First and foremost, the decision was made with increasing offensive production in mind. Flowers hit an abysmal .239/.295/.356 with a wRC+ of 79 in 2015. With patchwork being done elsewhere on offense, the White Sox simply didn’t believe they had any path to success with Flowers in the lineup on a daily basis. That’s certainly a fair assessment. However, Flowers went on to have the best offensive season of his career in Atlanta in 2016. Perhaps the automatic reaction is that Flowers went to a somewhat weaker National League, and the White Sox had no way of predicting that a breakout was coming.

That is not necessarily true. While Flowers wasn’t great during the 2015 season, he showed some shockingly good improvements in areas that sometimes go unnoticed. From 2014 to 2015 some serious improvements were made in his contact and swing rates. He lowered his swing percentage on pitches outside the zone from 34.1 to 29.5 percent while keeping his swing percentage on pitches inside the zone relatively the same. Laying off the garbage helped him raise his contact rate on pitches inside the zone by 7.9 percent. Even more noticeable was the drop in strikeout rate from 36 to 28.8 percent. That adjustment seemed to stick around in Atlanta where he held a 28 percent strikeout rate while raising his walk rate a bit to become an above average hitter, which is not often seen from catchers.

The success of Flowers only compounded the issues that the White Sox saw from their decision to change things at catcher. While they were looking to make an offensive improvement, neither Avila nor Navarro held up their ends of the deal. Navarro’s slash line was horrifying. He hit .207/.265/.322 with a 56 wRC+. He was disastrous at the plate, which was where he was supposed to excel. Avila faired slightly better, mostly due to his ability to take a walk. Avila had a walk rate of 18.2 percent, which helped him reach above average wRC+ (104). The offensive production was bad and disappointing. However, the White Sox can be mostly forgiven for that part of it. They expected success at the plate (although perhaps that’s a poor reflection of their scouting department), but they got failure. Where the White Sox were really burned for their decision was behind the plate.

Tyler Flowers was coming off his best defensive season, in which he had an FRAA of 11.0 and ranked third in framing runs with 15.2. The misconception appears to be that the White Sox weren’t even aware of this impressive framing ability, especially in the year before his release. Rick Hahn put those suggestions to bed with his comments during a conference call in March.

“I think there’s an unfortunate perception out there that we let Tyler Flowers go because we don’t believe in or perhaps are even not aware of framing data,” he said. “Hopefully people realize it was a little more of a sophisticated decision than that. We certainly have, I believe, owned the fact that it did not pan out with (Dioner) Navarro and (Alex) Avila the way we had hoped.”

Hahn makes two things clear with this statement. First, the White Sox do consider and value framing data. Second, he owns up to the fact that the decision to move from Flowers to Navarro and Avila was not a success. He went on to talk in a little more detail about framing and the things the White Sox consider when pursuing a catcher.

“We do very much value catcher defense,” he said. “We spend a great deal of time on framing and teaching framing at the minor league level … In fact, you will recall that Tyler made great advances as part of our organization in his framing metrics. When it does come to evaluating a catcher’s defensive ability, we don’t limit it strictly to framing. We would like to also have their ability to control the running game be evaluated, their ability with lateral movement to handle passed balls in the dirt, to a lesser extend wild pitches and the effect a catcher has on that, as well as their ability to work with a pitching staff and manage a pitcher’s compliance with their game plan as well.

“So it’s easy to look at the decision on Tyler and think it was us not understanding or appreciating framing data, however, nothing could be farther from the truth.”

First off, he’s right about the fact that Flowers learned his framing skill in the White Sox minor league system. When he was acquired, he was actually considered an above-average hitter with questions about whether he could stick behind the plate. (Sound familiar?) What is more interesting is that he goes on to describe the other aspects of defense that they do value. Specifically throwing runners out and blocking.

Using numbers from Baseball Prospectus, Flowers had -2.8 blocking runs and -0.6 throwing runs in 2015. Being in the red on any defensive metric isn’t a great sign, but certainly those small negatives are outweighed by the +15.2 runs he produced by framing. It becomes even more questionable when the unimpressive -0.8 blocking runs and -0.6 throwing runs from Navarro in 2016 come into play. His numbers before the addition were very similar, so there wasn’t a drastic change year to year after joining Chicago. Avila wasn’t much better in 2016 with 0.0 blocking runs and -0.6 throwing runs. It’s easy to deflect the displeasure over framing away by mentioning other aspects of defense. After all, framing just happens to be the in vogue stat. However, neither Avila nor Navarro was an upgrade defensively outside of framing.

