The Bountiful White Sox Outfield

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.

Left Field

Melky Cabrera

J.B. Shuck

 

Center Field

Adam Eaton

Emilio Bonifacio

Leury Garcia

 

Right Field

Avisail Garcia

Bonifacio

Shuck

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Cabrera suffered a nightmare of a season in 2013 which we later learned was due to a tumor in his back. Against that backdrop, his .279 AVG in 88 games is almost an accomplishment. It was a punch-less .279, but still… a tumor… on his back. I’m not sure I could make it through a 15-team auction with a tumor on my back and Cabrera somehow managed to hit well beyond his weight (210 lbs.) for 372 PA.

Expectations predictably rose once the tumor was removed and Cabrera returned to essentially deliver a repeat of his 2011 breakout with KC sans a good portion of the speed. It was a well-balanced effort, too. He had just a 10-point platoon split in wRC+ favoring righties at 128 and a 10-point home/road split favoring the road with a 130.

After playing for the same team in back-to-back years for the first time since 2008-2009, he will join his sixth team in 2015 and gets yet another favorable ballpark. It’s not quite as favorable as Rogers Centre was, but the fact that he didn’t have to lean on Rogers in Toronto and has had success in both KC and SF makes me worry less about the downgrade in home ballpark.

This guy can simply hit. He missed the last month of the season with pinkie surgery (not a typo), but it won’t have any lingering effects or delay the start of his season. Hitting second in what should be a solid lineup should offer a lot of run scoring opportunities. He should be able to log another 80-run season and if he stays healthy for the first time in three years, he could chase down his career best of 102, set back in 2011. We are now three years removed from his 20 SB season and it’s time to drop expectations into single digits.

A chic sleeper coming into the 2014 season, A.Garcia was felled by an injury just eight games into his season. The torn labrum was expected to end his year when it first happened. By the summer, he had improved the timetable to a September return, but then after some early-July batting practice, he was sent out on a rehab assignment and returned on August 16^th to get a decent little 38-game stint to close the season.

He only hit .239 with a .696 OPS, but the five homers, 25 RBIs and four stolen bases were a microcosm of why he is so appealing to many. He has just under 500 PA of about league average work (97 wRC+) for his career, but the do-a-bit-of-everything nature to his game makes him a fantasy darling. The Steamer projection of .263-18 HR-9 SB might not feel that impressive, but only nine outfielders reached all three thresholds last season. All that has come with a 57 percent groundball rate, just wait until he learns how to lift the ball more consistently. This is a growth stock. It won’t all come at once in 2015, but the market isn’t asking you to pay for a full breakout as a teens-round pick.

Eaton’s numbers don’t jump off the page at you and it is easy to be disheartened by his 1 HR and 63 percent success rate on the basepaths, but both are ripe for improvement. He is by no means a power source, but he’s not Ben Revere, either. A 1.3 percent HR/FB is obscene and definitely undercut his power, even though he is more of a slap-hitter looking for base knocks over power. Getting back to the 7-8 percent level he showed in his first two MLB stints and in the minors will bring him up to the 5-7 range, which is where Steamer sees him going, too.

That’s secondary for him, though; his game is about getting on base, stealing bases, and scoring runs. Two of those aspects are already in place. His eight percent walk rate was instrumental to his .362 OBP and helped him score 76 runs in 123 games, a 100-run pace over a full season of work. His 15 stolen bases would’ve jumped to 20 in a full season, but he has got to get sharper on the bases if he wants to bring his lofty SB numbers from the minors (seasons of 34 and 44 SBs; 76% success rate) into the big leagues.

The skills are in place for a 2014 Denard Span season from Eaton, but more than the recovery of his HR/FB rate or improvement of his SB success rate, he needs to stay healthy or the quantity just won’t be there. He missed the first three months of 2013 with an elbow injury and then had two DL stints in 2014 (hamstring, oblique) so the health piece just isn’t there yet. Map your projection for 125-130 games and take anything extra as pure bonus.

Bonifacio is the only backup to concern you with in this outfield. Shuck is 28 and has never shown anything to get excited about, whether in the minors or in his 684 PA as a major leaguer. L.Garcia is younger at 24 this year, but not even small sample size caveats can explain away his 12 wRC+ in 266 PA with the Sox and Rangers over the last two seasons. He’s only barely hitting his weight which is particularly sad for him as he weighs just 170.

Bonifacio has achieved fantasy usefulness in each of the last six seasons despite only once topping an 81 wRC+. Speed and flexibility are what he offers and nothing more, but it’s enough to be consistently relevant. He will enter 2014 qualifying in the outfield and at second base and could add to that as the season wears on, although the incumbent shortstop has averaged 153 games in his seven year career with exactly 158 games played in each of the last four seasons so if you’re praying for Boni to reclaim the SS eligibility that has eluded him since 2012, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

I’d rank the starters as Cabrera, Garcia, and Eaton with little room between them which puts me in lockstep with early drafters who have them in a tight band ranging from the 43^rd to 50^th outfielders off the board. All three carry all-format value, too. Cabrera and Eaton get a jump in OBP leagues while young Avisail showed some growth there last year, but not enough to avoid a slide down the rankings in that format. Bonifacio is an AL-only or deep mixed league option, though more ideally deployed in the middle infield slot with that second base eligibility.