Biased Season Preview: The 2013 Chicago White Sox

With the Village Tavern back to quasi-active status, I decided it was time to send it back towards its roots – in other words, a not very timely or intellectual sports article.  Here is the Village Tavern’s preview of the 2013 White Sox season.

Hitting:

Last year, the White Sox were almost an exactly average offense, finishing 15^th in baseball in runs scored.  They finished 3^rd in the league with 211 home runs, but only in the middle of the pack in OBP and batting average.  Based on following them as a fan, the lineup felt more out-prone than the team’s .318 OBP would suggest, and you’d expect a team that finished 15^th in OBP and 3^rd in HRs to be a top-ten offense.  Part of the problem was that the Sox seemed to struggle to get that big hit with men in scoring position.  A power-heavy offense also lends itself to a boom-and-bust quality, which is not great news for their record, but which shouldn’t affect the aggregate numbers too much.

What’s changed this season?  Tyler Flowers will finally get a chance as the full-time starting catcher.  He’s actually already 27, but his debut in the role was delayed by A.J.’s long tenure and willingness to stay with the Sox on relatively cheap, short-term contracts for awhile.  The consensus on Flowers seems to be that he should hit 30+ home runs as a full-time starter in a hitter’s park (which would be roughly on track with his career HRs/AB to this point, and possibly even low), but that he’s also going to hit around .220.  In other words, in comparison to AJ, more power and fewer times on base, which will skew the offense even more towards power...just what we needed.  Personally, I think the .220s predictions will end up being low; Flowers hit in the .270s and .280s in the minors, and his more recent .220 seasons have come as a young backup moving up and down from the minors to the bigs, which isn’t easy for a hitter to deal with.

The other projected new starter, Jeff Keppinger, will provide almost no power, but hit over .300 in part-time work last year, and should hopefully get on base more than Kevin Youkillis (who at least provided power) or Brent Morel (who didn’t get on base much or hit for power).  Keppinger is also known for being difficult to strike out, so this move may have been made with the Tigers in mind – no team in baseball is more reliant on the strikeout to escape from innings than Detroit, who for the most part has great pitching and terrible fielding.  Keppinger may end up as one of those players who is better suited for a bench/utility role than as a full-time starter that other teams spend time game-planning for, so I’m actually vaguely pessimistic here, although he shouldn’t be the offensive black hole that 3B was for most of last year.

Looking at the lineup in total, this looks to be more of the same.  Power is the most obvious team strength: every regular starter but Keppinger should easily hit double figures in homers, Rios, Konerko, Viciedo, and Flowers have a chance to go over 30, and Dunn should be among the league leaders.  This will be a very scary team for opponents in games where the Sox are tied or trailing by one late, as nearly everyone in the lineup is a threat to alter the game with one swing.  I’m also hearing “regression” thrown around with this lineup a lot, especially with Dunn and Rios.  Frankly, with Dunn, it doesn’t make any sense at all, at least not if you can remember (or look things up from) further than two years into the past.  While Dunn was a feel-good story in 2012 because of his rebound from a truly horrific 2011, his 2012 season was actually right in line with his career numbers – actually, slightly worse in some respects.  If you look at his baseball card, 2011 jumps out as an obvious outlier, and that’s without considering that he had surgery early in the season and was living his first year in a new city.  He’ll be fine.  I do understand it with Rios, and to be honest, I never know what we’re going to get from him, but he seems to have fixed his approach last season and I’m cautiously optimistic there.

However, the offense is average or worse in other respects, and they will probably frustrate us fans by having more than their share of 1-2-3 innings, and teamwide slumps are going to be a possibility when they either aren’t hitting for power or are hitting too many solo shots.  In other words, this is pretty much the offense White Sox fans know and love and loathe.

Fielding:

First off, I’ll say that fielding might be one of the few parts of baseball left where statistics haven’t quite caught up to “the eye test.”  That said, the Sox had good defensive numbers last season, leading the league in fielding percentage and finishing eighth (and within .005) of first in defensive efficiency ratio (which is basically the rate at which balls in play are turned into outs).  However, they were only slightly above average in defensive runs saved.   So, while calling the White Sox defense “mediocre” (as Grantland’s preview did) is lazy and ill-informed, depending on what stats you value more, they were either elite or slightly above average on defense last year.

Having watched most of last season, I felt like the Sox were very good defensively, especially up the middle and with Rios in right field, but they didn’t make me feel like I was watching one of the best fielding teams in the league.  Some of the credit goes to Robin Ventura for putting more effort into positioning the defense for individual hitters than Ozzie did (the 2011 Sox, with a lot of the same players, were also near the top in fielding percentage but were 22^nd in defensive efficiency with an ugly .687).

