As you’ve surely seen, heard, and/or read about by now, the benches cleared during Saturday’s White Sox game in Kansas City because Perez took umbrage to Tim Anderson being excited about hitting a leadoff homerun. Yes, you read that correctly. Salvador Perez, member of the 2014 & 2015 scraptastic celebration-addict Royals was mad about a player being happy. Here are the key quotes about it courtesy of editor emeritus James Fegan:

“He did it Opening Day, too,” Perez said. “The same thing. Said a bad word. He didn’t even play in a fucking playoff game. He doesn’t know about getting excited. You have to be in playoffs to get excited, win a World Series, to get excited. That’s a game. That’s a simple game. That’s the second time I said something to him. The first time I saw it I was on the DL. He do it again and I have the opportunity to say something to him again.”

“I’ve hit some homers, too,” Perez said. “I keep running the bases. I don’t get loud like you. That’s the only thing I tell him. Keep doing what you’re doing, bro. Have fun. It’s a game, you know, but respect my team. That’s it. He was mad about that.”

What.

Baseball will forever have some of the dumbest unwritten rules because traditions exist and the vast majority of them are pointless and ridiculous. But man, the hypocrisy of this coming from one of the key players in the Kansas City Royals Handjive Brigade is downright comical. The 2014 and 2015 Royals were maybe the most exuberant and demonstrative baseball team I can ever remember watching. They celebrated everything. Homerun? Trots and dugout dances. Hit a double? Elaborate hand gestures to the dugout. Eked out a single? Clap until your hands bleed. Strike someone out? Jaw at them the entire walk back to the dugout. And if the other team didn’t like it, you could always just get into a fight with them like the Royals did multiple times.

Anderson is happy again and it’s great to see. He’s rebounding nicely from last year’s awfulness and isn’t afraid to show his elation on the field. That’s going to rub some teams the wrong way and to an extent, I guess I get it. But if you spent multiple years defending Yordano Ventura’s attitude and antics, you absolutely forfeit all rights to tell players from other teams to calm down and play the game the right way.

Photo credit: Peter G Aiken

After the “All Relievers Must Go” mega sale last season, as well as the non-tendering of Zach Putnam and Jake Petricka earlier in the winter, it was obvious the White Sox were going to need to bring in some relief help because even during another season where contention is not anticipated, it turns out guys still need to eat innings. The White Sox reliever depth chart on MLB.com prior to the trade included a top seven bullpen of Nate Jones, Juan Minaya, Gregory Infante, Aaron Bummer, Danny Farquhar, Jace Fry, and Thyago Vieira. Reinforcements were necessary.

Soria is the name you’re likely most familiar with from his dominant stint with Kansas City a decade ago. From 2007-2010 he tossed 255 innings, posting a K/9 of 9.9 and a 2.01 ERA. He missed the 2011 season with Tommy John surgery and subsequently bounced around from Texas to Detroit to Pittsburgh over the next few years before landing back with the Royals the last two seasons, where he wasn’t great in 2016 before rebounding for a solid 2017. Now 33 years old, he’s coming off a season where he struck out his most batters per nine since 2014 with a cFIP (78) that suggests he was much better than his 3.70 ERA would indicate. One would expect Soria to be in the mix with both Jones and Minaya for late-inning work in 2018.

Avilan is a 28-year-old lefty who misses both bats and the plate at a high rate. After coming to the Dodgers from Atlanta during the 2016 he saw a huge jump in both his BB/9 (2.5 to 4.6) and K/9 (8.3 to 12.8). He was solid in a limited role for the Dodgers last season, striking out 52 in 46 innings of work with a 2.93 ERA and a complementary DRA of 3.19. He was left off the Dodgers’ playoff roster after suffering from left shoulder inflammation toward the end of the season. With the unproven Bummer and Fry the only lefty relievers on the White Sox 40-man roster, he’s a reasonable option there.

The player the White Sox sent away in exchange for bullpen depth, Peter, was the subject of much discussion when they decided to leave him off the 40-man roster and thus, unprotected heading into the Rule 5 draft earlier this winter, where he was not selected. Peter was among the “Next 10″ in BP’s Top 10 White Sox Prospects list released earlier this offseason, with our prospect team saying about him:

Peter spent another year bouncing between Double-A and Triple-A, playing all over the diamond, and basically having the Jake Peter season. In a bit of a twist though, he socked nine home runs in 45 International League games after hitting just eleven total in his first three professional seasons. This may be a sample size blip of course—and Peter’s profile has always been more “scrappy utility type” than “future Brian Dozier”—but even if that is the case, he’s pretty much major league ready and a reasonable bench upgrade for a team that gave an awful lot of at-bats to Tyler Saladino and Alen Hanson last season. And hey, Brian Dozier’s profile was never “future Brian Dozier” either.

