Archive for Chicago White Sox

One week into the season, it’s obviously too early to place much weight on any player’s performance thus far. In these early days of the season, I like to instead take a look at situational trends that alter players’ fantasy potential going forward. From position battles to lineup placement, there’s plenty to talk about from a fantasy perspective, without looking too much into small-sample statistics.

I identified three middle infielders whose fantasy arrows are pointing up, two of whom are widely available on waiver wires. (Position eligibility and ownership percentages from Yahoo.)

Marcus Semien – SS – 47% owned

When this season opened, it didn’t look like much changed for Oakland’s starting shortstop from the start of last season. Semien worked his way up the batting order as last season went on, bouncing around between the No. 2 and No. 7 spots from mid-May onward, and even saw 16 starts in the leadoff spot. However, 2017 started with the 26-year-old right back down at the bottom of the lineup, batting ninth twice and eighth once in the team’s first three games.

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The 2016 performance of Todd Frazier was something of an enigma. Or was it?

While he flashed his typical brand of power and (it’s with extreme reluctance that I even mention this) turned in a solid RBI total, he also featured a slash with a .225 average and .302 on-base percentage, both of which were among the worst at the third base position. His strikeout rate, at 24.5%, was the highest of his career. Those are certainly factors that will cause some prospective owners to shy away moving forward.

At the same time, there are other elements of Frazier’s game that still leave him as one of the more intriguing players that the hot corner has to offer. While some may shy away, others will jump at the opportunity to get that kind of power into their lineup, even with the potential drawbacks. With that in mind, what’s the correct course of action in regard to Todd Frazier?

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With established players fleeing the south side of Chicago like their hair’s on fire — like any good rebuild, honestly — it’s a little strange that one of the vested veterans left standing is closer David Robertson.

If not perfect, Robertson has been perfectly useful over his first two seasons with the White Sox in the closer’s role. Despite the team only winning an average of 77 games in those first two seasons, Robertson has saved roughly half of those wins (71) with a decent 3.44 ERA (3.04 FIP), much more than a strikeout per inning (11.5 K/9) and a walk rate right around his career mark, though it was much better in year one (1.8 BB/9) than year two (4.6).

With $25 million left on his deal and the free-agent market barren for late-inning relievers not only now, but at the advent of the offseason, Robertson still presents a fairly decent value. It makes sense for the White Sox to cash that in for myriad reasons, not the least of which is the closer-in-waiting and today’s subject: Nate Jones.

Who? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for our Depth Chart Discussions to begin. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will begin breaking them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find them gathered here.

The White Sox had an aggressive offseason, adding plenty of fantasy-relevant talent to an interesting core. Two-thirds of their outfield was already drawing attention as mid-round guys with breakout potential. They added another mid-rounder – though he is of the established variety – this offseason making their starting outfield one of the more alluring fantasy units in the game.

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When it comes to analyzing minor league players, it is certainly important to consider both the statistics they compile and the connection between that performance and the visual/mechanical elements of their process behind the numbers. However, if there’s one group of prospects who can be effectively analyzed (in a shorthanded fashion) from a purely statistical standpoint, it’s probably first base prospects. In general, they’re below-average defenders–none of the 25 qualified first basemen in 2013 posted a positive FanGraphs Defense value, after all–and as a result, they are held to extremely high offensive standards. Evaluating a first base prospect, then, often comes down to a simple method: If he hits, he’s interesting, and if he doesn’t, he’s not.

Applying this crude method to White Sox first base prospect Rangel Ravelo probably would lead many toward the second conclusion. Ravelo’s not entirely off the radar–he hit .312/.393/.455 with High-A Winston-Salem this year as a 21-year-old, enough to slot him into the final slot on Baseball America’s top 30 White Sox prospects. But he’s a first baseman who is a career .298/.359/.402 hitter–that’s a meager .104 Isolated Power and just seven home runs in 1179 plate appearances since being drafted in sixth round in 2010 out of a Florida high school.

The logical conclusion to draw, then, is that Ravelo, while perhaps a talented hitter, is never going to have the power required to make an impact given what’s likely to be little defensive ability. Then again, maybe the visual/mechanical aspect still retains importance for first basemen, because it paints a very different picture of Ravelo than his production does.

