The Impressively Poor White Sox Offense

Brayan Pena is a 33-year-old backup catcher who has amassed 1820 PA across 11 seasons, producing a .259/.299/.352 line and a 75 wRC+. The takeaway point from that first sentence is that Brayan Pena has been among the worst hitters in the league over the last decade, which is probably something you knew about him without any prompting. Pena’s a fun-loving character and he’s passable behind the plate, so he’s made a career for himself in the big leagues despite the very limited offensive production.

Reflecting on Pena is simply a way to put the 2015 White Sox in perspective because the White Sox are essentially hitting like Brayan Pena as a team this year. On the season, they’re hitting .241/.295/.357 (77 wRC+). They’re five percentage points worse than the Phillies (82 wRC+) at the plate without removing the Phillies’ pitchers from the equation. Take pitchers out of the equation and the White Sox’ 78 wRC+ is nine percentage points worse than the 29th place Phillies (87 wRC+). The White Sox offense is historically bad.

It actually gets a little worse, too. The White Sox have the worst collection of hitters in the league this year, but they have also been exceptionally poor on the bases according to our combination of stolen-base runs (wSB), double play runs (wGDP), and other baserunning runs (UBR), sitting at -17.6 BsR. Only two other clubs are below -10 BsR this year. The combination of bad hitting and baserunning puts the White Sox position players at a preposterously bad 99 runs below average on offense (OFF). The 29th-place Phillies position players are 54 runs below average on offense. The difference between the White Sox and the Phillies is between four and five wins, and that’s only comparing the positions players’ offensive production for each team.

By Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating, the White Sox are 28th in baseball at -36 runs and -30 runs, respectively. Put it all together and the White Sox position players have registered a -3.4 WAR during the 2015 campaign. The 29th-place Phillies are at 2.1 WAR.

Of course WAR isn’t a perfect reflection of team performance, and wRC+ isn’t a perfect measure of team hitting, but the White Sox are far and away the worst in the game in both. Maybe they haven’t been the worst group of position players in the league, but the evidence strongly suggests that is the case.

And the fun thing about the 2015 White Sox (for people who aren’t White Sox fans, I assume), is that their futility isn’t constrained to 2015. The 2013 Marlins position players had a 77 wRC+, but if you’re looking for an American League team, you have to go back to the 1992 Angels, who also featured a 78 wRC+. By Baserunning Runs (BsR), they are currently the 16th-worst team since 2002 (the first year we have wGDP and UBR) and prorating per plate appearance, they’re on pace to be the worst by season’s end.

You have to go all the way back to the 1998 Twins (-4.7) to find a worse group of position players by WAR and those Twins have about 3,000 plate appearances on the 2015 White Sox. Only the 1998 Twins, 1963 Mets, 1977 Braves, and 1979 A’s have had lower position player WAR than this year’s White Sox. And only the 1979 A’s, at -9.7 WAR, are far enough ahead (behind?) to feel comfortable the White Sox won’t catch them come October.

This isn’t just a bad group of position players, it is arguably one of the worst collections of position players ever assembled. Certainly, the precision of WAR suffers as we move further back in history, so the point isn’t that the Sox are exactly the fifth-worst team since 1961, but rather that they’re in rare company.

Also of note: the White Sox pitchers have about 11 WAR at the moment. If you compare a team’s pitching WAR to their position-player WAR (adding in pitchers this time), the 2015 White Sox have the 17th-largest differential among teams with better pitching than hitting since 1961. They’re only 5 WAR short of the top spot, held by the 1970 Phillies. The Sox hitters are bad, and they look especially bad compared to their perfectly acceptable pitching staff.

The obvious question, or at least an interesting one, is how in the world this happened? The White Sox had, by most accounts, a productive winter. Most of their impact additions were on the pitching side, but Melky Cabrera and Emilio Bonifacio should have helped a little at the plate.

To illuminate the problem, let’s take a look at the wOBA for the hitters we had in their depth chart when the season started. Below we have three informational columns: preseason ZiPS/Steamer wOBA, 2015 PA, and 2015 wOBA through Tuesday. We’ll assume that the plate-appearance distribution is fixed, even though it’s certainly a function of everyone’s performance. Let’s go with it, though, because this isn’t official science. Here are the 14 hitters who we projected who have also appeared for the Sox:

Fourteen hitters, and two of them have beaten their offensive projections. Soto’s been a nice little surprise, and Shuck’s been a touch over in about 100 PA. The other 12 guys range from slightly worse to much worse. If you calculate the wOBA of this group, weighted by PA, it’s .288. If you do the same with the projected wOBA and actual PA, it’s .322. In other words, you’re talking about a difference of roughly 80 to 90 runs between the projected value of this group and the observed value. They’re undershooting their offensive projections by eight or nine wins through half a season.

Is there a lesson in all of this? Probably not. The odds of a such a dramatic under-performance seem remote, especially because there presumably isn’t a strong connection among the players’ under-performances. Maybe Ramirez’s collapse is related to Cabrera’s, but it’s not like each player’s production should be strongly related to one another. You’d expect this kind of year to happen over the course of many seasons, but it’s pretty remarkable that this under-performance of projections overlapped an already unimpressive roster to produce one of the worst collection of position players of all time.

The White Sox are among the worst teams in the American League and they’ll surely be sellers at the trade deadline next week, but the problem they face is that they have such a small number of players that would serve as real upgrades for contenders. Their core players could easily be part of the next good White Sox team, and the ones who they would be happy to trade have, well, inspired this article.

It’s been a rough year to be a White Sox fan, especially if you like the run-scoring part of baseball, but if it provides any comfort, you are getting to witness a very depressing chase of history.