Fielding is going to be hugely important and needs to be one of the strengths of the team.  For one thing, Don Cooper’s pitch-to-contact philosophy requires good fielders to work, and for another, it’s potentially the only significant advantage the White Sox have over Detroit.  Flowers has generally been regarded as solid defensively to this point, and for once the Sox might even have a catcher that other teams don’t enjoy running on so much.  The Sox aren’t going to have a defensive ace like Morel at 3B anymore, but whatever they come up with will probably not be worse than Youkillis was, and the age of glove-only players like Morel having careers as starters is pretty much over anyway.  However, with Ramirez and Beckham, hitters aren’t going to have much room to work with over the middle.  You’d assume that Konerko is a bad fielder because he’s so aggressively old, white, and unathletic (I can’t really think of a less athletic professional athlete that isn’t fat), but he rarely makes mistakes and seems to have better range than you’d expect, and first basemen need to make hundreds of routine plays for every chance they get at a spectacular one anyway.  The outfield is good, but not amazing, and may improve a bit this year as none of the starting outfielders last season had a ton of recent MLB experience at their specific positions.

Pitching:

The ability to draft and develop pitching is the White Sox’s biggest consistent strength as an organization – the closer and five of the six pitchers expected to start this season have played all or substantially all of their big league careers with the Sox, and there are also Gio Gonzalez, Daniel Hudson, Mark Buehrle, Brandon McCarthy, and Sergio Santos floating around as surplus products of the “perpetually weak” farm system (although in fairness, they haven’t been nearly as successful in developing field players).

Frankly, pitching coach Don Cooper gives this team an advantage and needs to be kept around as long as possible, routinely turning pitchers with one or zero plus-pitches into viable starters – and, in Buehrle’s case, an ace and multi-time all-star.  Buehrle really embodied Cooper’s philosophy more than any other starter – don’t waste a bunch of time on the mound, pitch to contact, force groundballs, and avoid walks.  This is primarily designed to avoid giving up home runs and walks, which strikeout pitchers tend to do more of, and despite U.S. Cellular’s reputation as a homer haven, the Sox pitching staff is generally middle-of-the-pack or better in home runs allowed.

Number one starter Chris Sale is one of the primary reasons to be excited for this season.  The Sox have always had two or more good starters in the time I’ve been following them, Contreras submitted one of the best 12-month runs by a pitcher ever (the second half of ’05 and the first half of ’06), and if you offered me a deal where Sale would obtain the same amount of career and team success as Buehrle did in his White Sox career, I’d jump all over it.  All that said, the Sox haven’t really had a dominating strikeout pitcher since Jack McDowell; while Buehrle and, at times, Contreras, Loaiza, and even Garland made me feel like the Sox had a great chance to win all of their starts, I never really scheduled anything differently to get a chance to watch them pitch.  As an added bonus, his youthful age means that he’s the one White Sox player that experts won’t automatically assume to be declining from season to season!

Last season also gave us a chance to see a full healthy season from post-surgery Peavy.  While it’s a safe bet to say he’s won his last Cy Young Award, he remains a very good #2 starter, and understands how to pitch well enough that his lack of any single killer pitch doesn’t hurt him that much (which is impressive for a guy that used to have three or four such pitches).  Last season definitely took him, in my mind, from “I cannot wait until we are out of this contract,” to “uh, we sort of can’t afford to lose this guy,” sort of like a better version of what Carlos Boozer is doing this year for the Bulls.  Gavin Floyd will have amazing stretches and rough patches as usual, which is the consequence of having a devastating out pitch (his curveball) that you can only sometimes throw for strikes.

So far, I’m basically describing an average rotation for a decent MLB team – one Cy Young contender, a solid #2 starter who might make the all-star team but can’t really be described as dominant, and an up-and-down third starter who will hopefully be more good than bad.  The wild card this season will be how the back of the rotation does.  The last two spots are going to be divided by some combination of Jose Quintana, Dylan Axelrod, and John Danks When and If He is Healthy.   While Quintana and Axelrod have both pitched very well at times and are at the stage in their careers where they should improve, neither is really established yet and I’m still nervous every time they pitch.  In order to have a contending-calibur rotation, the Sox need at least one of the back three to be a reliable starter this year, and no more than one to be a disaster.  Even though his recovery is supposedly going wellish, I’m considering anything we get from Danks to be a bonus given his track record over the last couple of seasons, but if Quintana or Axelrod flame out, it will quickly become a necessity.  The other question mark is whether changing catchers will affect the rotation, as AJ was known for calling games well.  On the other hand, I’m sure that Cooper and the veteran starters have a lot of input on game planning for hitters, so this may not make much difference.

It’s impossible to predict what will happen to any bullpen over the course of the year.  Addison Reed was a mediocre closer last season, but he’s young, he throws hard, and he doesn’t walk people, so there’s certainly potential for him to become a top closer, perhaps even this season.  Jesse Crain and Matt Thornton are both very reliable setup guys who shouldn’t be asked to close regularly (or, in Thornton’s case, ever).  The rest of the bullpen is made up of young guys who could pitch very well or could be disastrous, although it’s a better group than you’d expect given how bad the Sox farm system allegedly always is.  Donnie Veal and Nate Jones are vaguely promising but not really reliable, Hector Santiago is vaguely reliable but not really that promising, and I will probably turn the game off if Septimo or Omogrosso comes in.