The path to playing time was hard to envision for Peter in Chicago. As a utility infielder who’s best position is second base, the existence of Yoan Moncada, not to mention Yolmer Sanchez, Leury Garcia, and the players mentioned above, there was no readily-available playing time for a player who is nearly 25.

Peter may turn into an adequate major league contributor, but given the blockade of middle infielders ahead of him, not to mention the fact that no team was willing to take a shot on him in the Rule 5, he’s a reasonably subtraction in a deal that nets the White Sox a pair of plus relievers and some cash to boot.

Lead Photo Credit: Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports

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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This gentle fan-to-fan banter is commonplace in my life and presumably, at times, in yours. But it nonetheless caught me off guard as it got me thinking about the absurdity of the interaction given the circumstances. As the White Sox have slogged through a not unexpectedly unsuccessful 2017 season, I’ve scarcely been affected by the result of any singular game. That comes with the territory of rooting for a rebuilding team. You look at what transpired over the course of a game and hope the players you believe will matter in 2-3 years perform in a way that has you feeling good about their development. You’re still happy about the wins, whether they’re thanks to Lucas Giolito and Yoan Moncada or Adam Engel and Mike Pelfrey. You’re less pleased with the losses (unless you’re doing it wrong, in which case I can’t help you). But you watch, because you like baseball and you’re a White Sox fan and it’s something you’re just used to doing in July and August and September.

The reason the interaction caught me off guard, I think, is because as I’ve become so accustomed to that level of rooting interest I often forget that, oh yeah, wins and losses still matter. I was also reminded of this Monday when our friends at BP Kansas City posted a series preview in which David Lesky wrote about how important it was for the Royals’ sinking playoff hopes to take a series from the cellar dwelling White Sox. Oh yeah, the results of these games still matter to some people.

It’s a strangely simplistic way of viewing the season, but something I’ve just gotten comfortable with throughout 2017 (as well as during the latter halves of most recent seasons). My reaction to soft-natured ribbing about the White Sox blowing a lead is to look at how Giolito, Moncada, and Tim Anderson performed. “Oh well, at least Giolito tossed six innings of one-run ball and Moncada and Anderson had two hits each.”

I do this sometimes without thinking because I know that those are the guys who are supposed to make September games meaningful in the years to come. Giolito, Moncada, and Anderson, as well as Reynaldo Lopez and Carlos Rodon are the players everyone dreams will be throwing important pitches and taking important at-bats for the White Sox down the road. You could argue this for a number of other plays if you want — the red-hot Yolmer Sanchez, the disabled Leury Garcia, the handsome Nicky Delmonico, Avisail Garcia. But, really, it’s those first five, as well as a few who haven’t yet donned White Sox uniforms in games that count, who matter, even if wins and losses don’t yet.

This is not a new line of thinking. We’ve written in this space a number of times how despite a losing season, there are reasons to watch and reasons to find optimism as the White Sox sit 29 games below .500 with 17 games to play. The results are an afterthought, but seeing Giolito battle through six innings with subpar stuff is meaningful, just as it was in a different way when he eviscerated the Rays last week. Seeing Anderson battle through personal strife to turn around his season since the beginning of August, or Moncada show the tools that made him a top prospect, despite poor BIP luck thus far, matters.

So much can change between now and when the White Sox begin to show signs of fielding a competitive team, but regardless of how far down the road it is, what matters in September today are important developments toward a future where a September blown lead against the Royals is worth caring about.

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Things started to fall apart, however, when he entered the heart of the Royals lineup for the second time. With a no-hitter still intact in the fourth inning, Lopez hung a curveball that Mike Moustakas crushed to right-center field. Things started to fall apart after that as he allowed two straight hits with still just one out. He came back and got two straight outs to escape, but it was the beginning of a tumultuous final three innings of work for the young righty.

When Moustakas strode to the plate again in the sixth, the result was the same as in the fourth. This time, it was a changeup from Lopez left up in the zone taken over the left-center wall. He didn’t have a single strikeout after the third inning. He survived on outs in the air, giving up just those two runs on the long ball. In his six innings of work, he had just one ground ball out. The final line showed that it was a successful debut with Lopez going six innings, allowing four hits, two runs, and three walks while striking out six.

