game 7 and an incredible World Series. But if you must be petty, try to cling to thoughts of [The 2005 Sox needlessly blitzing the Indians out of a playoff spot during the final weekend of the season/The Jon Garland trade].

I will miss baseball, but the offseason is around the corner, and it won’t be long before we get to discuss [Paying Kenley Jansen $100 million/Trading Chris Sale for several 17-year-olds]. In the mean time, stay safe, and do not [ignite the Cuyahoga River/destroy my car] in celebration.

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Cleveland is a pretty good comparison for the White Sox in many respects.  It is a team with strict financial limitations that frequently finds itself drafting in the teens rather than the top five, and is built primarily around the excellent, cheap front of its starting rotation.  It’s just that Cleveland has addressed the same problems better than the White Sox have. They drafted Tyler Naquin, who hit .296/.372/.514, two picks after Courtney Hawkins, who hit .203/.255/.349 in his second attempt at Double-A this year. They signed Rajai Davis as their veteran stopgap center fielder, who provided about one win above replacement instead of Austin Jackson, who did not. Jose Ramirez turned into an All-Star whereas Carlos Sanchez has shown no discernible progress in about three years.

But hey, drafting is hard, injuries happen, and sometimes a player just hits his 90th percentile and the organization only deserves the faintest of credit for it. I am hard-pressed to find an excuse for why Cleveland signed Napoli for one year, $ 7 million, while the White Sox stood pat with Adam LaRoche and Avisail Garcia. Obviously the White Sox believed they would have LaRoche on hand and they were not expecting his retirement. They probably should have had more contingency plans generally, but I won’t pretend that LaRoche’s departure was predictable.  But even if LaRoche had stayed for 2016 and even if he had somewhat of a bounce back year, he still needed a platoon partner.

Avisail Garcia was tendered a $2.1 million contract in his first year of arbitration eligibility, meaning Napoli would have cost about $5 million more — or, assuming you’d be bidding against Cleveland, maybe $5.5 or 6 million more. Napoli would go on to post an .800 OPS while receiving the most playing time of his career. He has had better rate stats when used more selectively against right-handed pitching, but if you were planning on having LaRoche around, it looks like you could have used him for ~450-500 high quality PAs, or if pressed into full-time duty, you could still expect him to hold his own as a designated hitter who can spot start at first base.

Was the cost prohibitive? That seems strange, even for the White Sox.  A one-year deal for less than $10 million should not be prohibitive for any organization, especially given that they spent approximately $ 5.1 million on Garcia, Jimmy Rollins, and Justin Morneau. Nor can they say they wouldn’t have enough plate appearances for him. People get hurt, players need rest, and the team wound up giving more than 1,000 plate appearances to sub-replacement bats, on a roster with tremendous positional flexibility.

How much of the decision was continuing to double down on their bet that Garcia would develop? It’s not crazy, even now, to suggest that there is a non-zero chance that he improves to make himself a useful major leaguer in some capacity. It is crazy for a team genuinely attempting to win, with elite talent in its prime, to rely on Garcia improving to the point where he has to be a quality major leaguer in order for the roster to function. It appears that after years of dashing themselves against the rocks of Dayan Viciedo — the Mike Napoli of Japan! — the White Sox bet the farm on Garcia once again, and unsurprisingly, it blew up in their face again.

600-plus plate appearances of Napoli and a couple of other minor changes would have made the 2016 White Sox a lot better.  And again, mid-to-low-end free agents could make the 2017 White Sox a lot better.  There just isn’t a lot of evidence that the White Sox as currently constituted have the ability or willingness to identify that you need redundancy and depth, or even the most rudimentary description of evaluation — which players are good and which players are bad?

So while I still believe that, given the cards they have to play, the White Sox should try for the playoffs again in 2017, I certainly understand those who disagree based on despair, frustration, and lack of confidence in the organization.

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However, sometimes excuses really are pathetic.

Hawk’s asinine gripes about the schedule aside, when it became clear that the 2016 season was irretrievably tipping from surprise success to familiar and foreseeable failure, other excuses cropped up. “Well, Austin Jackson got hurt, and what were they supposed to do without Zach Putnam and Jake Petricka?” or something along those lines.

And sure, J.B. Shuck is a downgrade from Jackson, and the replacement-level guys who slotted in to middle relief in the wake of Putnam and Petricka were generally very bad. But even I–the biggest Zach Putnam fan in the world, who got in on the ground floor–would never argue that these losses are anywhere close to those of several playoff teams.