Add on the poor framing from both Avila and Navarro and the decision becomes even more mind-boggling. It’s not often that an inability to frame is readily seen day to day via the eye test. Navarro made that possible. His -18.8 framing runs in 2016 only backed up what the eyes told us right away. It would’ve been hard to be worse than Navarro behind the plate. In fact, nobody was worse. Avila, however, did his best to catch up by producing a -6.5 framing runs.

The decision to move from Flowers to Avila and Navarro was a bad one. It was made even worse by an inability to identify improvements from Flowers on the offensive side of the ball. The biggest discrepancy, however, was on defense. While Avila and Navarro failed most excessively at framing, they weren’t good in any aspects of defending.

Does this matter anymore? Hahn has owned up to the lack of success they saw from the move. Hahn has expressed a desire to have catchers excel behind the plate. It really shouldn’t matter anymore. However, it continues to leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. Flowers wouldn’t have cost much at all for the White Sox to retain. They failed to see that he was on the verge of a good offensive performance in addition to his consistent ability behind the plate. While Flowers is long gone now, the impact of this catching decision will continue to reverberate.

Rehashing the details of the catchers added last year can be painful, but it perhaps gives us an insight into the mindset of the team going forward. Omar Narvaez appears to be the guy the White Sox are going with for now. At least until Zack Collins can work his way up in the next few years. Narvaez isn’t egregious behind the plate like Navarro and Avila were. However, he’s not going to help his pitchers out nearly as much as Flowers did. The White Sox must deal with the consequences that has for their pitching staff. They must also consider how that affects their decision making in regards to the catcher position going forward. It doesn’t appear as though Narvaez or Collins is going to be impressive on defense, so what are the White Sox going to do if they continue to fall behind the league in catcher defense? The answer to that question remains to be seen. It is, however, certainly a question that must be answered.

Lead Photo Credit: Steve Mitchell/USA Today Sports Images

The White Sox’ recent saga at catcher is well-known by now. In an effort to boost the offense, a platoon of Alex Avila and Dioner Navarro was acquired after the 2015 season, with Tyler Flowers non-tendered. Predictable issues arose–Avila got hurt, and Navarro was ghastly as a receiver. Slightly less predictable was Navarro’s bat disintegrating as well while Flowers would have a career year at the plate.

But, during the churn of catchers due to injuries and ineffectiveness, Omar Narvaez got his shot once the playoffs were already long out of reach, and showed that the odd profile he demonstrated in the minors would translate to the majors. Narvaez has basically zero power, with only seven home runs in almost 1,800 career minor league plate appearances, to go along with a .336 minor league slugging percentage.

The problem with hitting for no power at all, beyond the lost value of not getting extra base hits in and of itself, is that pitchers have no reason to pitch you carefully. If the worst thing you can do to them is hit a single, why would they walk you?

So far in his career, however, that hasn’t mattered for Narvaez. He walks anyway. He walked more than he struck out in the minors en route to a .353 OBP and so far in 151 major league plate appearances he has walked more than he’s struck out.  Indeed, at the outset of 2017 his statistics reflect a sort of exaggerated version of his purest form, with a triple slash line of .250/.382/.286.  Watching him hit, you can kind of see how he’s able to pull this off, as he has excellent knowledge of the strike zone, willing to take close pitches, and with his 90% contact rate, he is able to either put strikes in play or spoil them.  If anything, it appears that his primary goal at the plate is to walk above all else, with getting a hit as a fallback.

Whether Narvaez can sustain his strangely-shaped production bears monitoring. It seems unlikely that such a player will be the rare catcher that you run out there for ~475+ plate appearances a year (last year only 10 players did so).  However, crucially, Narvaez has improved his pitch framing from his debut in 2016, as FRAA has him in the black for 2017.  And given that the average OBP last year for all players was .322, having a catcher who simply makes pitchers work and gets on base at a .330-.340 clip while providing solid defense is nothing to sneeze at.  In fact, he may be such an improvement on the 2016 White Sox catching situation* that Narvaez represents one of the many reasons the rebuilding version of the team may win roughly the same amount of games as the contending one did.

