Tuesday, April 2 was a good day for the Chicago White Sox. A solid seven-inning start from Garrett Crochet gave the team a lead into the late innings and the bullpen managed to preserve the win. This win, the first of the season, moved to Sox to a 1-4 record, a .200 winning percentage. That’s not an impressive start to the season by any means, but that 1-4 record represents the high-water mark of the month-old 2024 season for the Pale Hose. At no point in the last three weeks have the White Sox had a seasonal winning percentage better than .200, and the four-game losing streak to begin the year is their shortest losing streak so far. Whenever a team that’s projected to be terrible starts the season even worse than expected, we instinctually invoke the 1962 Mets, who set the record for the most losses in a season, at 120. We’re at that point with these White Sox.

What’s striking about Chicago’s start is that in some ways, it’s not even particularly unlucky. Yes, Yoán Moncada and Luis Robert Jr. are out for significant stretches of time, but the projected WAR for their missed playing time so far is a bit under one win. The team’s had only two other IL stints since the start of the season and both injured players, reliever John Brebbia and slugger Eloy Jiménez, returned quickly. Other than Moncada and Robert, the Sox are fielding largely the lineup, rotation, and bullpen that they intended to when the season began. They’re only about a single win worse than their Pythagorean record, and in their three wins, they outscored their opponents by a total of four runs, meaning they were just a few bad breaks from being in the 1988 Orioles territory of dreadful starts.

Chicago’s pitching, at least, hasn’t been completely hopeless. Don’t get me wrong, the White Sox staff ranks at or near the bottom of the league in ERA, FIP, and the various spins on these numbers, but the bullpen has been sort of average, and there have been at least flashes of competence from some of the starters. Crochet’s ERA is ugly, but his peripheral stats are much better and the reasons he’s struggled (homer rate, BABIP) are two of the most volatile stats in existence. Erick Fedde has looked a lot better than he did before his stint in Korea and was terrific on Tuesday, striking out 11 Twins in a 6-5 walk-off loss for the Sox. No, it’s not the pitching that’s the primary offender right now; it’s the offense.

The White Sox have been cosplaying as a Deadball era team, hitting .189/.263/.292 and scoring barely over two runs per game. To put that into context, they have a 62 wRC+ as a team, a mark that has never been maintained for a full season by any big league club; the worst hitting team over a full season was the 1920 Philadelphia A’s, with a 68 wRC+. Even if we look at just the first 24 games of a season, the White Sox lineup is among the most inept since 1901.

Teams were shut out an average of 10.3 times last year; these White Sox have been shut out eight times, meaning they’ve already been shut out half as many times as the offense that led the majors in shutouts last season, the Oakland A’s. Chicago is more than a third of the way toward matching the 2019 Marlins and 2022 Tigers for the highest single-season total of shutouts in the wild-card era, with 22. Let’s catch up quickly on the current AL Central projections in ZiPS.

The White Sox are hopelessly out of the race in a division where “showing up for the season” is basically all it takes to contend. Their current 80th percentile projection to finish the season is about 10 wins worse than the 20th percentile projection for any other team. That 20th percentile projection of 47.2 wins would amount to 115 losses, tantalizingly close to 120. Let’s get the exact distribution of the South Siders’ results.

ZiPS currently gives the White Sox an 8.1% chance of winning 42 or fewer games. When I projected the A’s last year, they came out with only a 5.2% shot at finishing that poorly. Congratulations?

The 2024 White Sox are fairly likely to set franchise records for futility. The current projections give them a 43% chance to have the worst winning percentage in franchise history, a mark currently held by the 1932 club, at .325.

It’s also hard to see where the White Sox would get surges of improvement outside of a regression toward the mean. At the earliest, Moncada is still a few months away from returning. ZiPS is already assuming that Robert’s IL stint will be much shorter and he’ll come back and play as he was expected to coming into the season. There are no hotshot prospects expected to make an impact this year, and the big league roster looks an awful lot like a Triple-A team at the moment, full of fringy veterans.