For example, the Indians can’t exactly paper over mistakes with money.  Cleveland is an interesting comparison for the White Sox in that sense, as well as the fact that they projected to have problems scoring runs, and that the main strength of the team was a cost-controlled stable of quality starting pitchers.

Cleveland has already won 90 games. They did this despite only getting 43 horrible PAs from Michael Brantley, instead of the .319/.382/.494 line over 635 PAs per year they did the two years before. What’s more, they won’t get more than 150 innings out of either Carlos Carrasco or Danny Salazar. Yan Gomes had an OPS of .529 for ~250 PAs in between injuries.

The Mets are another offensively-challenged squad with financial limitations and a roster built around potent starting pitching.  As of this drafting, they have a pretty good grip on the first Wild Card slot in the National League. Matt Harvey, Steven Matz, Jake deGrom, David Wright, Neil Walker…all of them lost for significant chunks of the season to injury.

These teams illustrate the failings of the White Sox more so than, say, the Dodgers, who can burn through hundreds of millions of dollars of brittle pitchers without blinking. And while the Mets are in the National League and get to play a lot more games against the worst teams in the majors, they and Cleveland lost a lot more really, really great players to injury than the White Sox did and succeeded anyway, despite being situated very similarly.

There are myriad reasons for that. The Mets spent in the offseason to retain an elite bat and brought in potential stopgaps like Kelly Johnson, James Loney, and (ugh) Jose Reyes when problems arose. They also opted for one of the best defensive catchers in the majors as the primary backup, especially with regard to framing, in the form of Rene Rivera.

Cleveland succeeded by actually hitting with the cheap free agents they signed, such as Mike Napoli, Rajai Davis, and even, to an extent, Marlon Byrd. They added Abraham Almonte for the modest price of an aging lefty specialist. And, they got Tyler Naquin with their 2012 first round pick instead of Courtney Hawkins.

There are a lot of reasons why the White Sox failed in 2016.  Looking at how other organizations solved the same problems with similar resources helps put in perspective that although these problems are significant, they are not insurmountable with competence and creativity.

And keep that in mind if the organization tries to deflect blame for their mistakes on the losses of some pretty fungible players.

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1. To that end, Carlos Rodon was the most helpful contributor, shrugging off a pair of bad outings to reel off his best start of the year. Rodon’s fastball was mid-to-high 90s all day with a hard wipeout slider, and he stayed strong through the end, ratcheting up his velocity down the stretch and striking out 11 over a season-high eight shutout innings. The Indians did not collect their first hit on Rodon–one of two singles all day–until the fifth, but it was an inning earlier where it became pretty clear they were out of luck. With a runner on (Rodon walked three on the day), Rodon set up Cleveland masher Mike Napoli with hard fastballs that dotted the edges of each side of the plate before twirling a 88 mph slider that the Indians’ first baseman couldn’t check up on. When he can command both sides of the plate and bust out his best slider on demand, it’s pretty hard on the opposition. Rodon recorded five of his last six outs by strikeout.

2. Sox hitting didn’t exactly overwhelm Indians starter Josh Tomlin, but they met the standard of producing enough to win a shutout. Todd Frazier managed to cause plenty of chaos with…his speed, of course. He led off the fifth with a single and stole second base with his patented walking lead with two outs. With the moment falling on Carlos Sanchez, the second baseman continued to shake off his slow start to the season and went with the pitch to guide a RBI single to left. Frazier stole his second base of the day to help add an insurance run in the ninth, taking off after a leadoff walk and scooting to third after the throw bounced away. Omar Narvaez‘s second hit of the day–and his first to leave the infield–plated Frazier to put the Sox up 3-0.

3. Narvaez also played a part in the Sox bizarre rally in the seventh, led off by Justin Morneau busting it down the line on a grounder to reach on a Michael Martinez throwing error. Avisail Garcia rolled a grounder through the middle of the infield for a single, and Narvaez loaded the bases by tapping an infield single past the reach of Tomlin and too far in front of Martinez to draw a throw. Sanchez didn’t quite match his efforts from the fifth, but his shallow flare to center scored pinch-runner J.B. Shuck on a sacrifice fly. Rajai Davis‘ throw from center beat Shuck, Chris Gimenez‘s tag at the plate beat Shuck, but the ball caromed–seemingly off Shuck’s helmet–down the first base line and Shuck was ruled safe.

4. Snuck into the back of this game was David Robertson striking out the side for a perfect ninth inning, giving Sox pitching 14 strikeouts for the day. Robertson’s ERA is down to 3.50 for the season. He’s allowed one earned run all month.

