While LaRoche was a very long shot to rebound in any meaningful way in 2016, as PECOTA had him pegged for a TAv of .260, there is a non-crazy universe where one points to his .304 TAv in 2014 and attributes his awful 2015 to injuries.  With the White Sox finally filing his retirement papers, however, we will never get an answer as to what he could do in 2016.

The timing of this fiasco remains poor, as Pedro Alvarez had just been scooped up and added to Baltimore’s collection of all-or-nothing lefty sluggers.  Combined with Justin Morneau‘s surgery keeping him from even swinging a bat until June and Marlon Byrd signing with Cleveland, and there isn’t a whole lot left to choose from.

A team with quality depth would be happy to hide Melky Cabrera‘s glove at DH and just use LaRoche’s departure as a way to improve team defense.  The White Sox are not a team with quality depth, and unless something changes, they’re going to have either Cabrera or Avisail Garcia lumbering around ineffectually in the outfield one way or the other.  One could imagine more aggressive use of J.B. Shuck as a defensive replacement (a configuration of Shuck-Austin Jackson-Adam Eaton would be the best defensive outfield the White Sox have run out in a long time), but unfortunately none of Garcia, Jerry Sands or Shuck is a very appetizing option against right-handed pitching.  Indeed, unless you are the biggest Travis Ishikawa fan on the planet, there aren’t any usable left-handed platoon bats in the organization, or indeed, anywhere on the horizon.

Perhaps RotoWorld is correct that the White Sox simply do not presently have a DH, although I suppose Garcia fields like one.

Trade speculation is an easy way to sound like a moron — this shields me from being a moron if I say something dumb, right? — but the most attractive, realistic option looks like Matt Adams from the Cardinals.  The most obvious benefit is that he shares a name with one of our authors, but he has the potential to be a plus lefty bat who can spell Jose Abreu at first base.  Although St. Louis denied it this winter, it appears Matt Holliday is likely to get PAs at first this year, which means, with Brandon Moss on board, Adams could be the odd man out.  Granted, just because St. Louis can afford to part with Adams doesn’t mean they want to do so, but his projected .268 TAv would fit very nicely in the space recently vacated by Mr. LaRoche.

Given that Adams is under team control until 2019, and he will only turn 30 at the very end of that control, the Cardinals can ask for a return that will sting.  Something built around Trey Michalczewski and Jordan Guerrero may get most of the way there.  Those guys are nice, but are likely worth sacrificing in exchange for a guy who may give you ~1,500 quality PAs over the next three seasons.

*While the uncertainty as to how this will impact the team moving forward (if at all) is a source of discomfort, I take solace from Chris Sale singling out both Rick Hahn and Robin Ventura for praise yesterday.  If it is indeed purely an issue between Sale (and perhaps other individuals on the team) and Kenny Williams, then that should be fairly straightforward to navigate.  It also undercuts the narrative that swept Twitter yesterday that Sale had reached the point of no return, hated the whole organization, and would need to be traded immediately.  One is left to guess how well this sentiment correlates to a given speculator’s desire to have their team trade for Sale at pennies on the dollar…

Photo Credit – USA TODAY Images by Joe Camporeale.

A slightly longer look at PECOTA reveals what gave: Rick Hahn, specifically dollars to Austin Jackson, even though he likely (hopefully) won’t log more than a handful of PA at DH this year. Acquiring Jackson gave the White Sox a credible extra outfielder they were in sore need of, which means that Adam Eaton and Melky Cabrera can slide down the defensive spectrum a little bit and the White Sox can allocate more PA to their actually good hitters.

This would be a pretty big change in approach for the Sox. Until LaRoche retired, this year was shaping up to be the first DH-by-committee situation for the White Sox since the Mark Kotsay era of 2010. For most of the last 20 years, the White Sox have filled that lineup slot the more conventional way: put an old 1B there and hope for some dingers. They were forced into the committee route by default last year when LaRoche proved himself incapable of hitting, and one could be optimistic that this year they would get a boost from the position relative to the league.

This being an article about White Sox position players, though, there were compelling reasons for pessimism. One easy way to summarize this is that any team for which Austin Jackson represents a real improvement is a team with real problems. The White Sox simply don’t have any hitting depth. As I write this, I think the second-most credible first baseman on the roster is Todd Frazier, who’s played a cumulative half-season at the cold corner (none last year) and is also the starting third baseman. If any position player comes down with any sort of injury, it will necessitate a shuffling that won’t be pretty; before LaRoche left, the most likely casualty of that would’ve been the DH production.

The lack of depth might be why the White Sox have so rarely gone without a regular DH. For the committee route to work well, a club needs a mix of guys at different positions who hit from different sides of the plate to mix and match, and needs all of them to be credible major league hitters. That way, players get opportunities when they’re in a position to succeed, and nobody bears too much of the load. Most of the time, teams don’t get the same results from this system as with a single starter, but they get to use more resources on the rest of your roster, so it evens out.***

The operative phrase is credible major league hitters, and when there aren’t any, what happens is the offense hemorrhage that befell the 2015 Sox. This is what happens when a team doesn’t develop a single good-hitting prospect for more than a decade: there’s no insurance policy for two successive pricey free agent DHs going in the tank.

You’ve likely noticed that a hefty amount of the preceding sentences have been conditional. The reason is simple: at this point, we can’t know what the Sox will do to fill LaRoche’s role on the roster, and with a meaningful amount of budgeted payroll freed up, we can’t even rule out decent-sized acquisitions. If a single competent major leaguer like Jackson can move the needle, another, actually good MLB player’s impact should be even bigger. Hitting depth isn’t just a matter of a backup plan in case of injury; even a minimal amount of it can flow through the roster and strengthen every position. With the White Sox right on the cusp of contention, $13 million in zombie money and a free roster spot might be just the boost they need.

*-DH goes to -1.0 if Jose Abreu’s PA at DH are counted toward 1B and the reverse is done for Adam LaRoche.

**-That last including the healthy bump from days where Abreu would’ve played DH with LaRoche at first. All your favorite caveats about projections, WARP, and preseason depth charts apply.

***-To put this in more concrete terms: the average AL team from 1996-2014 received 350 PA at DH from the player with the most time there. Teams above that cutoff had an average cumulative line about 12% better than the league average DH, and teams below it were about 7% worse.  As with most analysis that conditions on playing time, the causality goes in both directions. (Numbers via Retrosheet and the Baseball Reference Play Index).