•••

Reynaldo was sitting in the upper 90s during the first three innings of work; surely adrenaline had something to do with him pumping gas to begin his White Sox debut. When he got into trouble in the later innings of his start, the fastball was sitting closer to 95 mph. The extra couple ticks, along with nasty secondary pitches in the first three innings is what allowed him to miss bats with such authority. He had six strikeouts in the first three innings of work and looked extremely impressive despite his pitch count quickly building up.

The stuff simply dropped off for Lopez as he got into the fourth and beyond. His fastball was a couple ticks lower, and there was noticeably less bite to his curveball. The changeup was left up in the zone far too often, and major league hitters naturally pounced on such opportunities. Even with his stuff dropping off, Lopez was able to battle through, though. He managed to work around a couple base hits and a lot of balls in the air to complete a solid start. Only Moustakas was truly able to jump at his mistakes, and he’s on pace for at least 40 home runs this season.

This start was entirely emblematic of Lopez’ prospect profile. His stuff is incredible, and when he’s on he’s going to dazzle with all three pitches. When he’s not missing bats, however, the contact he gives up is often in the air (42.8 percent fly balls in Charlotte). That contact in the air becomes dangerous when it’s hit with even a little gusto or catches a stream of wind or perhaps is carried further because of a juiced ball. Such was the case against Moustakas, whose fly balls both landed beyond the outfield wall.

Analysts and scouts have doubted Lopez’s ability to start in the long term. It’s easy to scoff at such statements when merely peering at box scores from minor league games. Lopez certainly looked like he was handling a starter’s role with ease in Charlotte. Those box scores don’t quite tell the whole story, and it’s not until a pitcher is given a good look that the concerns come to light.

The concerns about Lopez’ future as a starter were on display Friday. While he did work through the sixth inning allowing just two earned runs, the concern about a future in the bullpen is entirely warranted. The stuff is good. It’s really good. But if he is unable to induce weak contact and ground balls, as was the case against the Royals, the profile screams future reliever. When he’s on, he’s striking out batters left and right while driving up his pitch count. When he’s off, hitters make more contact. That contact is often in the air, leading to home runs allowed.

It should be mentioned that this is all based on one start. Things can change for better or worse in the future starts Lopez will see throughout the months of August and September. However, it was impossible to ignore the warning signals about the future of the lively right-handed arm.

Lead photo credit: Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports

2. The White Sox pitching staff has, predictably, become much worse since the departures of Quintana, Robertson, and Tommy Kahnle. Those three were arguably the best three pitchers on the roster, so it’s natural that their departure would have lasting impacts on the team they left behind. Quintana has only been gone from the team for 10 days now, but since his departure the longest outing by a White Sox starter has been six innings. Miguel Gonzalez has done it once, and James Shields has done it once.

Things are bound to get even uglier when fatigue sets in for both the rotation and the bullpen. Gonzalez has been unimpressive, Shields has shown flashes of his poor 2016 self, and Carlos Rodon has battled control issues since arriving back in Chicago. That’s going to be taxing for the bullpen, which just lost two of the relievers they leaned on the heaviest. Robertson and Kahnle threw more pitches for the White Sox than everyone but Chris Beck, Anthony Swarzak, and Dan Jennings. Tyler Clippard was supposed to alleviate some of that burden, but he’s thrown just one-third of an inning in two games while allowing three hits and an earned run. The team will have to get creative with how they handle the remainder of the innings needed in 2017 while keeping in mind that they don’t want to burn any of the young arms.

3. One young arm that could be on his way to Chicago in the near future is Reynaldo Lopez. While his future as a starter still hangs in the balance, he’s already shown an ability to make some starts at the big league level (with Washington in 2016) and is having a fine season in Charlotte. In his last nine starts, he’s posted an ERA of 3.23, which includes one stinker of a game where he allowed six earned runs and four walks. In those last nine starts he’s walked more than two batters just that one time while striking out six or more five times, including two different outings with double digit strikeouts. He’s looked really good, which should be a sign that the White Sox are ready to give him the call. They’re right to be patient, of course, but he seems like a pitcher that is ready to make that next step. It may not be before his next start, but it seems like his time in Charlotte is coming to a close.

4. Another prospect who has been lighting it up as of late is newly acquired Eloy Jimenez. On Sunday he went 5-for-6 with two doubles and a home run. He’s had just 31 at-bats with the Dash, but he’s managed to hit seven extra base hits. His 19.7 percent strikeout rate this season indicates that he’s not whiffing or getting fooled all that often. In fact, his 10.8 percent walk rate seems to point toward some excellent discipline at the plate. This is all scouting the stat line, of course, but it’s certainly not a bad thing to see a top 10 prospect getting the desired results. It seems like it’s only a matter of time before he departs the crowded outfield of Winston-Salem for the bright, shiny Double-A ballpark in Birmingham.

