The following article is part of my ongoing look at the candidates on the 2023 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, use the tool above. An introduction to JAWS can be found here.

Albert Belle was baseball’s most notorious bad boy in the 1990s, and he developed into one of the game’s elite sluggers. He flat out terrorized pitchers — and was no picnic for many of those around him — for a decade before a degenerative hip condition forced his retirement at age 34. Even at the height of an offense-heavy era, his numbers are something to behold.

So, too, are stories of Belle’s temper. A 1996 Sports Illustrated cover story, “He Thrives on Anger” — a title taken from a quote by Cleveland clubhouse attendant Frank Mancini, one of Belle’s closest friends — detailed his throwing baseballs at a photographer, hurling epithets at a broadcaster, and chasing teenagers who had egged his house in his Ford Explorer. While Belle overcame early-career problems with alcohol to flourish in the majors, his actions once he did rarely cast his as a feel-good story. Had the behavior that incurred multiple fines and suspensions — not to mention a 1998 domestic battery complaint that was later dropped — occurred two decades later, he could have received even heavier punishment that might have altered his career path. Read the rest of this entry »

White Sox Baseball Operations Data Engineer

Location: Chicago, IL or Glendale, AZ

Description
The Chicago White Sox seek an experienced Data Engineer to join their baseball operations group. The data engineer will be responsible for building, maintaining, and documenting data pipelines while ensuring availability and accuracy of external and internal data sets. This position will report to the Director of Baseball Analytics.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the software development and analytics teams through research, design, and architectural efforts to build World-class decision support systems.
• Design, manage, and optimize on-premise and cloud database resources.
• Build and monitor ETL pipelines to ingest and clean external data sources while also facilitating the development and availability of internal metrics.

Requirements

• Degree in computer science, engineering, or similar field.
• Knowledge of SQL Server, MySQL, or similar relational database with the ability to write and optimize complex queries and stored procedures.
• Technical proficiency with Python.
• Experience with web development and scripting technologies such as Node and JavaScript.
• Experience working with large datasets in relational format and JSON.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Familiarity with advanced baseball metrics and research.
• Strong communication and presentation skills.
• Demonstrated high degree of integrity, professionalism, accountability, and discretion.
• Ability to work flexible hours and weekends.

Preferred Qualifications

• Object oriented development experience with Visual Studio and C#.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes, Docker, and other containerization methodologies.
• Experience with parallelization of cloud compute resources with Spark or similar.
• Familiarity with the Machine Learning lifecycle, including experience with MLFlow or similar.

To Apply:
Please review the requirements above and send a resume/cover letter to ApplyAnalytics@chisox.com. Due to the large number of applications, you may not receive a response.

Player Development Affiliate Intern

Locations: Charlotte, NC — Birmingham, AL — Winston-Salem, NC — Kannapolis, NC — Glendale, AZ

Summary:
The Chicago White Sox are seeking multiple seasonal Player Development Affiliate Interns. This entry level opportunity will provide individuals with a wide range of experiences across professional baseball. These positions will primarily support Minor League coaching staffs at affiliate locations throughout the Minor League season. There will also be opportunity to work on various baseball operations projects depending on skillset.

Program Details:

• Associates will be compensated on an hourly basis and are eligible for over-time. Housing or a housing stiped will be provided.
• The position will take place at one of our 5 affiliate locations: Charlotte (AAA), Birmingham (AA), Winston-Salem (A+), Kannapolis (A), or Glendale (RK).
• All positions will start during Minor League Spring Training and end upon the conclusion of the Minor League season with the potential of extending into Instructional League.
• Candidates must be fully available for the duration of the internship (March 1 — September 30).
• Hours for this position may vary week to week; candidates must be available and prepared to work full time but irregular hours, including nights and weekends.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities:

• Directly support players and coaching staff with all day-to-day video and information needs
• Film and chart each game and any early work requests
• Compile advanced scouting reports to be utilized prior to each series
• Manage the setup and operation of all baseball technology
• Travel with the team on all road trips
• Aid in the execution of players development plans
• Complete independent projects as assigned by scouting/analytics/player development/front office staffs

Qualifications:

• Strong communication, organization skills, and eagerness to learn
• Strong knowledge pertaining to information technology including proficiency with all Microsoft Office software
• Knowledge of baseball technologies such as Hawkeye, Motion Capture, TrackMan, Rapsodo, Blast Motion, Motus, etc. is strongly encouraged
• Must have a valid driver’s license and ability to lift and carry up to 50 lbs.
• Ability to work evenings, weekends, or holidays

Additional Skills:

• Prior coaching/playing experience
• Advanced understanding of hitting/pitching biomechanics
• Conversational Spanish
• Video editing skills
• Prior baseball/performance related research. Use of SQL/R/Python languages.