And don’t forget: The White Sox could get even worse than this come trade season. Moncada’s likely going to return too late to be tradeable at the deadline, but everyone else should be available. I’m including Robert; next season is his last under his base contract before the team option years, and I can’t envision this franchise turning things around before he hits free agency. If 2023 wasn’t sufficient notice that the team’s competitive window has been slammed shut and locked, it’s clear now that the whole thing has been bricked over.

It’s tragic – in a baseball sense – that the fans endured a seven-year rebuild only to have the win-now phase amount to only two seasons, one of them severely shortened by the pandemic. And unlike teams that can claim to have suffered an extraordinary series of unfortunate events, this tale is largely one the White Sox wrote for themselves. Coming off a 93-win season in 2021 in which they lapped the division, finishing in first by 13 games, the White Sox suddenly stopped acting like contenders. Rather than addressing their weaknesses, they simply added a couple of relievers (Kendall Graveman and Joe Kelly) and called it an offseason. Despite getting no offensive contributions from second base, the outfielder corners, and designated hitter in 2021, the team’s big position player move was bringing back Leury García on a three-year contract.

Demosthenes, an Athenian politician of the fourth century BC, once wrote that “the easiest thing of all is to deceive one’s self; for what a man wishes he generally believes to be true.” This comes from one his speeches (the Olynthiacs) in which he urged military support of Olynthus, attacked by Philip II of Macedon in 349 BC. And it’s a fitting quote for the White Sox, a team that has largely been run with decisions based on things they want to be true, rather than things that are actually so.

The White Sox wanted to address the second base hole, a problem for years, by just going with whatever utility guys they had on hand. They wanted Andrew Vaughn to hit in the majors in 2021, despite his struggles at High-A ball in 2019 and the cancellation of the minor leagues in 2020. They wanted Tony La Russa to manage the team to glory, and Jiménez to turn into prime José Bautista, and Moncada to stay healthy. The wish list goes on and on.

The end result is that the Sox squandered a position in which they had many advantages. They were a team at the top of the division with a payroll that was tens of millions of dollars from the luxury tax threshold. They had much of their young core a long way from free agency and the financial potential of playing in one of the country’s largest media markets. They played in the weakest division in baseball. Now they’re the worst team in that division.

The White Sox are too far gone, with problems that run too deep to be papered over by a few personnel changes and a handful of hires to their notoriously tiny analytics department. At this point, it feels like the only way for the franchise to turn things around is to clean house. That includes Jerry Reinsdorf, the team’s owner, who by all indications is a large part of the current dysfunction, but who by all indications has no intention of selling the team. So, can the White Sox lose 120 games? Sure. But maybe the better question is this: What would it matter if they did?

Ribs have been in the headlines this week, but sadly, not as part of a review of exciting new ballpark barbecue offerings. On Monday, Triston Casas was diagnosed with a fractured rib on his left side, an injury that will result in a prolonged absence and comes at a time when the Red Sox infield has already been depleted. On Wednesday, the Cubs’ Cody Bellinger was diagnosed with fractured ribs on his right side, interrupting his rebound from a slow start.

The 24-year-old Casas left Saturday’s game against the Pirates after injuring himself while fouling off a Mitch Keller pitch. He was initially diagnosed with a strain in his left rib cage and was placed on the injured list on Sunday. An MRI taken on Monday revealed a fracture as well, and the presumption is that his absence will be a long one given that the damage involves muscle and cartilage as well as bone. “Timetable, there’s none. It has to heal on its own. We’ve just got to be patient,” said manager Alex Cora. That sounds like a trip to the 60-day IL could be in order. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday night, the Orioles beat the Angels to vault into a tie for first place in the AL East at 16-8. That tie was short-lived; the Yankees beat the A’s a few hours later to reclaim first for themselves. Meanwhile, the Red Sox beat the Guardians to move to 14-11, the last-place Rays beat the Tigers to get back to .500, and the Blue Jays lost a squeaker to the Royals. It was a good day for the AL East, but what else is new?

Through 93 games of non-divisional play, the AL East teams have accumulated a 57-36 record, a .613 winning percentage. That would be a 99-win pace across a 162-game schedule. They’re tearing the league to shreds. That led me to wonder: Just how good is this start, and what happened to the previous divisions to start this hot?