*The 2016 White Sox were the worst team in the majors in pitch framing, and Navarro alone was worth -2.5 WARP.

It is increasingly looking like Narvaez is usable as the big half of a platoon or a plus backup, and that’s a pretty excellent result for a minor league Rule V draft acquisition. It’s early, but 2017 has been a good year for the prognosis of the White Sox’ potential supporting cast moving forward.

The only problem was betting on Navarro and Avila. Navarro turned 32 in September and for his career only had one season of above average offense and two directly at league average. He could still throw runners out, but that was the extent of his defensive abilities. And while Avila is a fine enough backup, expecting a catcher with at least three admitted concussions since 2013 to be able to handle half of a platoon was hardly realistic. The Sox went from buying the eight on the craps table to betting a hard eight: the payoff is theoretically better, but you’re sinking your odds of walking away with a favorable outcome.

Which is exactly what happened. Navarro was shipped back to Toronto in August for a 25-year-0ld Double-A reliever. Avila had one of the stranger batting lines after the trade, managing only seven hits in 46 at bats but with four of those hits beings home runs, and drawing 14 walks as well. You don’t often see a .763 OPS paired with a .152 batting average. And while the return on the Navarro trade will likely never result in major league anything for the White Sox, it did free up playing time for someone who might. Omar Narvaez used his 34 games to show off his silent skill set: an impressive knowledge of the strike zone as a hitter and defense that, while not officially good, at least won’t make you want to break your remote while watching.

The White Sox grabbed Narvaez from the Tampa Bay Rays in the 2013 Rule V draft and stashed him away in the minors. He didn’t show up on any prospect lists because, well, he just kind of existed. Seven home runs in 1,543 minor league at-bats isn’t much of anything to write home about, and neither is a .277 average, so it’s completely understandable that no one knew who he was going into last year. He struggled tremendously in Birmingham in 2016, putting up a .208 TAv in 13 games. His 41 game stint in Charlotte didn’t go much better (.210 TAv). But then Kevan Smith got hurt and Navarro got traded and circumstances more or less forced the Sox into playing Narvaez in the majors. And he managed to hold his own.

There’s nothing inherently sexy about a .267/.350/.337 slash line or a .261 TAv. But from a 24-year-old catcher who before that season had never played above High-A? That’s pretty impressive. Of course, there are caveats. We’re looking at a 34 game sample size, most of which came at the end of the year when pitching staffs are cooked, manned with September call ups, or both. But after watching a full season of Navarro and Avila, it was a refreshing glass of lukewarm pond water after drinking sand.

I don’t expect Narvaez to be anything amazing, but he doesn’t have to be. He’s not going to suddenly develop power. His defense might improve from acceptable to decent. It’s not likely, but it happened with Flowers so I’m not willing to write it off completely. PECOTA is not optimistic at all about his upcoming season (-1.6 WARP, .233 TAv). But again, I’m not expecting Buster Posey. All I’m hoping for from Narvaez is what he’s shown his whole career: an eye that allows him to draw an equal amount of walks to strikeouts and a bat with enough hits in it to make him a 1-2 WARP player. The current rebuild is predicated upon stocking the minors with players with the chance of becoming All-Stars or more. If everything breaks right, Tim Anderson and Yoan Moncada are the stars capable of carrying the offense. But those teams still need quietly useful guys filling in some of the other gaps. This year will go a long way in showing if Narvaez can turn into that type of player for Chicago.

Lead Photo Credit: Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports

But the magnitude of just how bad he was needs to be expressed mathematically, because just saying, “He was really bad” doesn’t capture it.  People acknowledge Navarro was bad in the way people take for a given that the Spanish Flu was bad, but when you actually quantify it, in 1918 the Spanish Flu killed as many as 50 million people or up to 5 percent of the world’s population at the time. Similarly, the White Sox were minus-26.4 in framing runs as a team, worst in MLB, with Navarro registering minus-19.9 in only half a season’s worth of games.