To Apply:
Please email PDJobs@chisox.com with the subject line “PD Affiliate Intern” and include your resume and references.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Chicago White Sox.

Elvis Andrus didn’t come to Chicago as a marquee attraction. He wasn’t a trade deadline acquisition; rather, the A’s released him on August 17, and the White Sox signed him two days later. At the time, it felt notable for a completely unrelated reason: Andrus had an option with the A’s that was close to vesting, one that would pay him $15 million next year. The White Sox, meanwhile, had serious depth issues; with Tim Anderson and Leury Garcia both on the IL, they were short on middle infielders, and Andrus was the only way to add someone from outside the organization.

It was, in hindsight, a stroke of serendipity. The White Sox were desperately in need of freely available competence. If their spate of injuries had happened three weeks earlier, they would have had any number of options on the trade market. Given the timing, though, it was Andrus or nothing. If he’d merely played as well as he did in Oakland, he’d have been an excellent stopgap. Instead, he’s been the sixth-best offensive player in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

With Justin Verlander landing on the injured list due to a mild right calf injury, the AL Cy Young race has taken a turn. On Saturday, Dylan Cease did his best to capitalize on the opportunity. Facing the Twins in Chicago, the 26-year-old White Sox righty came within one out of throwing the season’s fourth no-hitter, losing it only when Luis Arraez singled with two outs in the ninth.

Cease had twice taken no-hit bids into the sixth inning this year, on April 27 against the Royals and June 21 against the Blue Jays, and had made a total of three appearances in which he allowed just one hit and no runs (May 2 against the Angels, the aforementioned June 21 start, and July 17 against the Twins). He was even better than all of those on Saturday, and particularly efficient. He breezed through the first five frames in just 50 pitches, with a leadoff walk to Jake Cave in the third inning not just the only blemish, but also the only time to that point that he even went to a three-ball count. At the same time, he didn’t record his first strikeout until Gio Urshela fanned on a slider to end the fifth.

Cease labored a bit in the sixth, throwing 21 pitches and issuing a two-out walk to Gilberto Celestino, the second and last time he’d go to a three-ball count all night. But he escaped that by catching Arraez looking at a high curveball on a generous call:

Cease needed just 20 pitches to get through the seventh and eighth combined, running his total to 91. He’d done a great job of pitching efficiently and maintaining his velocity:

Before he could take the mound in the ninth, however, Cease had to wait out a six-run rally. The White Sox, already leading 7–0, pounced on position player Nick Gordon via a pair of walks, three singles, and a grand slam by Elvis Andrus to run the score to 13–0. Fortunately, all of that took only about 15 minutes due to Gordon’s limited repertoire (Statcast credits him with throwing 30 fastballs varying in speed from 49.2 mph to 86 mph). Despite the delay, Cease made quick work of the first two Twins, striking out Caleb Hamilton on four pitches and getting Celestino to hit a first-pitch fly out.

Up came Arraez, the AL leader in batting average at that point (.318). After taking a low slider for ball one and fouling off a 97-mph fastball for strike one, he hit a slider in the middle of the zone 100.7 mph into the right-center field gap — no man’s land, a clean single. Cease remained composed enough to strike out Kyle Garlick to complete the one-hit shutout, but it still constituted a tough near-miss.

If not for Arraez’s single, Cease would have joined the Angels’ Reid Detmers, who blanked the Rays on May 10, as the only pitchers to throw complete-game no-hitters this season. Additionally, a quintet of Mets led by Tylor Megill threw a combined no-hitter against the Phillies on April 29, and likewise for a trio of Astros led by Cristian Javier against the Yankees on June 25.