To solve this problem, I decided to look back through history for inter-divisional records from across the league, because by definition intra-divisional records work out to .500. I started in 1998, the first year with 30 teams, and went from there. But that’s not sufficient, of course. If the East keeps this record up throughout the year, it will end up with the best winning percentage of the 30-team era. But its teams probably won’t keep the pace up. It’s a lot easier to post a .600 winning percentage over 93 games than over the 550 they’ll rack up by season’s end. The best full-season non-divisional winning percentage over that time was .595 by the AL West in 2001, and the Mariners tying the single-season wins record had a lot to do with that.

To account for that, you have to stop your count earlier in the season. Through the same date last year, for example, the AL East had played 81 non-divisional games. Outrageously, its teams had won 57 of those as well, a .704 winning percentage that’s the best, through games of April 24, of any division over this time frame.

Using the exact day isn’t perfect either, though. Through April 24 of 2004, AL East teams had played 18 non-divisional games thanks to a late start to the season. In 1998, they’d already played 95. Still, that provides us an interesting initial benchmark. The .613 clip that the division is currently playing at is a 93rd-percentile outcome, 11th-best over the last 26 years (I’ve excluded 2020 from this analysis for obvious reasons).
Read the rest of this entry »

In the first at-bat of Monday’s game between the Yankees and the A’s, Carlos Rodón fooled Esteury Ruiz with a back foot slider. Ruiz tried to check his swing, and the ball actually hit him in the back foot. It was very much a borderline call, and first base umpire John Tumpane ruled that Ruiz held up and should therefore be awarded first base. Naturally, umpire antagonist extraordinaire Aaron Boone started complaining about the call and quickly earned a warning. Enjoyably for everyone involved, the television broadcast picked up the warning perfectly. “Hey, guess what,” shouted home plate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt. “You’re not yelling at me. I did what I was supposed to do and checked. I’m looking for him to get hit by the pitch. You got anything else to say, you’re gone. OK?” A chastened Boone raised his hand to signal that he understood. Moments later, he became the first manager in the history of the game to be ejected while examining his fingernails.

What happened, of course, is that a fan seated in the front row directly behind Boone yelled at Wendelstedt, who mistook the voice for Boone’s. Wendelstedt’s refusal to listen to either Boone or the many other people who tried to explain that the voice hadn’t come from the Yankee dugout at all is its own issue. So too is his farfetched post-game contention that he was reacting to a different voice entirely: “I heard something come from the far end of the dugout, had nothing to do with his area but he’s the manager of the Yankees. So he’s the one that had to go.” One of the last things Boone said before leaving the field was, “You guys are in trouble for this.” I suspect that he’s wrong, and for the same reason that Wendelstedt felt comfortable telling reporters a tale that could so easily be proven wrong: Umpires are rarely held accountable for these kinds of mistakes (at least not publicly). However, none of that is our topic for today. Our topic is something much more specific. I have a suspicion as to why Wendelstedt was instantly certain that Boone was the one who shouted. It’s not just that the fan shouted; it’s what he shouted.

Over seven years of watching Aaron Boone yelling at umpires, two things have always stood out to me. The first is that Aaron Boone loves to address the umpires by name. On Monday, the kerfuffle started when Boone yelled to Tumpane, “Hey! It’s a full swing, John!” Toward the end of the ordeal, he told Wendelstedt, “I’m not leaving, Hunter.” Here’s the thing about humans: Unless we’re either greeting someone, trying to get someone’s attention, or specifying which person we’re speaking to, we don’t actually say each other’s names very often. If you’re simply using someone’s name to get their attention, you put it at the front of the sentence, in order to make sure they hear the rest of what you say. Boone doesn’t do that nearly as often. He puts the umpire’s name at the end of the sentence, which is something you do in order to add more emphasis. If you watch footage of his ejections, you’ll hear him shout, “Bear down, Brennan,” at Brennan Miller, “Where’s that pitch, Sean?” to Sean Barber, “Jeez Lance,” to Lance Barrett, and plenty more. Maybe it comes from the fact that Boone has spent his entire life around the game and knows absolutely everyone. Or maybe at some point he took a Dale Carnegie class and learned that the sweetest thing a person can hear is the sound of their own name. Maybe this is just how he thinks schmoozing works. I removed curse words from some of these quotes, but the point remains. Boone loves to remind the umpires of their own names.