As a result, Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, Carlos Rodon, and Miguel Gonzalez finished second, third, ninth, and 17th in all of baseball in terms of most value lost to poor framing by their catchers.  Sale and Quintana are veteran front-line starters who muddled through, but Rodon clearly suffered dramatically.  Despite posting a good 3.44 DRA and a cFIP of 87 — a top 20 mark among pitchers with more that 140 innings — his ERA was 4.04.

The 2017 White Sox are going to be bad, and Omar Narvaez is likely mediocre-to-okay as a receiver rather than a true asset, but he doesn’t need to be more than that to be a massive upgrade. A team with neutral framing — zero runs added or subtracted — would have been 15th in the majors instead of 30th.  The White Sox were further negative at minus-26.4 than the best team in the majors was positive at 25.6.

As a result, pitch framing, along with the timing of when good players like Quintana, Todd Frazier, and Melky Cabrera are dealt, as well as if and when the new elite prospects arrive, represents one of the many variables that could have a big impact on the 2017 team’s win total. Like many of the White Sox worst positions of the last decade, semi-competence represents a quantum leap above what they had in place previously.

It’s going to be a bad team, but the White Sox eventual record might wind up pretty close to where it was last year based largely on the fact that it would be almost impossible to do anything but improve in this area moving forward.

Lead Image Credit: Troy Taormina // USA Today Sports Images

Rodon had a very encouraging finish to the 2015 season, lowering his walk rate by 4.2 percentage points from the first half of the season to the second. His effectiveness in his rookie campaign, especially in the second half, was reason enough for White Sox fans and writers alike to jump aboard the Rodon hype train. By simply putting his mid-90s fastball and powerful slider in the zone, he built huge expectations for the 2016 season.

What some fans failed to consider, however, was how much Tyler Flowers played a part in Rodon’s improvements during the 2015 season. One of the best framers in the league helped Rodon get more strikes called and utilize his pitches better. With Dioner Navarro catching Rodon for the majority of the first half of 2016, he failed brutally. He couldn’t find the strike zone, he was getting hit hard, and his seldom-used changeup completely disappeared from his repertoire.

For the second-straight season, Rodon greatly improved in the second half. In 2015, it was his slight adjustment of where he set up on the mound and ability to find the strike zone. In 2016 he, with the help of new battery partner Omar Narvaez, discovered the power of his changeup and utilized the backdoor slider. Those two pitches alone helped him lower his opposing batting line against right handed hitting in the first half from .309/.376/.502 to .238/.307/.389. Although he was already a strikeout fiend, he managed to raise his strikeout rate against right-handed hitting 3.5 percentage points from the first half of the season to the second.

His newfound ability to get right handed batters out greatly improved his ability to last longer in games and ultimately be more effective, and he looked like a more dominant and complete pitcher than he ever had before. He began to limit his pitch counts, throw more fastballs in the mid-to-upper 90s, and his highly touted slider became a true weapon. As the White Sox headed further down the stretch with no hope of the postseason, Robin Ventura allowed Rodon to go deeper into games and face higher-leverage situations to test him. The young southpaw responded well to those situations, giving even more reason to believe that Rodon was growing into a top of the rotation role.

The rising expectations for Rodon led to disappointment in the early parts of 2016, but he was able to bounce back incredibly well during the latter parts of the season. In his final start of the season, he set an American League record by striking out the first seven batters of the game. He ultimately gave up two earned runs in the start and only lasted six innings, but his dominance in the early part of the game was a preview of Rodon’s future: slicing and dicing his way through the lineup, using all three of his pitches strategically. His 2016 season was full of struggles, but as a whole Rodon made great strides. His continuing growth is incredibly encouraging for the future of the White Sox and their rotation.

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

Dioner Navarro had most recently played for the Toronto Blue Jays, where he was well-known for his inability to frame and mostly used as a platoon bat. He had 192 plate appearances in 2015 (135 against right handed pitching), in which he hit .246/.307/.374 with just an 84 wRC+ and .129 ISO. For a catcher those numbers aren’t completely despicable, but he was mostly shielded by favorable hitting match-ups. And yet, the White Sox saw him as such an offensive upgrade over Tyler Flowers that it washed out the wide margin in framing ability. Either that or the White Sox didn’t consider framing at all in their decision. I’m not sure which is worse.