Instead, Cease became the fourth pitcher to have a no-hitter broken up in the ninth this season, after the Cardinals’ Miles Mikolas (with two outs on June 14 against the Pirates), the Dodgers’ Tyler Anderson (with one out on June 15 against the Angels) and the Rays’ Drew Rasmussen (with no outs against the Orioles on August 14), who actually had a perfect game in progress before his bid ended. Anderson’s effort was retroactively obscured by a reversal of a seventh-inning ruling, where the pitcher fielded a dribbler down the first base line and made a poor throw; initially ruled a two-base error, it was changed to a single and an error. Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox remain serious playoff contenders in 2022, but I doubt many would classify this season as a roaring success. With what appeared in the preseason to be the AL Central’s strongest roster, Chicago has not gone on a leisurely stroll to October. Instead, it’s locked in a brutal three-way clash with Cleveland and Minnesota and currently stands 1.5 games behind both.

The reasons for the team’s struggles are myriad. The entire offense failed to produce, especially early in the season, finishing April with a .212/.264/.348 line and an 8–12 record. When healthy, Yasmani Grandal and Yoán Moncada have not hit at all, leaving two offensive problems in unexpected places. Lance Lynn got a late start to the season and has generally been ineffective. The manager has an odd fetish for getting Leury Garcia into the lineup at every possible juncture. We can play this game all day, but we can now throw a new problem onto the pile in the loss of starting shortstop Tim Anderson to an injured ligament in his left middle finger that requires surgery. Anderson is expected to miss four-to-six weeks of play and make a full recovery, but with only eight weeks left in the regular season, that’s a lot of missed time.

After the trade deadline, I projected the White Sox as having the biggest loss in playoff probability of any team due to transactions made around baseball at the deadline. Whereas they would have been projected with a 59.5% shot at the postseason with the pre-deadline rosters, they came out afterward at 52.2%. Despite not actually losing any ground in the last week to their rivals in the standings, replacing Anderson with a combination of Garcia and Lenyn Sosa sends another chunk of the team’s playoff hopes into eternal oblivion.

For the first time this season, the Sox are projected to have a worse chance at taking the division than both the Twins and Guardians, and roughly a quarter of the scenarios in which they make the playoffs have evaporated. Losing a win is a very big deal for a team in such a tight race, and that gets even a bit worse for Chicago because of the change in MLB’s rules for divisional ties, with tiebreakers being used instead of bonus baseball. Right now, should there be a tiebreaker needed, ZiPS estimates that the Guardians will beat the Sox 74% of the time, and the Twins will come out on top in 69% (not nice!) of tiebreakers. And all that is with projections that assume that Anderson misses an average of five weeks. If he has a setback and can’t get back for the rest of the regular season, it obviously gets worse; in the simulations when he didn’t return (about 10% of sims), Chicago only made the playoffs about three times in ten. Read the rest of this entry »

Another trade deadline has come and gone, and I must say, this one was more exciting than I expected. I didn’t see the Yankees, Astros, or Dodgers making huge splashes, given that all three are in a daunting position both for first place in their divisions and a first-round playoff bye. There were also relatively few short-term rental options available; Juan Soto, Frankie Montas, and Luis Castillo, among others, could always be traded, but with none of them free agents after this season, teams could also pull them back if they didn’t like the offers. Meanwhile, players like Willson Contreras, Ian Happ and Carlos Rodón stayed put, also to my surprise. By and large, though, we had a whirlwind of a 48-hour period leading up to the deadline.

So, who won and who lost? That’s a bit of a loaded question, because the definition of winning and losing varies depending on each franchise’s goals. A contending team improving, a rebuilding team getting worse but acquiring a stable of prospects, or an indolent team only re-signing its 37-year-old closer are all things that can be considered a win in one way or the other. But we’re here to do some hardcore ranking, so let’s look only at who improved themselves the most in 2022.

To keep this all science-y rather than a somewhat arbitrary exercise, I first projected the entire league’s rest of season in ZiPS and then repeated the exercise with all trades since July 19 unwound. Since some teams primarily got overall playoff boosts and some teams saw improvement mainly in terms of World Series gains, I took each team’s rank in both categories and then ranked everyone by the harmonic mean of those two ranks. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the trade deadline. It’s the best time of the year for baseball chaos, rumor-mongering reporting, and of course, the main event: a million trades featuring relievers you’ve heard of but don’t know a ton about. The difference between a blown lead in the seventh inning of a playoff game and an uneventful 4-2 win might be one of these unheralded arms. Heck, they could be a better option but still give up a three-run shot in a crushing loss. Or they could be a worse option! There are no guarantees in baseball. Still, here are some relievers who contending teams think enough of to trade for and plug into their bullpens.