5. Zack Collins is a prospect with less desirable results than Lopez or Jimenez. Despite being drafted as a bat-first prospect, Collins has stalled in High-A, a level that a player his age should have no problem with. There is of course the notion that catching prospects develop at different paces with different parts of their game taking a back seat at different times, which the lovely James Fegan mentioned in his excellent article about Collins. Even being generous towards Collins in that regard, the failure to hit at such a low level is a concern. If he’s unable to put things together the White Sox could have a failed pick at the top of the draft on their hands. The good news, however, is that the team has built enough prospect depth to withstand such a thing. It is also far too early to give up on a player like Collins, but the clock keeps ticking and he does keep getting older with each passing second. The concern is there, but the alarm bells aren’t quite ringing yet.

Lead Photo Credit: Denny Medley-USA Today Sports Images

-How and why Dave grew up a White Sox fan.

-The White Sox better-than-expected start to the season and what it means for the future of Jose Quintana.

-The surprising good starts of the likes of Avisail Garcia, Leury Garcia, and Matt Davidson.

-Why the Kansas City Royals are bad now.

-Which Star Wars character would Jose Quintana be?

You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast app by searching for “The Catbird Speaks.”

In a sense, the Royals had some of the same tough decisions to make as the White Sox did coming into this winter. The farm was depleted after shipping off considerable talent to obtain James Shields, Ben Zobrist, and Johnny Cueto.  Obviously, back-to-back World Series appearances, including a victory, are a worthy return for such an investment, but now they’re on the other side, already bumping up against budget constraints with a middling major league roster.  And while they did sign Jason Hammel, sadly, he merely serves to soak up the innings that would have gone to Yordano Ventura.

Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain, and Alcides Escobar will all be free agents at the end of the season, and the Royals largely opted to add short-term supporting pieces to make one last run with this group, and how 2018-2020 play out will hinge largely on whether or not they are competing around the deadline. If they have fallen out of the race, they may be able to inject some talent back into the system by trading these players off.  They’re rentals, but it’s better than losing them for nothing, or the greatly diminished compensatory pick system under the new CBA.

Indeed, unless the Royals do surprisingly well selling off their pending free agents, the cupboard is awfully bare. Sal Perez and Danny Duffy are still young and signed long term, but Alex Gordon and Ian Kennedy are on the wrong side of 30, and Gordon is coming off arguably the worst season of his career. That’s about it, although Raul Mondesi Jr. could at least ensure they don’t miss Escobar too much.

The farm is weak.  Their top prospect is pretty much ready, but his ceiling is limited, and the next two behind him are relievers. So despite the front office’s creativity and recent track record of performing greater than the sum of their parts, their system lacks impact potential. And, for all that the Royals did successfully building a team that competed for three years, it took a long time to accumulate it, and the talent is leaving faster than they can bring it in.

Update: On March 1st, the mother site published its Organizational Rankings, and Kansas City weighs in at 27th, only ahead of a troika of truly desolate systems.

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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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This is still accurate, but asking around and reading up on Getz’s history with the Royals has at least added some nuance to the hire, if not lending it a whole new angle. The Sox definitely went young and less experienced, will undoubtedly avoid paying a large salary by doing so, and are leaning more toward a calculated risk than anything resembling a sure thing. But the move seems more driven by a different motivation than their love of bringing back old favorites, rather it’s their tendency to look at successful division rivals as a model.

The Royals made the move to bring Getz into the fold as soon as he was available after his retirement from playing in 2014, and specifically placed him to work in player development. His actual title with the Royals is hard to pin down, but the focus is unmistakable. The role offered ample opportunity for Getz to work alongside the Royals’ scouts and learn their approach, but also the chance to do some actual player instruction in their farm system.

Royals GM Dayton Moore is just as well known for taking care of his people as anyone in the game, and rather than have Getz languish in a token position, he was brought along aggressively. The Detroit News even reported him as weighing in on trades for Johnny Cueto and Ben Zobrist within his first year with the organization, in addition to having his fingerprints on some of the rookies who debuted in 2015.

This is not to argue that Getz is actually an amazing hire (because that’s still a total unknown) or that former experience with the Sox organization did not help him land this job (because c’mon), but this is a move that is far more about trying to steal the mojo of the 2013-present Royals than insularity.

While that notion might conjure the image of Rick Hahn cold-calling Royals staffers and asking what’s the secret behind “Kansas City Specials,” trying to poach from an organization that has thrived from building high defensive competency and contact skills from its position players sounds a lot more like what they should be doing to overhaul this franchise.

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