5.

pic.twitter.com/7teU1f5QBz

— Jose Abreu (@79JoseAbreu) September 25, 2016

Team Record: 74-81

Next game is Monday vs. Tampa Bay at 7:10pm CT on CSN+

Lead Image Credit: Ken Blaze // USA Today Sports Images

1. The Sox got off to a quick start with Tim Anderson dropping a blooper into right field to lead off the game. He quickly advanced to second on a wild pitch and was easily driven in on a Melky Cabrera double to right. A Jose Abreu single and intentional baserunning kerfuffle would score Melky, giving the Sox a 2-0 lead they would not relinquish the rest of the night.

2. Which was good because Jose Quintana simply did not have it. He threw multiple fastballs that failed to crack 90 MPH and walked more hitters (three) than he struck out (two) over six innings, but he turned that chicken byproduct into chicken salad anyways, stringing together six one-run innings, and picked up his 13th win of the season.

3. The sailing was especially rough over the first two innings. After striking out Rajai Davis to start the game, Quintana would give up a single to Jason Kipnis before walking Francisco Lindor and Mike Napoli to load the bases. Carlos Santana grounded into a double play to end that threat with nothing more than mild agita. Cleveland would load the bases again in the bottom of the second with no outs on the strength of consecutive singles from Jose Ramirez and Brandon Guyer as well as a walk from the immortal Coco Crisp. They’d only manage one run though on a Davis single before being shut down for the rest of the night.

4. Todd Frazier‘s strange first season with the Sox continued as he hit his 39th home run so hard it almost cleared the stadium walls themselves in left in the sixth inning. He hasn’t quite been the MVP candidate the Sox brass hoped he would be when they traded for him, but he’s the best player the franchise has had at the hot corner in a long time and it’s not his fault the team is only fielding three other useful hitters.

5. But Cleveland’s bold strategy of starting the game with a relief pitcher wound up being less than effective, as they’d ultimately need seven pitchers to get through the formerly punchless Sox offense. It doesn’t really mean anything because the Indians are still going to the playoffs and the White Sox are all but guaranteed to finish below .500 for the fourth-straight season, but it’s nice to not watch someone else celebrate.

Team Record: 73-81

Next game is Sunday at 12:10pm CT at Cleveland on WGN

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Though no one has reported any specific concerns raised about James Shields‘ physical condition, Buster Olney reported that the White Sox were one of the teams “enraged by what they perceived to be strategic deception: veiling medical information that could have been pivotal in trade discussions.”

The Sox, at least, did not give up Anderson Espinoza.

It’s into this context that Shields pulled off a shortlist contender for his best start in a White Sox uniform. Six innings, three hits, one earned run, three walks and eight strikeouts isn’t exactly prime Koufax, but with only a handful of hard hit balls all afternoon, Shields exhibited a rare mastery of his domain.

As much as Shields has struggled to rack up any whiffs since his arrival, he’s just seemed helpless to mitigate what’s wrong with him. Fastballs lose speed, breaking balls flatten, changeups lose feel, but as much has Shields seems worn out at the end of a very long career, he’s also been through the wars. He’s suffered through down seasons before, he made his living racking up complete games, nights where he would lose his mechanics and find them again and keep going, and still went through a half-season’s worth of starts of just getting hammered regularly with no escape. It’s bizarre. Not just on a ‘bad things happen to the White Sox’ level, but it’s a mystifying result for this specific player.

In that light, any stanch of the flow would be notable. I would be tempted to write about Shields’ objectively bad start last Saturday, where he somehow packed four walks around two monstrous home runs and came out with a quality start on the other side, as some sign of progress. Instead, we have this objectively good outing, where Shields mostly killed Cleveland’s getaway day lineup with a really sharp curveball, getting six of his 10 swings-and-misses with it, mostly with diving action down and out of the zone.

This is…not necessarily a secret breakthrough strategy. His curve was getting launched for all of July and August, and he certainly wasn’t holding back an effective secondary pitch for other options. There’s a temptation to say he should live out of the zone more, given how much natural life on his pitches he’s lost, he should let his rabid opposition chase their way out of crush mode. Pretty much any curve that Shields threw that wasn’t nasty was at least not hittable, and anything to keep from leading the league in home runs allowed is worth it. Become Samuel Deduno is not really a compelling a career plan, but consider the alternative we’ve been living with.

Or more likely, this was one start, where he had a curveball. Maybe in his next start, he’ll have his curveball again, and then maybe if he has it–or hell, something two-thirds as good as his old changeup–for a third start, we’ll really have something to marinate on. For now, it’s just a nice flash, and over it hangs the specter that the Sox may have been dealt something pre-degraded, if not pre-ruined, that they will never be able to fully redeem.

