For the White Sox in 2016, no one really paid enough attention to outfielder Melky Cabrera. Fans were too busy crying in their beer over James Shields, wishing upon a star that Tim Anderson wasn’t a fluke, or wondering what Justin Morneau would contribute in July to a team sinking faster than the Titanic. No one gave much thought to nor appreciated Cabrera for what he was doing in 2016.

Cabrera was not simply a successful outfielder who played with day-in and day-out consistency, making him a mainstay of the White Sox shaky lineup this past season, but he actually improved upon the the disappointment that he was in 2015.

Take a look at the improvements that Cabrera made from one year to the next:

He lowered his strikeout rate by more than two percentage points, brought his walk total up slightly, and boosted his power numbers to levels that rounded out his slash line to look much heartier than it did in his first year on the South side.

It gets better though. Cabrera posted some of the best numbers he has in his 12-year career in 2016. Check it out:

Now sure, seeing that Cabrera’s slash line numbers in 2016 were only good enough to be ranked fourth seems as though it doesn’t exactly merit “career best,” but consider that Cabrera just finished off the 12th year of his career and is posting numbers this strong in his age-32 season before you scoff. I’d say that’s a quite laudable feat.

Cabrera’s 10.7 percent strikeout rate was not only a career best for him, but it was also the lowest of all White Sox hitters in 2016 just behind J.B. Shuck (8.7 percent).

The defense is the one aspect of Cabrera’s game that bogs down his ability to be labeled as an all encompassing force to be reckoned with in baseball after all this time. Baseball Prospectus’ fielding statistic, FRAA, gave Cabrera a -6.7 in 2016, which in part is to blame for his WARP of just 0.9 in 2016 (up from -0.1 in 2015 though!). However, his FRAA this season was a tad better than the -7.6 he earned in his first year with the White Sox. Still in the red, but improvements are improvements no matter how incremental. 

But as James so cordially pointed out in his piece on Cabrera just last month, when you’re putting Cabrera against the backdrop of an outfield that consists of Avisail Garcia’s infamous defense as well as Cabrera having taken the spot of Dayan Viciedo, it’s hard for White Sox fans to see anything but the grass being greener in Cabrera’s part of the outfield since his arrival.

Cabrera’s contract looked dismal in his first year with the White Sox. It seemed as though all Rick Hahn did was shell out an exorbitant amount of cash that the White Sox couldn’t technically afford after the expensive offseason they had laced together, for what appeared to be an aged outfielder with poor defensive marks and even poorer offensive ones. Perhaps it simply took Cabrera becoming acclimated to his new environment, but the second year success he had certainly makes the first year of his contract look a bit more tolerable.

As for the third year, we know Cabrera has this type of production in him, though he’ll be heading into his age-33 season and the final year of his contract with the White Sox, it’s not hard to believe we will at least perhaps see some middle ground of production from him at the plate in that final year. If not, well, it will be time to cut ties anyway. If one more year of Cabrera turns out to be the worst thing that the 2017 White Sox suffer though, I would say that 2017 probably turned out pretty well on the South side.

Lead photo courtesy of Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports

A White Sox problem that has been referred to several times here, is the standout performance of core players being canceled out by the multiple positions just left to be filled by sub-major league talent. A refreshing exception to all that furor has been Melky Cabrera, who has just kind of done his job this season.

Like any free agent signing, Cabrera was brought mostly on the hope that he could produce in his first season. After age 30, bringing in any free agent is about filling in an immediate need with an educated guess about what that player can still be, and every year the certainty of that guess gets worse. With that in mind, Melky hitting .238/.272/.276 in his first 65 games in Chicago tanked much of the optimism for his tenure.

Cabrera had a nuclear month of July last season along with much of the team, but as the Adam Dunn contract showed, even if the sudden and inexplicable nosedive of a veteran player is not permanent, it’s usually the first step into the fits and starts of real decline. Instead, Cabrera has just turned around and given this year what the Sox needed originally: a solidly-above average bat to stick in an outfield corner and not worry about, as there are so, so many other things they need to worry about.

Despite an awful August, Cabrera’s .296/.348/.444 batting line gives him a 110 wRC+, a 117 OPS+ and a .275 TAv, all of which say this is a solid hitter to put in the top half of their order. Ironically, when I was shamelessly stumping for a Cabrera signing in the Winter of 2014, I admitted that Cabrera’s availability was probably coming a year too early: the Sox had a chasm in their outfield that had no solutions waiting in their minor league depth, but they were probably not quite ready to compete with him in 2015, when he would likely produce the most value. That wound up being true, albeit not for any intended reasons.