Not only did Navarro greatly lack in framing skills, hurting a White Sox pitching staff that needed as much help as it could get outside of the top two starters, but he also didn’t hit worth a lick. During his 298 plate appearances with the White Sox, Navarro hit just .210/.267/.339 with a .216 TAv, 60 wRC+, and .129 ISO. In other words, he was bad. Very, very bad.

As far as framing statistics go, the Baseball Prospectus stat CSAA is about as good as it gets. Dioner Navarro was 5th worst in that statistic this season. In fact, according to FRAA Dioner Navarro was the worst defensive catcher in all of Major League Baseball this season with a -20.4 value.

Navarro’s impotence as a hitter combined with indifference and lack of skill behind the plate made him a complete disaster of an addition for the White Sox front office. In terms of WARP, Dioner Navarro was the worst position player in all of baseball. His -2.84 was 0.93 wins worse than the next worst player, the now retired Mark Teixeira. Granted, that number is heavily swayed by FRAA’s dislike of Navarro, but even the eye test strongly suggests that Navarro was horrendous both behind the plate and with the bat.

On a team carrying Avisail Garcia, J.B. Shuck, and Jason Coats, Dioner Navarro was the worst. In a group of offseason additions that included Austin Jackson, Jimmy Rollins, and Jerry Sands, Dioner Navarro was the worst. Perhaps that comes off as hyperbole, but at a premium position where the White Sox couldn’t afford to miss, they missed big time with Dioner Navarro.

Lead Photo Credit: Joe Nicholson – USA Today Sports Images

Well guess what, it happened again. With all of the caveats cited in my January piece about single-season WARP totals–although FRAA is better than say, UZR or DRS–the White Sox wound up using as regulars a bunch of below-replacement level players.  By this metric, recently departed Dioner Navarro was the worst position player in the majors at -2.4.* But it doesn’t stop there. J.B. Shuck has now accumulated 231 PAs and in that time his .250 OBP and .307 SLG have been good enough for a -1.2 WARP, 8th worst in MLB.

If the excuse here is, “They were counting on Austin Jackson and he got hurt” I would point out that Jackson himself was below replacement when he was injured for the rest of the season as well.  And while we’re at it, if the plan is, “Nobody can get hurt, even our worst position players, or we’re done,” then the plan is really bad.

*The second-worst weighed in at -1.9 so Navarro was basically lapping the field. 

Even if we grant a mulligan for Jimmy Rollins‘ stopgap -0.3 WARP, we have Carlos Sanchez‘ breathtaking season wherein his meager 98 PAs were so bad that he is still the 21st worst player in baseball by this measure.  I haven’t even had to mention Avisail Garcia, who is somehow barely above replacement level, but only because, for reasons that elude me, FRAA likes his defense. So if you disagree with its assertion that he is a positive in the outfield, he too is one of the worst players in the league.

“Once again this team proves that replacement level doesn’t exist if you have no organizational depth.” – Ethan Spalding

They’ve had some bad luck, to be sure, although of all the rookies who got injured this year, Charlie Tilson likely represented the only realistic upgrade on what they have.  Shuck is a low bar to clear, as we discussed, but even so, you’d have to be pretty bullish on Tilson to have expected him to perform much better than Jackson’s bench-quality production this year anyway.

So it’s been another season of simply rearranging problems instead of solving them.  To be sure, the infield is in better shape than it was–third base and second base have legitimate major leaguers in place for 2017 (although afterward they project to be disasters again), and barring incident, shortstop looks like it has a long-term solution.  However, designated hitter, starting catcher, and at least one outfield spot are all looking dire again, and the September call-ups do not offer excitement about next year the way, say, Trayce Thompson did.  And again, left field is looking like a void waiting to happen after 2017 as well.

The White Sox are now more than a few seasons into their overhaul of their Latin America program and the CBA overhauling the draft to suit their preferences, and yet the depth is still woefully inadequate at the major league level and in the high minors.  An organization that won its only World Series in a century with a team that was defined by a lack of weaknesses, instead of elite players carrying dead weight, they have since tried for more than a decade to make the latter work, to no avail.

What’s that cliche about the definition of insanity again?

Lead Image Credit: Rick Osentoski // USA Today Sports Images

Moving on from Flowers made sense, as despite being heralded as a prospect whose bat would play even if his defense was questionable, Flowers never became an above-average hitter, and most years was at or below the league average for catchers offensively.