Depth/Intangibles:

Robin Ventura enters his second year as manager, which should be good news; he didn’t have much prior experience and may be better at the job this season (not that I have any real complaints from last year).  The bench is mostly made up of young guys who I haven’t heard of before, and pseudo-fan-favorite DeWayne Wise, who is somehow on the White Sox again.  Considering also that Lillibridge has signed with the Cubs, I’m guessing that the Chicago area houses in the MLB bench player price range are hard to sell.  Jordan Danks and/or Jared Mitchell might come up from the minors this season, possibly for good in Danks’s case, but barring an injury neither one is going to regularly start.  Last season’s better-than-expected record, and the fact that most predictions seemed to be using 2012’s original predictions as a baseline rather than the actual results, will hopefully give the team a combination of a feel-good vibe and an “us against the world” mentality that may give them a minor edge, to the extent that stuff like that actually helps.

Expectations/Prediction:

Most mainstream previews I’ve read of the Sox have them at about .500 or slightly under.  Honestly, that seems just a bit goofy to me.  Sox fans are used to being .500 or better (10 of the last 13 seasons), so the thought of a losing record leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  It also doesn’t really seem all that realistic – if you view their young players in the light Royals and Indians youngsters are viewed and their veterans the way Detroit’s old-timers are, this team should easily win over 100 games.  More realistically, I think they win somewhere between 85 and 90 again.  The team hasn’t changed substantially and I don’t see a reason to think they’ll be substantially worse than last year’s 85-77, and that was actually below their expected wins based on run differential, so it isn’t like they were lucky to have that record.

Is that enough for the playoffs?

Detroit is the obvious hurdle in the division.  The Tigers have some problems which could come up to bite them; many of their key players are already getting old, they don’t really have a closer, and their infield defense is somewhere between “bad” and “one of the worst of all time.”  Despite these flaws, the batting order and rotation are so good that they should be a 90-win team or close to it for at least one or two more years, and even without a clear closer, it isn’t like their bullpen is terrible.  Additionally, while Detroit doesn’t look like a super deep team this season, they addressed some of last season’s depth issues by adding Torii Hunter and by developing their younger pitchers.  While the Sox certainly are capable of finishing ahead of Detroit, it’s honestly not that likely unless the Tigers underachieve significantly or one of their “big three” gets hurt.

You'll hear some hype about the other teams in this division from time to time, but to be honest, as someone who follows them regularly, the rest of the division is pretty bad.  Cleveland and Kansas City are supposedly young and up-and-coming teams, but on the other hand, as the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me every year for ten seasons in a row, and I must be so stupid that I shouldn’t be allowed to buy my own groceries.  The Royals honestly could end up around .500ish if everything goes right and will put up a fight in every individual series, but their bullpen and the back of the rotation are excruciatingly bad, which will keep them from being close to the division lead over the course of a whole season.  As for Cleveland and Minnesota, I’ll just say that, in my fantasy baseball league (a highly competitive 12-teamer with a roster format that emphasizes starting pitching), a grand total of one starting pitcher was taken from those teams, and that was a late-round flyer on Ubaldo Jimenez.  While it's easy to assume that beating Detroit is priority #1, the type of season the Sox have will largely be dependent on whether they can beat up on the other three division rivals, or whether they end up around .500 in those games.

With two good/decent teams and three bad ones, the AL Central could have a decent chance to produce a Wild Card team, and this might be the most likely way in for the Sox.  The AL East has long been a Wild Card factory, but with Boston and New York declining and the Orioles and (maybe) Jays improving, it’s a hard division to make sense of.  The best-case scenario for our Wild Card hopes is that the East ends up being a division with five good teams but no great or terrible ones, where everybody beats up on each other and nobody is able to get past the high 80s in wins.  The AL East might produce a 90-game winner this year, but I don’t see it producing two of them, like it often has in the past.

The West looks a little more likely to produce at least one Wild Card, although it's also tougher to figure out than the Central is.  The Mariners should still be bad for at least a couple more years, which helps the rest of the division.  Texas continues to have good pitching, but with Hamilton and Napoli gone, this could be the year that their annual free agent losses catch up to them.  The Angels are positively terrifying on paper, but they also were last year and it didn’t translate to anything amazing on the field.  Defending division champ Oakland is the toughest to read – last year looked like a return to Billy Beane’s glory days, where they routinely win division titles with a bunch of players that nobody’s ever heard of.

Looking at the league this way, I’ll go out on a limb and predict that it takes less than 90 wins to get a wild card spot this year.  The final prediction for the season: 87-75, 2^nd in AL Central, and into the playoffs as the AL’s second wild card team.