The second thing I’ve noticed is more important to my theory. Like any true coach, Boone is a teacher. He doesn’t just complain about the umpire’s calls. He couches his complaints as constructive criticism. He implores them to get better and he tells them that it’s not too late to improve. Not two weeks ago he told umpire John Bacon, “Come on, John. You’re better than that.” Boone employs classic coach-speak, telling them to get it together, to clean it up, to bear down; all of those vague, unhelpful bromides your high school coach used to hurl at you rather than offering actionable advice. “I need you to get better,” he’ll yell.

This is an innovative approach, especially when the target for all of this encouragement is an umpire. By berating the umpires under the guise of offering friendly advice, Boone has somehow found a way to be passive aggressive while shouting at the top of his lungs. It’s borderline gaslighting and it honestly might be a scientific breakthrough: caring so loudly that the object of your affection has you removed from the premises. Boone has literally gotten ejected for telling an umpire, “I’m just trying to help you.” He then got suspended for screaming at the same umpire from such close range that he ended up spitting on him, an action that is not traditionally considered helpful. I can’t tell if Boone saves this coach-speak specifically for umpires, or whether he’s been around the game so long that this is just how he speaks to everyone all day long. I can absolutely see him growing more and more exasperated as he waits for his coffee during the morning rush at Dunkin’ Donuts, then finally striding over and telling the poor kid behind the counter, “I need you to bear down, Derek. Right now.”

Like many motivators, Boone has a go-to rallying cry, a phrase intended to fire up his charges. That phrase is Let’s go, and as you might have noticed, he’s not alone in that. Let’s go is having a moment. Although it has been around for centuries, its status as a catch-all exclamation has grown explosively over the last few years. Luke Winkie documented the phenomenon for Slate back in June:

Clearly Let’s go has become a hinge point for the male vocabulary, a shortcut for all intragender communication. The term is utilitarian, flexible, and fundamentally meaningless; it’s another way to say, “Yes, a thing exists.” I first started noticing its encroachment about three years ago, when suddenly every sentence that came out of my mouth seemed to be punctuated in the exact same way. Did I engineer a deft maneuver in a board game? Let’s go. Did my girlfriend and I settle on a takeout order? Let’s go. Does the bloodwork look good? Let’s go.

As in the examples above, Let’s go is usually reserved for happy moments. That’s even more true in the realm of baseball. It’s the kind of thing you’re likely to see Sarah Langs, a beacon of baseball joy if there ever was one, tweeting to mark the occasion of the first game of the season.

But in keeping with the cynicism of his attempts to help the umpires become the best versions of themselves both on and off the field, Boone charges up this positive colloquialism with all the negative energy he can muster. He’s not the only coach to say this phrase, but he says it way more than anybody else. At this point, Let’s go (with or without the adornment of an f-bomb) is basically Aaron Boone’s catchphrase, especially when it comes to umpires. It didn’t take me long to assemble the clips below.

Knowing all this, take a moment to put yourself in the Hunter Wendelstedt’s extremely inflexible shoes. It’s Monday afternoon. You’re approximately eight seconds into the game and Aaron Boone is already chirping, because apparently the wood sage and sea salt aromatherapy candles in the Yankees clubhouse have not succeeded in calming him down even a little bit. Mere seconds after administering a warning, you hear a shout coming from the exact same spot. The fan’s voice wasn’t picked up by television microphones, but according to the lipreading of Jomboy, what he shouted was, “Let’s go, home plate!” (I’m not 100% convinced that’s what he said; he might have just shouted Go or, Yo, but both of those options are close enough that they could easily be confused for Let’s go.) As for the second part, addressing the home plate umpire as Home Plate is hilariously dumb. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, spoken by the character Debbie Fogle. “I’ve never even had a nickname,” she says. Then she reconsiders, “I mean, I guess people do call me ‘Hey Lady.’”