Of course, what became Flowers’ strength was that he usually ranked near the top of the league in pitch framing, and had developed a reputation for calling a good game, something Chris Sale was often quick to praise.

So in jettisoning Flowers for the platoon of free-agent acquisitions Alex Avila and Dioner Navarro, the White Sox were essentially attempting to trade defense for offense behind the plate. In theory, this was easy to understand: the White Sox had one of the five worst offenses in baseball a year ago and, with presumed defensive upgrades at third base and in center and right field, upgrading the offense while downgrading defensively at one position was justifiable.

This is especially true when you consider that of the two pluses in Flowers’ game mentioned earlier, one is intangible and the other’s value is still difficult to quantify. (Although the numbers we do have, particularly in the framing department, say Navarro and Avila have been awful).

Where the White Sox failed is in replacing that known quantity with anything resembling an upgrade. In Avila and Navarro, the White Sox were gambling that a platoon of the two veterans would provide enough of an offensive upgrade to make up for the presumed loss defensively. They were low-risk gambles, but given the organization’s lack of depth at the position, it was actually an ill-conceived gamble that was doomed from the start.

It would be one thing if the White Sox were replacing Flowers with a young player they could at least hope to develop. But in Avila and Navarro, the White Sox built their catching position like a house of cards, with the hope not that they had replaced Flowers with something resembling a long-term solution, but instead with hope that they’d get one more season of value before the arrangement toppled to the ground.

Even if Avila weren’t riddled with injury problems, the Sox were still relying on two guys who hadn’t been markedly above replacement level in a number of years, one who was 32-years-old without plus athleticism, and the other who had suffered multiple concussions and hadn’t been the same since his most recently reported one in 2014.

The only way this would have wound up a significant upgrade is if both had hit their ~80th percentile production level, and with that kind of history that’s a gamble that was never going to pay off. Maybe them failing as miserably as they have — Navarro’s bat dropping off specifically — wasn’t foreseeable, but it was a helluva lot more likely than the combination of A) staying healthy and B) hitting like they had in their respective primes.

Again, I’m not advocating the White Sox sticking with the status quo. When the decision to part ways with Flowers was made, it was refreshing to see a team that has too often stood by unproductive incumbents for far too long — Gordon Beckham, Dayan Viciedo, Avisail Garcia come immediately to mind — move on from such a player. But when you’re replacing mediocre with mediocre, all you’re doing, if you’ll pardon the cliche, is shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The White Sox have a number of problems to address if they want to get back to contention, but when you’re just swapping out replacement-level veterans for other replacement-level veterans, all you’re really doing is providing an opportunity to watch a new player in a new jersey fail time and time again. The White Sox have been a directionless franchise for too long now, and the catching position exemplifies it as much as any move they’ve made.

Lead Photo Credit: Joe Nicholson-USA TODAY Sports

Despite Rick Hahn being coy about the offseason plan, this is an organization that has been gallingly passive in recent years.  In that sense, it is a positive to see them trade away a player that is clearly not part of the future, is blocking someone worth evaluating in the present, and looking for ways to add talent–any talent–to the organization.  After all, whether or not the White Sox choose to rebuild or try to actually capitalize on the good, cheap core that they have in place this winter, Navarro was expendable either way.

Colton Turner is the return coming back from Toronto.  As you might imagine, it’s not exactly the biggest haul, again–this is a free addition to the organization, because the alternative is just watching Navarro leave at the end of the year for nothing.  He’s a 25-year old LHP who was vaporizing both levels of A-ball (as you’d hope) and has struggled quite a bit with his promotion to AA.  The best hope for him is that he’s a LOOGY eventually, but that’s still useful.  The White Sox have certainly had their trouble finding someone to fill that role without spending a decent amount of money on a guy like Zach Duke.

Along those same lines, the trade syncs up with Alex Avila‘s activation from the DL.  There are still a few days to make waiver trades, and one wonders if someone would be interested in giving up something for him.  After all, Avila has had a better year than Navarro has.  Even if the White Sox wanted to bring him back in 2016, he’s a free agent at the end of the year regardless and he’s not getting a Qualifying Offer–there’s no reason you can’t just sign him anyway.