Yankees Acquire Scott Effross
Scott Effross wasn’t supposed to amount to anything in the big leagues. A 15th-round pick in the 2015 draft, he kicked around the Cubs system for years, frequently old for his level and rarely posting knockout numbers. Then in 2019, on the suggestion of pitching coach Ron Villone, he started throwing sidearm. Three years later, he’s carving through hitters in the majors.

“Carving” might undersell it. Since his 2021 debut, Effross has been one of the best relievers in the game. In 57.1 innings, he’s compiled a 2.98 ERA and 2.45 FIP. He’s striking out 29% of opposing batters and hardly walking anyone. With his new low arm slot, he’s adopted what I like to think of as the sidearmer’s basic arsenal: a sinker, a slider, and a break-glass-in-case-of-lefty changeup. Read the rest of this entry »

While still focusing upon teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — this year I have incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. Interestingly enough, four of the six teams below the WAR cutoff for right field also make the list for left field: two of them because they’re far below, and the other two because they’re just a hair above, and we might as well acknowledge those situations within this context. As such, I’ve used the rankings of the right fielders to determine the order of the capsules; those that also cover left field include an asterisk. I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the August 2 deadline.

All statistics in this article are through July 27, though team won-loss records and Playoff Odds are through July 28.

Phillies

Bryce Harper was the National League’s Most Valuable Player last year, but he’s been limited to just 64 games overall and eight in right field due to a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right (throwing) arm and a fractured left thumb. The UCL injury limited him to designated hitter duty, but he continued to rake (.318/.385/.599, 167 wRC+ overall) until an errant fastball from Blake Snell hit him on June 25. He underwent surgery to implant pins to help heal the thumb, but as of Monday, doctors decided that he hadn’t progressed enough to have them removed; he’ll be reevaluated next Monday. Once Harper is cleared, he’ll likely need at least a couple of weeks to ramp up and complete a rehab assignment. If there’s good news, it’s that he has also been undergoing treatment on his elbow (he had a platelet-rich plasma injection in May) and plans to test his ability to throw once the pins are out.

Harper’s move to DH meant that Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos, the two defensively challenged sluggers whom the Phillies signed to big free-agent deals, had to play in the same outfield on most days; thus far, Schwarber has started in left field 89 times and Castellanos in right 84 times. The former has hit for a 119 wRC+ and leads the NL with 31 homers, but the latter has been terrible, batting just .246/.291/.365 (83 wRC+) with eight homers as well as [puts on protective goggles] -6.7 UZR, -7 RAA, and -12 DRS in 723.2 innings in right field. His -1.4 WAR is tied with Robinson Canó for last in the majors among position players. Ouch.

As NBC Sports’ Corey Seidman noted, pitchers have attacked Castellanos with low-and-away breaking balls that he has been unable to lay off. He owns a career-worst 45% chase rate (7.2 points above his career mark) and a corresponding career-high 57.8% swing rate, a combination that fits the pattern of a player pressing. Additionally, he has a career-high 42.7% groundball rate, about six points above his norm, and his .245 xwOBA on pitches outside of the zone is 33 points below his norm; his .103 xwOBA on low-and-away breaking pitches is an 81-point drop from last year and is 36 points below his norm. His overall Statcast numbers (87.8 mph average exit velocity, 7.1% barrel rate, 33.8% hard-hit rate, .299 xwOBA) are all career worsts, as is his 17.5% swinging-strike rate.

If you’ve been reading this series, you know that the Phillies have already made the list at shortstop, third base, and center field. More than likely they’re just going to gut it out here, hoping that either Harper can return to the field or Castellanos can get back on track. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a rule in baseball that allows managers to intentionally walk opposing batters automatically. More specifically, “following the signal of the manager’s intention, the umpire will immediately award first base to the batter.” Depending on who you ask, it’s either a minor time saver or completely pointless.