So the fan shouted two things: One of them was absolutely something Boone would say, and the other was something Boone would never say. On the one hand, if there’s one thing Wendelstedt knows, it’s that Aaron Boone knows his name. Boone is more likely to address an umpire by their first, middle, and last names like a parent grounding their kid for cursing — “Harry Hunter Wendelstedt, I am very disappointed in you.” — than he is to address the home plate umpire as Home Plate. If he’d stopped to think about it, Wendelstedt would’ve realized that no one in the ballpark was less likely than Boone to address him by his position rather than his first name.

On the other hand, before he heard, “Home plate,” he heard Boone’s catchphrase. No wonder he thought it was him. And Wendelstedt isn’t exactly a stop-and-think-about-it kind of guy. He started winding up to toss Boone before the butthead in the front row got to the T in Plate, and he refused to let anything he learned over the next few hours change his mind. Besides, over his decades as an umpire, I’m sure Wendelstedt has been called Home Plate enough times that it’s basically his version of Hey Lady.

So that’s my theory. Boone got ejected because the fan yelled exactly the right thing to make the umpire think it was the manager. By having a catchphrase, Boone has made himself very easy to impersonate. Even if you call the umpire something the real manager would never call them — Home Plate; or Blue; or Hey Umpire Guy; or Excuse me, Mister Moustache Man — as long as you throw in a Let’s go (and maybe some profanity for good measure), you’re basically Aaron Boone.

Mike Trout decided he was going to be more aggressive on the bases this year. Last season, Trout lamented that he missed the days when he was a true stolen base threat. It couldn’t have been easy for the former steals leader to watch the effects of the new rules play out around him. Like Mr. Incredible stuck in a dead-end office job, Trout longed for the glory days. I’d imagine that feeling was made all the more painful because he knew deep down that he still had the skills to achieve greatness.

Things are different this season. Last year, the Angels ranked last in the American League in stolen bases. This year, they rank third. They have a new manager and several new coaches. Trout is never one to spark controversy, and he hasn’t blamed any of his past managers for holding him back. Still, former Angels manager Phil Nevin made it clear he wasn’t all that interested in his players stealing last year, while new skipper Ron Washington and first base coach Bo Porter have already spoken about their team taking a more aggressive approach on the bases. Both mentioned Trout in particular, and Trout himself has confirmed that aggressive baserunning is a bigger part of the “game plan” for 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve become increasingly convinced that a lot of the subtle roster construction hacks some teams use to get the most out of their prospects — service time manipulation, extremely restrictive pitcher workload management, drafting by bonus demand rather than picking the best player available — are too cute by half. Sometimes it pays off, but in most cases, players are going to be good, or they’re not. They’re going to stay healthy, or they’re not. And fixating on the externalities is ultimately self-defeating.

Consider Jordan Walker. The St. Louis Cardinals, to their immense credit, brought Walker north from spring training last year. The no. 12 global prospect that offseason, Walker was only 20 at the time, and hadn’t had so much as a sniff at Triple-A. But he was athletic for his 6-foot-5 frame, which promised so much power the question was whether scouts could accurately report it before they ran out of pluses.

Did it matter that the Cardinals had an extremely crowded outfield at the time? No. Did it matter that if Walker lived up to his potential, he’d hit free agency at age 26? No. The only thing that mattered was whether he’d sink or swim. Read the rest of this entry »

Monday afternoon’s game between the A’s and Yankees ended in impressive fashion for Oakland, with closer Mason Miller buzz-sawing through the top of New York’s lineup to close out a 2-0 victory. The 25-year-old righty struck out Anthony Volpe, Juan Soto, and Aaron Judge consecutively on 14 pitches, mixing eight four-seam fastballs — all with velocities above 100 mph — with four nasty sliders. He absolutely overpowered Judge:

Those fastballs Judge flailed at were clocked at 100.7 mph, 102.2 mph, and 102.5 mph, the last of which wasn’t quite as fast as the 103.3-mph heater Miller used to strike out Soto. Whoosh! Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Hendricks has long been lauded as a cerebral pitcher, and for good reason. Nicknamed “The Professor,” the 34-year-old Chicago Cubs right-hander not only has an economics degree from Dartmouth College, he relies far more on guile than gas. The antithesis of your prototypical power arm, Hendricks subsists with a heater that sits in the second percentile for velocity. Moreover, he’s no spin monster in terms of breaking stuff. As he’ll readily admit, his four-pitch arsenal is sans a plus breaking ball.