As for Navarro himself, anecdotally he became a lightning rod for criticism, and not without reason.  His bat fell apart, statistical and visual evidence that his framing was killing the pitching staff piled up quickly, and the guy he replaced was Chris Sale‘s personal catcher who was better in every way and promptly went off to have a career year in Atlanta.*  While catcher is a difficult position to solve, and pitch framing metrics do not inspire as much confidence as say, OBP does, a platoon of Avila and Tyler Flowers looks like a it would have been massively preferable to what they wound up doing.  And while no organization is perfect on this score,** the White Sox have been in the red on player evaluations for a while now.

*Sale’s off-the-field blowups this year didn’t come out of nowhere, as we’ve seen him confront the front office before, and anybody who has watched him give up a home run and come back throwing 99+ with zero control knows he’s….competitive.  However, one wonders if the White Sox non-tendering Flowers this winter pushed him into feeling more adversarial with management.  

**For example, the Astros are widely lauded as a Smart Organization that is On The Rise, but this is the same regime that drafted Mark Appel over Kris Bryant, and let J.D. Martinez, Robbie Grossman, and Jonathan Villar go actually for free or basically for free.

Well, despite all of that, Navarro gets to go play in playoff race with his teammates of the last two years, while the White Sox will continue to flush year five of Sale’s Hall of Fame Peak down the toilet without him.

In that light, Shields wasn’t that bad Wednesday.

He was still sort of bad, though, and the Sox lost, no thanks in part.

1. Holding the Sox to a mere 3-0 deficit in the sixth, Shields was one out–nay, one strike–away from the platonic ideal of a quality start: six innings, three earned runs. Instead, Shields hung an 0-2 curve to Tommy Joseph, and crumpled into a crouch as it flew out to left-center behind him. Just for good measure and the proper level of knife-twisting, it wound up being the decisive run of the game when the Sox ninth-inning rally died at 5-3, and it made sure the garish 2.58 HR/9 he game into the game with improbably went up.

2. After twirling a perfect first inning–second start in a row–Shields ran into trouble in the second, with two outs and the bottom of the order coming for him. Joseph bashed a double, Aaron Altherr sprayed an RBI single to right, and Freddy Galvis plated him as well with line drive to right-center that Adam Eaton let roll past him in center.

Not done, Shields allowed Cesar Hernandez to flip an elevated 91 mph fastball out to the opposite field and into the bullpen in left to lead off the third. Otherwise, Shields was, flashing competence? He spun some nice curves on the night, struck out six and walked none, and had enough legit reason for confidence in the pitch that you can understand how he found himself hanging one to Joseph at the end of the sixth. Once you get over his constant vulnerability to getting crushed at any given moment, it was one of his stronger efforts.

3. Despite the lack of swing-and-miss stuff or top velocity, Phillies starter Jerad Eickhoff faced the minimum number of Sox hitters through five innings, with an Eaton single erased by a double play in the fourth being his only baserunner early on. Like Shields, however, he seemed to get unraveled by the bottom of the Sox order. Avisail Garcia led off the sixth with a single, and came home when Dioner Navarro blasted a center-cut fastball out to right for his first home run since July 4. The outburst made it a game again, and chased Eickhoff after six even though he was only at 71 pitches.

4. After an improbable scoreless inning of work from Matt Albers, Dan Jennings was brought into the eighth solely to face Ryan Howard, and gave up a single to right. Tommy Kahnle took over to add some right-handed firepower, and promptly walked Cameron Rupp, and allowed Altherr to rip an insurance-run scoring single to left to bring home pinch-runner Emmanuel Burriss. Letting Howard bat against the lefty doesn’t seem much more sane than allowing him to run, but the Phillies chose right in each case.

5. It wound up only looking and feeling bad, because the Sox rally in the ninth against Phillies closer Jeanmar Gomez could only get so close. After Jose Abreu drilled a single to keep his on-base streak alive at 20 games, Todd Frazier worked a two-out walk, and Garcia hung back and sprayed a hanger down the right-field line to plate Abreu. Those heroics brought Navarro back to the plate with the tying run on base and the chance to have his moment of the season, but a weak grounder second ended it.

Team Record: 60-65

Next game is Thursday at 7:10pm CT vs. Seattle on CSN

Lead Image Credit: Mike Dinovo // USA Today Sports Images