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Everybody loves a sleeper–a player who seems primed to break out but who few pay attention to. Predicting a prospect breakout a) is fun and b) gives an evaluator some credibility, and in fantasy baseball, grabbing a player on the cheap and watching him soar to usefulness is a great way to find success.

While the White Sox minor league system has not been considered anywhere near an elite group in the past several years, they have managed to accumulate a number of sleeper successes. Until 2013, this allowed the major league team to stay competitive, supplementing a veteran core with solid performances from unheralded sources. While the team struggled in 2013, the trend continued, with Marcus Semien, Erik Johnson, and Daniel Webb all upping their stock considerably throughout the 2013 season and reaching the majors despite opening the year with no upper-minors experience.

In a system with little other places to look for positive thoughts other than the next wave of potential sleepers, one player who many analysts point to as a sleeper to watch is righthanded pitcher Chris Bassitt. Our own Marc Hulet ranked the lanky hurler as the organization’s eleventh-best prospect. But how good might Bassitt become?

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Every year, there are always several prospects who emerge from obscurity to post majestic statlines in the lower levels of the minor leagues. As such a player strings together an extended period of statistical superiority, questions of his legitimacy as a potential impact player arise–do the numbers merely reflect hollow dominance of fatally flawed, cupcake opponents, or are they a sign of a player emerging as a prospect to watch?

In the immediate aftermath of such a statistical rise, there is always a need for firsthand observation of the player to contextualize both his present excellence and future potential. One player very much in this mold is White Sox pitching prospect Adam Lopez.

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On August 6, the White Sox promoted starting pitcher Chris Beck from High-A Winston-Salem to Double-A Birmingham. A common question I heard when that news broke was “Isn’t that rushing him, since his strikeout rate is low?”

My response to that line of questioning was always “No, he’ll be fine.” And indeed he was, making five great starts in Birmingham down the stretch (28 IP, 22/3 K/BB, 0 HR, 2.89 ERA, 2.16 FIP). Ending his first full professional season by overmatching Double-A hitters is a great sign, but what of the low strikeout rate? How does the 76th overall pick of the 2012 draft project?

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A few days ago, I wrote a post looking into some players who were putting up fairly pedestrian numbers but remained quite intriguing due to being young for their levels. I didn’t include White Sox outfield prospect Courtney Hawkins on the list, but I suppose I could have. Nobody would say Hawkins doesn’t have tools–he was the 13th overall pick in the 2012 draft for a reason–but he sure is struggling in High-A Winston-Salem this year. I mean, sure, he’s second in the Carolina League with 19 home runs, and he’s slugging a quite respectable .452–the elephant in the room is the strikeout totals.

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It is often said that closers are made, not born. Any experienced baseball fan knows this; it seems that for every Huston Street type who arrives with hype, four or five Jason Grillis, Andrew Baileys, or John Axfords slip into dominance after finding dead-ends in other roles. As such, predicting who will ascend to MLB closer roles (beyond the obvious “the best MLB non-closer relief pitchers”) is often a fool’s errand.

This becomes even more difficult when one attempts to find future closers in the minor leagues. Many of the pitchers who end up closing MLB games were starters all through their minor league careers, but it’s tough to project a minor league starter as a closer outright–in doing so, one is essentially saying “This pitcher will fail badly at the role he’s currently in and subsequently find tremendous success in a role he’s never pitched in.” Certainly plausible, but not something that seems like it can be said with much confidence. And minor league relievers–well, they’re equally problematic to forecast. After all, if a pitcher has a big future, why isn’t he able to crack a minor league rotation?

It’s certainly possible to envision any number of minor leaguers closing out ballgames–as so many sabermetricians are fond of saying, the role of garnering save totals can be accomplished reasonably effectively by any number of players, and the minor leagues have no shortage of interesting power pitchers that could fit a closer profile if things go their way. However, it’s quite another thing to actually predict that a minor league pitcher will end up amassing saves in the big leagues.

I think White Sox pitching prospect Daniel Webb merits such a prediction, though.

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