There is a generally accepted practice in baseball that intentional walks are either issued at the start of a plate appearance, after first base becomes open, or when the count begins to favor a batter. You won’t find that anywhere in the rulebook, but it’s true nonetheless. It’s a common-sense practice: the only other time you can walk a batter intentionally is after a pitch tilts the count in the pitcher’s favor, and if an intentional walk makes sense then, it probably made sense before that pitch was thrown.

Baseball conventional wisdom isn’t always correct. In the case of when to intentionally walk a batter, though, it follows straightforward logic. Allow me to make an analogy. Let’s say you and I have made a strange deal. I have 60 seconds to accomplish some task – call it untangling a knot. If I manage it, you’ll owe me $10. Before I start, I make you an offer: you can just hand me $5 now and we’ll call the whole thing off. You can trade the possibility of a $10 loss for the certainty of a $5 loss.

Let’s further say that you turn me down, and that the clock starts. For the first 10 seconds, I don’t do anything — maybe I stubbed my toe and am hopping around in pain. After those 10 seconds, I offer you the same deal: for $5, we can call the same thing off. You wouldn’t take me up on it, of course. You liked your odds enough that you didn’t opt out before, and now I’m less likely to accomplish my task.

Anyway, Tony La Russa intentionally walked José Ramírez yesterday. He did so automatically, in keeping with the rules of the game, by signaling to the umpire from the dugout. He did it in contravention of the generally accepted practices of the game, though, by issuing the walk while Ramírez was behind 0-1 in the count.

In an abstract sense, it’s pretty clear why you wouldn’t do this. The knot-untangling game is a clunky analogy but it gets the point across. There’s no reason to run the numbers: by the numbers, the walk doesn’t make sense. But abstractions don’t always tell the whole story, so let’s look at the specific circumstances around this walk and see if any of them can shed some light on what happened here.

First, the situation. Ramírez came to bat with two outs in the fifth inning. Amed Rosario, the previous batter, had doubled to make the score 4-0 and now stood on second base. Davis Martin, the White Sox starter, stayed in to face Ramírez. Pitching coach Ethan Katz came out for a discussion with Martin. After that meeting came this pitch:

From there, La Russa had seen enough: he walked Ramírez. Martin recovered to strike Franmil Reyes out, escaping the inning. It didn’t matter, in either case; the Sox only scored once all game, and Cleveland held on to win 4-1.

Rather than endlessly speculate, let’s hear what La Russa said about his decision:

“…Sometimes… they get themselves out. And if they get good patience, it’s like an unintentional intentional walk. So that’s what Ethan went out to say, and the first pitch was on the plate. He fouled it off, so I said, well, put him on. I just think it’s lack of experience for Davis and understanding more about that situation. Because he’s smart enough to know to pitch off the plate and he got it on, cost him two runs. He was supposed to do it again, and after one strike, said no.”

First things first: that explains the pitching meeting. Katz was out there to tell Martin to pitch around Ramírez. Ramírez had singled in two runs in the third inning, as La Russa alluded to above. Easy peasy, right? He wanted Martin to get Ramírez to chase, Ramírez didn’t, let’s face the next batter.

Only, that description glosses over the change in count, which is the most meaningful thing that happened on that first pitch. If you’re looking to record an out, a foul ball is a pretty good place to start. José Ramírez is one of the best hitters in baseball. For his career, he’s hitting .279/.356/.507, and he’s better than that now. Even after 0-1 counts, he’s hitting .266/.307/.472 for a perfectly acceptable 106 wRC+.

But again, the question isn’t whether walking Ramírez made sense. I think I would have walked him there from the start, but I don’t believe it’s an obvious choice either way. The question, instead, is whether the information in that foul ball tilted the balance in favor of an intentional walk.

We know La Russa’s case: the pitch being on the plate proved to him that Martin couldn’t follow his instructions. He wanted pitches out of the zone, he didn’t get them, and he didn’t need to see anything more. It’s not that Ramírez made devastating contact – per Statcast, that foul ball was 63 mph off the bat, though I’m not sure how accurate foul ball exit velocity readings are – but merely the location of the pitch that made an intentional walk a good option.