While Cabrera wasn’t meant as a savior, he’s increased the baseline total of plus hitters–last year they had two, now they have three, or four depending on which metrics is measuring Todd Frazier‘s contribution–on a Sox lineup too starved for credible hitters to care about any of his flaws. Cabrera’s level swing keeps him from posting ideal power production from an outfield corner, but on this team, he’s only a single point behind Justin Morneau for the third-highest slugging percentage on the roster, and only the slap-hitting J.B. Shuck makes more contact.

But the biggest negative element of Cabrera that the Sox are in the position to ignore is his defense, which is also what keeps him from being rated as a reliable starter, two-win type of player.

When a player’s defense is as universally regarded as below average as Cabrera’s is, we should be able to pick it out just fine with our eyes, but he replaced Dayan Viciedo, and has frequently shared the field with Avisail Garcia. Having a poor defensive partner actually makes Cabrera’s limited range less tolerable, and Cabrera, Garcia and Adam Eaton outfield defense of 2015 was under-the-radar terrible, but Cabrera’s ability to actually track and run down routine and some difficult fly balls has understandably avoided criticism from this audience.

While only Baseball Reference will be friendly enough to Cabrera’s defense to give him the blessed two-win player status that indicates a reliable starter, he gets the time-tested “makes all the routine plays” designation that makes him tolerable to a team that desperately needs his bat. On a roster of problems, Cabrera has not been one, and has taken one less issue off the board for 2017. In most free agent classes, that’s the best you can hope for.

Lead Image Credit: Kamil Krzaczynski // USA Today Sports Images

Garcia was never going to live up to the incredibly lazy “Mini Miggy” comparison. The list of things they have in common is fairly decent: similar size, right-handed, played for the Tigers, and from Venezuela. The only thing missing is the whole “actually being good at baseball” part. Depending on which valuing system you prefer, since joining the White Sox in the middle of the 2013 season Garcia has been either a replacement level nothing (0.7 WARP) or an unmitigated disaster (-1.8 fWAR, -0.6 bWAR). There’s really no way to put lipstick on that pig.

His hitting has managed to get worse every year he’s played for the White Sox, with his OPS+ dropping from 109 to 105 to a pathetic 90 in both 2015 and 2016. Maybe you prefer TAv? He’s gone from .272 to .257 to .245 to .252. His ISO peaked at .169 in his injury shortened 2014 before bottoming out at .108 last season. He’s currently sitting at .124, which is the same as Elvis Andrus‘. Your RF should not have the same power profile as a notoriously weak-hitting shortstop having a career year. And while it’s somewhat fair to hypothesize that Avi’s unfortunate shoulder injury in early 2014 ruined his chances of hitting anything close to useful power numbers, it was realistically only a matter of time before he hurt himself diving for a ball in the outfield seeing as his idea of laying out for a catch most closely resembled a lawn dart viciously thrown into the turf by a drunk.

And while he’s no longer throwing himself around in the outfield like a punch-drunk stuntman, his defensive prowess remains as unimpressive as ever. The Tigers have abused Garcia’s confused idea of playing right field multiple times this series alone. His career UZR in RF for the Sox is -14.4. He’s been worth -21 Rdrs. A whopping -3.6 dWAR over 287 games.

I’ve been calling Garcia “Dayan Viciedo 2.0″ for two years now because the name fits like Cinderella’s slipper. Talented young corner OF prospect who never lives up to the hype and slowly drains White Sox fans of all their hopes and dreams while the team gives him more than 1,100 PA before admitting it’s not going to work? Which player am I talking about?

It gets even more sad when you start comparing their White Sox career numbers.

Before the start of the 2016 season, all Garcia had left in his favor was the fact that he’s now in his age 25 season. I get it when teams are reluctant to give up on young players who were supposed to be great. Calling it quits right before a guy breaks out and watching it happen for someone else sucks. Look at the Twins with David Ortiz. Or the Twins with Carlos Gomez. And I understand that there really isn’t anyone the Sox can call up to replace him right now. But the team had a chance to fix this problem in the offseason by adding any outfielder and the best they managed to do was Austin Jackson.

The White Sox as currently constructed are a mediocre team. Continuing to start Avisail Garcia in right shifts them down the spectrum to simply a bad one.