The Path Out of the Pit Isn’t Always Linear

Imagine you’re stuck in a huge hole. A chasm, a pit, an oubliette.

You’re in this hole, and you have to get out. You’re not going to just jam your fingernails into the wall and start climbing straight up. Wouldn’t be much of a hole if getting out were so simple. You’d have to build stairs or carve handholds or piece together an improvised ladder. It takes time, with no guarantee of success, and progress is not necessarily linear.

The White Sox are in a metaphorical hole at the moment. (Wait, wasn’t the hole always a metaphor? Don’t worry about it.) They just finished 41-121, a record so poor it violates certain assumptions that underpin contemporary baseball analysis. For example: Replacement level — as in wins above — comes to a winning percentage of .294, which is a hair under 48 wins. That’s seven more than the White Sox managed last season.

It’s reasonable to assume that the Sox weren’t quite as bad as their record in 2024. Chicago’s position players combined for -6.3 WAR — yes, that’s a minus sign — the worst number for a position player group in the 21st Century, by some five wins. But White Sox pitchers, led by Garrett Crochet and Erick Fedde, were merely normal bad: 9.8 WAR. It wasn’t even the worst pitching staff in the league. Barely even in the bottom five, in fact.

Here’s the first rung on this ladder out of the pit: Fedde and Crochet are no longer on the White Sox, with both having been traded. Chris Flexen, who led the team in innings pitched, remains at large on the free agent market. Those were the top three WAR guys for the White Sox last season. No. 5, Tanner Banks, also got moved at the deadline. Fedde, Crochet, Flexen, and Banks combined for 8.2 of Chicago’s 9.8 pitcher WAR.

Which raises an interesting point: A lot of key White Sox contributors aren’t coming back. Last season, the White Sox used 29 position players and 34 pitchers, not counting Danny Mendick, who threw an inning of emergency relief last year. I don’t know if I should be surprised that a team that lost 121 games only had one instance of a position player pitching (21 teams had at least two, and the Marlins led the league with eight), but I am.

Anyway, only 12 of those 29 position players and 15 of those 34 pitchers are still with the organization. That doesn’t surprise me. Say what you will about how the White Sox have been run the past couple years — I don’t think any GM in the league would look over a 121-loss team and say, “Hey, let’s get the band back together.”

No, this is a case where you tell 57% of the band to pack their stuff and hit the bricks. That accounts for routine roster turnover; the departure of players who just can’t cut it; rebuilding trades like the ones that brought back prospects for Crochet, Fedde, and Banks; and the occasional rage trade or DFA because you’re sick of looking at this bum’s stupid face all the time.

To make up the numbers, the White Sox have brought in, by my count, 12 pitchers and 14 position players from outside the organization who have a shot at contributing this year. That list includes (relatively) high-profile free agent signings like Martín Pérez, near-majors prospects like Kyle Teel, and your garden variety non-roster invites and camp bodies. The cavalry includes five major league free agents, all on one-year contracts, totaling $13.25 million. Which is a quarter of a million dollars more than the Dodgers are paying for Kirby Yates.

That sounds pretty judgmental, and ordinarily I’d intend for it to be. But short of Jurassic Park-ing Babe Ruth back to life… actually they’d probably need several clones of the Bambino to make a dent — the White Sox were never going to get all the way out of the hole in one winter. They would’ve had to be out of their minds to trade for Kyle Tucker, for instance, and even if they’d offered Juan Soto $1 billion, I’m not sure he’d have taken the meeting. And they still would’ve been a couple Babe Ruth clones from getting back to .500.

Remember, the path out of the pit isn’t always linear. Trading three of their best pitchers might set them back in the short term, but it’ll pay off soon. Or at least that’s the idea.

The thing is: What if the worst season in modern major league history isn’t actually rock bottom?

It probably won’t be, but it might be close.

As bad as the White Sox were in 2024, they underperformed their underlying record. (As you’d probably expect for a team that set the single-season losses record.) Their run differential was that of a 48-win team, and if you want to play add-up-the-WAR, they were about a 51-win team. Still horrendous, just not historically so.

And according to ZiPS Depth Charts, they’re bringing in more WAR from outside the organization than they’re letting go, even accounting for the attrition at the deadline in 2024. Not by much, but it’s a net positive.

And because everything went so badly for the White Sox last year, it’s reasonable to expect some positive regression. Here’s one example: I’m smashing the over on Luis Robert Jr. being worth more than 0.5 WAR in 2025. And while Chicago’s prospect pool isn’t quite commensurate with the team’s record, the organization does have some young guys I like: Teel, Jonathan Cannon, Hagen Smith if he makes it all the way to the big leagues in 2025.

But even getting back to the tolerable end of bad — call it 100 losses — is going to require a lot of growth from prospects and returning players. It’s a long climb out of the pit, and we’re not even sure where the floor is yet.