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1. Carlos Sanchez mostly got jammed by a Bryan Shaw fastball with that one out in the ninth, but his bloop single to right-center split the Cleveland outfielders enough to allow pinch-runner Leury Garcia to race in from second and snap shut a curiously run-starved affair. Garcia came on for Omar Narvaez after the catcher lined a leadoff single to center. The speed-only and blocked in Triple-A Garcia coming on for the fifth Sox catcher used this season is the type of substitution September was built for.

2. Three scoreless relief innings and six innings of one-run ball from Shields carried the Sox to that 1-1 tie in the ninth. Shields looked…kinda, pretty good for real stretches of time? His velocity is all gone and his changeup is not the dominant offering it once was, but his usually looping curveball snapped like a real pitch Thursday, and was unusually stacked with weapons to pull from.

3. He certainly threatened to bring back the old Shields in the third inning. A complete loss of his release point led to two walks, two wild pitches and a hits batsmen, but he somehow held the Indians to one run on a Jose Ramirez sacrifice fly. A bases loaded groundout by Carlos Santana to end the inning set Shields onto a stretch of nine consecutive retired, which included five strikeouts by a man who had not struck out more than six in an entire game since coming to Chicago. A swinging bunt by Santana and a walk to Tyler Naquin put him in a mini-jam in the sixth, but Shields found one more curveball to end his day for his eighth strikeout of the afternoon, and sealed his first homer-free start in his last eight.

4. Not that the Sox offense had a big enough day to merit a second offense hero, but Jose Abreu managed to sneak in a dominant day for himself. A bullet single to center in the first helped the Sox load the bases in vain, but he took it upon himself to lead the scoring in the fourth, whacking a Mike Clevinger fastball for a no-doubt home run to left. He also drew an intentional walk in the eighth, as the Indians wisely ducked him with Melky Cabrera on second, and brought on Shaw to strike out Todd Frazier. Abreu is up to .299/.352/.482 on the season.

5. Nate Jones coming on and striking out two in a scoreless eighth is pretty typical these days, but the Sox relief corps managed to piece together a scoreless seventh with two hard outs off Chris Beck and three pitches from Dan Jennings, and David Robertson sweated out a nervous ninth inning after a walk, a hit, two stolen bases and a throwing error from Narvaez put runners on second and third before he too found a snapping curveball to finish off Coco Crisp. He picked up the win because that’s how baseball works.

Team Record: 70-75

Next game is Friday at Kansas City at 7:15pm CT on CSN

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1. Rodon has been one of the best pitchers in baseball in the second half of the season. Working with Omar Narvaez has greatly increased his changeup use, which has paid dividends against right-handed hitters especially. Everything was going right for Rodon coming into this start, and then everything went wrong. He gave up three runs in the fourth inning after walks got him into some trouble and Jose Ramirez lined a two-run triple to right and scored on a Brandon Guyer single, but Rodon still appeared to look in control of the game. In the sixth, his changeup turned on him. After giving up two-straight hits, he left a changeup over the middle of the plate to Coco Crisp, who simply waited and crushed the ball out to left-center field. That blast marked the end of Rodon’s night. In just five innings pitched, Rodon gave up six runs and three walks while only striking out five. It was a step in the wrong direction, but one start does not derail the progress that he has made throughout this season.

2. Jose Abreu struggled mightily, going 0-for-4 with two strikeouts. The sample size is far too small to make any real conclusions, but it appears that Abreu’s strong affinity to playing in the field rather than being a designated hitter has affected his play at the plate. In 24 plate appearances as a designated hitter this season, he has just five singles.

3. As a whole, the Sox offense was dreadful against Tomlin, who has been very bad recently. This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, but it certainly doesn’t inspire confidence. After two encouraging nights against two above-average pitchers, Sox hitters wer completely shut down by the Indians’ worst starting pitcher. The Sox collected just six hits the entire game, with five members of their lineup failing to reach base at all.

4. There have been very few bright spots in the White Sox season. One of which has been Melky Cabrera‘s recovery from a very bad 2015 season. Melky went 3-for-4 Wednesday, by far the standout of any Sox hitter in the game. The night Sox hitting had meant Cabrera was left on base each of the three times he reached.

5. In a game that has little to no meaning for the Sox, Robin Ventura managed to keep the important arms in the bullpen rested. Blake Smith, Michael Ynoa, and Juan Minaya all made appearances following Rodon’s exit. In the combined four innings they pitched they gave up just one hit, proving once again that baseball makes absolutely no sense.

Team Record: 70-75

Next game is Thursday vs. Cleveland at 1:10pm CT on CSN

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