His 2024 season is off to a slow start. Over five turbulent outings, Hendricks has surrendered 37 hits, including a league-worst eight round-trippers, seven walks and 28 runs across just 21 innings. Adjustments are in order, but that’s nothing new for the righty. An ability to adjust accordingly has gone a long way toward his career ledger, which coming into this year included an 84 ERA- and a 3.80 FIP, as well as stingy walk and home run rates. When push comes to shove, Hendricks has proven more than capable of outsmarting big league hitters.

Hendricks discussed his evolution as a pitcher and his overall M.O. on the mound during spring training.

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David Laurila: How have analytics impacted your evolution as a pitcher?

Kyle Hendricks: “Analytics have changed a lot throughout my career, and I’ve had to learn a lot about them. I still don’t know a whole lot, to be honest with you. We have such a good support group behind me on the pitching side, and I rely heavily on them. I’ll go through all my work, throw my bullpens, etcetera, and they’re breaking down all the data, what everything looks like. So, the most it’s probably helped me with is consistency — consistency of pitch shapes, and action on my pitches.

“From there, I’ve always been a guy searching for a better curveball and how to spin a ball better. It definitely can help, just looking at the shape of my curveball, the spin overall, the spin efficiency. Things like that. Those have helped me put a good visual to what I’m searching for in a breaking ball.”

Laurila: It’s interesting to hear you say that you don’t know a lot. Zack Wheeler recently told me that [Phillies pitching coach] Caleb Cotham was his pitching nerd. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, Ben Clemens published an article containing a list of the hitters who are getting the most power from the fewest swings and misses. It’s a ratio of barrels to whiffs, which Ben — because of his inexhaustible capacity for alliteration — calls “whomps per whiff.”

One name that stood out to me was Jake Cronenworth, who came in seventh on the whomps per whiff leaderboard. I first encountered Cronenworth many years ago, when he was the Shohei Ohtani of the Big Ten, and have been mightily pleased to see him evolve from a seventh-round pick to a two-time All-Star, and a starting infielder on a Padres team that usually buys its infielders from the Rolls Royce dealership.

A year ago, Cronenworth singed a seven-year contract extension that will keep him in brown and gold into the 2030s, and then the wheels fell off. Read the rest of this entry »

CJ Abrams has that look this year. After showing a glimpse of his offensive potential in 2023, his skills are on full display to start the season. Abrams’ projectable frame always seemed like it could facilitate him adding power. Whether he ever got to that power was dependent on his swing mechanics.

Up until this year, the lefty had a steep, pushy entry into the hitting zone. That resulted in a suboptimal launch angle distribution. In 2023, he had a 32.6% sweet-spot rate, which was in the 30th percentile. (A player’s sweet spot percentage is defined as the percentage of their batted balls hit between eight and 32 degrees.) So instead of hitting balls at launch angles that would result in line drives and hard-hit fly balls, Abrams hit a ton of popups and groundballs. His swing had a limited range of quality contact points.

He may have swatted 18 home runs, but those long balls were mixed in with consistent mishits. When you swing down into the hitting zone like Abrams did last year, it can lead you to be what a lot of hitting coaches call a collision hitter. If your bat path doesn’t have much room for error, you might still run into some homers from time to time, but there is only a tight window for you to do so. Rather than your barrel moving up through the entire hitting zone, it only does so at one point in space. That might be hard to conceptualize, so let’s check out some video of Abrams last year, focusing primarily on how his hands descend when he starts his swing. Read the rest of this entry »