I can’t tell you what the odds of Ramírez getting a hit on a ball in the strike zone were. La Russa can’t either – but from the sound of his comments, it sounds deterministic. In the third inning, when Martin left a pitch over the plate, it “cost him two runs.” Let’s see the pitch in question:

Unquestionably, two runs scored on that play. Unquestionably, Ramírez hit a single. He even hit the ball pretty hard. But is that a process failure by Martin? I’m not so sure. He threw a well-located changeup that Ramírez put on the ground into the shift. Position your second baseman three steps to the right, and that might be an out instead. Ramírez is great – but he’s hardly a guaranteed base hit every time a pitch is in the strike zone.

There’s really not much more to say than that. In La Russa’s mind, a pitch in the strike zone was unacceptable. I don’t for a second think that Martin meant to throw that changeup in the zone. Pitchers miss their targets sometimes, and Reese McGuire was setting up fairly close to the zone anyway.

I’m just an analyst on the internet. I’ve never managed a team. I won’t claim to know any of the exact numbers here, or whether Katz came out to tell Martin that any pitch in the strike zone, regardless of outcome, would lead to an intentional walk. But if I were La Russa, I wouldn’t give that order.

I’m just projecting, but it seems to me that La Russa is substituting absolutes for probabilities. You can pitch Ramírez in the zone and get an out. You can try to miss the zone and hit it. It’s not black and white – sometimes a bad process leads to a good outcome, and vice versa. That’s baseball in a nutshell: the edges are small either way, and both sides can’t win. All you can do is give yourself the best chance to succeed – pitchers have singled against Jacob deGrom, and Mike Trout has struck out against bad relievers. There are no absolutes.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding La Russa’s logic. Maybe there’s a detail left out somewhere, or something lost in translation. I don’t think so, though. Sometimes, you have to take people at their word. La Russa didn’t care about the fact that the foul ball made the count 0-1. It didn’t enter into his decision making. It wasn’t a question of whether Ramírez’s odds of getting on base changed after the combination of a pitch in the zone and a foul ball. It was just: pitch in zone, walk.

If you like La Russa’s decision making this year, this one won’t change your mind. In fact, you probably agree with him that baseball can be reduced to a binary. Pitches in the zone when you want to throw them out of the zone turn into runs, and so on and so forth.

If you haven’t liked La Russa’s decision making, on the other hand, this is just more evidence. When you deal in absolutes, you miss out on the fact that hitters do worse after 0-1 counts than overall, or that getting the other team’s best hitter to ground the ball into the shift is an overall good thing. You might also inadvertently belittle your pitcher after the game; “he’s smart enough to know” is something people say about children or pets.

If you came here to see the math behind another unlikely intentional walk, I’m sorry. There really isn’t any. You either trust that Tony La Russa knows enough that when he makes a wildly counter-intuitive decision, it’s for good reasons, or you don’t. As best as I can tell, there have never been any similar intentional walks, though our pitch-by-pitch database only goes back to 2002 and it’s entirely possible I missed some anyway. Is your faith in La Russa’s genius enough to outstrip that? That’s for you to decide on your own.

Bashing the White Sox is commonplace these days, and you can’t say the negativity hasn’t been earned. Widely expected by fans, reporters, pundits, and computer projection systems (as well as their sarcastic creators) to steamroll one of the worst divisions in baseball, the Pale Hose have struggled to consistently stay at .500, let alone stay ahead of the Twins and Guardians. Yet there are still reasons to think that the Sox, if not the team they were believed to be, can still salvage the 2022 season without divine intervention.

They’re Still Relevant in All the Projection Systems

Yes, when you look at the White Sox, you see some major, gaping holes, many of which are problems of the team’s own making, whether because of poor evaluation or inaction. Coming into the season, they were near the bottom of the league in our positional power rankings at second base and right field despite an offseason that saw a plethora of good options at those positions. They also didn’t assemble much in the way of depth in places where they had injured players or underwhelming options. Similar to my approach to mowing my backyard, they did the bare minimum.

But all of this is already baked into the cake, so to speak. The projection systems still assume that Leury García is awful and that Chicago needs another bat; the forecasts for players like Yoán Moncada, Yasmani Grandal, Eloy Jiménez, and Lance Lynn have already taken major hits. As for the team’s lack of depth, the ZiPS projected standings use a methodology that attempts to properly discount teams with underwhelming Plan Bs. Read the rest of this entry »