White Sox Playing Time Battles: Hitters

We’ve started our annual Depth Chart Discussions, re-branded as Playing Time Battles for 2016. You can catch up on every team we’ve covered in the Playing Time Battles Summary post or following along using the Depth Chart Discussions tag.

No offense in the American League scored fewer runs than the White Sox last season, and as a result it stands to reason that the bats couldn’t support what was one of the finest starting rotations in all of baseball last year. The Pale Hose scored 22 fewer runs than the next worst (Rays, 644) team, and were also among the AL’s worst in walk rate (14th, 6.7%), isolated power (.130, last), batting average (.250, t-10th), wOBA (.300, last), wRC+ (86, last) and pretty much any other offensive statistic that one could muster.

It’s not hard to find the culprits.

Among the 11 White Sox hitters to accrue at least 200 plate appearances last year, just two — Jose Abreu and Adam Eaton — posted wOBA marks above .320. Geovany Soto checked in at .311 with an uber-weird .219/.301/.406 line, but he just barely cross the threshold in terms of PA. Melky Cabrera snuck in at .307, and everyone else was worse than the .300 AL average in 2015. Between those seven other players, the White Sox gave just under 3,000 plate appearances to below-average hitters last year, including 600-plus to Avisail Garcia and Alexei Ramirez, and nearly 500 to Adam LaRoche.

For a second it’s worth focusing on Cabrera and LaRoche, considering they were the two big-ticket items brought in to help prop up an offense that, quite frankly, was in the same position the season before. Instead, they combined to nearly 1,200 plate appearances of below-average production — all at a cool cost of $25 million, by the way. But while those two are still essentially promised full-time playing gigs in 2015 — Cabrera is actually probably the lesser of two evils in the outfield with Garcia — the team didn’t take upgrading the offense lightly.

At catcher the club will go with the three-headed monster of Alex Avila, Dioner Navarro and Rob Brantly. The bulk, if not all, of the playing time will go to the first two, and both have plenty to prove. Avila hit just .191/.339/.287 last year with the Tigers, completing a five-season descent from when he hit .295/.389/.506 back in 2011. Throw in concussions — he played first base about one-third of the time last year — and it’s unclear just how much they plan to really have Avila back there. On one hand he’s making just $2.5 million on his one-year deal, but with Abreu and LaRoche in the clubhouse, he’s not stealing any time over at first, either. A more likely scenario is that Navarro (one year, $4 million) gets a large chunk of the playing time. He’s coming off a better, but still not great season with the Blue Jays (.682 OPS), and may be hoping to crack the 500 PA barrier for just the second time in his 12-year big league career. A platoon could be in line here too, as Navarro has hit lefties better in his career, and Avila the opposite. Brantly could steal some time if one or both fall on their face, but the 26-year-old hasn’t shown much since his cup of coffee in 2012.

The crowning jewel and champion of the infield is Abreu, who experienced a bit of a fallback from his outstanding 2014 rookie campaign, but was still a fine contributor. A 50-point drop in iso would hurt most hitters, but he still managed to bat .290/.347/.502 while breaking 30 home runs in a repeat performance. Something to watch is this: his walk rate tumbled from 8.2% to 5.8%. Did pitchers attack the zone more against him in 2016 than the year before? Slightly (42.5%, up from 40.3%), but Abreu also chased less and overall just swung less, but made more contact — especially on pitches out of the zone. It’s a weird profile, but it doesn’t look to me like he was exploited too much to the point where we could see a severe regression. That is, short of some sort of physical issue.

Second base will be fascinating for the White Sox in 2016. No team got less production out of its second baseman than the White Sox in 2016 (.251 wOBA, 53 wRC+), and while the team attacked that spot, it did so…unconventionally. Enter the impossibly young Brett Lawrie, who just recently turned 26 — damn 1990s birthdays — and was grabbed from the A’s for a couple minor league players. After saying goodbye to Gordon Beckham for the second time, did the White Sox grab the second coming? Beckham failed to live up to the promise of his first really nice season in Chicago, and Lawrie keeps searching for whatever it was that he did with the Jays in 2011. In that 43-game audition, Lawrie hit .293/.373/.580; in the four years and 450-plus games since, he’s hit .260/.310/.406 while shuttling between second and third. Third might be his better position — we’ll get there in a minute — but Lawrie will get the chance to settle in at second, and the expectations aren’t terribly high in terms of simple improvement. Even his so-so 2015 (.306 wOBA) was almost 60 points better than what Chicago got out of its keystone guys. He might have some intrigue in fantasy leagues this year; 15-plus homers, a handful of steals and a .260-.270 batting average at second base isn’t a bad combo. If you’re in walk leagues though, cover your eyes. Better yet, close them.

Third base will be locked down by new acquisition Todd Frazier, who escaped the fire sale in Cincinnati relatively unscathed, it seems. Now here’s a chance for real improvement; no team got less production out of its third basemen — this sounds familiar — in the AL than the White Sox in 2015 (.267 wOBA, 64 wRC+). Frazier added some power but at the expense of OBP, hitting .255/.309/.498 last year for the Reds, and could threaten to hit even more homers at US Cellular, which had a home run park factor of 112 according to StatCorner last season. In other words, roughly the same as the 113 factor of Great American Ballpark, one of the league’s notorious launchpads. For a team that has been searching for a third baseman ever since Joe Crede fell apart, this is huge. It’s unclear how much the White Sox will let Frazier run — double-digit steals the last two years — as just three teams had fewer steals in the AL than they did last year, but there’s a spot for a little sneaky value. Only Manny Machado (20 steals) ran more as a third baseman last year.

Shortstop also wasn’t good for the White Sox last year but it wasn’t a nuclear waste zone either, and it’ll get better soon. The Sox perked up to 13th among SS production in wOBA at .279 and wRC+ at 72, and super prospect Tim Anderson isn’t far away. Anderson hit .312/.350/.429 at Double-A Birmingham last year, and was ranked 19th on Baseball Prospectus’ top-101 prospect list. If he can’t crack the lineup right away, Tyler Saladino (.225/.267/.335 in 2015) might get the first shot, but so too might Jimmy Rollins, who just recently signed a minor league deal. Rollins hit just .224/.285/.358 for the Dodgers last year, and might take on more of a mentorship/utility role if he makes the team, but if the club deems Anderson close to ready, they might make him the caretaker to the position in the meantime. Leury Garcia and Carlos Sanchez could also figure into things up the middle, but neither is worth paying attention to in fantasy leagues.

All told, this has potential to be an interesting and vastly improved unit. But will it be very good? That’s still no guarantee. Having Abreu and Frazier on the ends helps a ton, but issues at catcher and up the middle will make this a boom or bust bunch.

UPDATE! The White Sox will be fielding an outfield this year, too:

The outfield is a cesspool of mediocrity, and that’s even with uber useful Eaton holding down center. Eaton is a jack-of-all trades fantasy-wise, hitting for average, taking his share of walks and poking enough extra-base hits to pair with a solid number of steals. There isn’t really a weakness in his profile, which makes him a nice, perhaps even sneaky fantasy contributor. The issue here is durability; Eaton managed to play 153 games last year but still has a penchant for playing the game extremely hard — perhaps at his own peril. Still, 2015 was a good sign for him moving forward in that respect.

Eaton in flanked in left by Cabrera and right by Garcia. Cabrera posted his second disappointing season in the last three after signing a relatively lucrative deal with the White Sox. Cabrera hit just .273/.314/.394, stole just three bases and did so while playing a career-high 158 games. Essentially, he played very poorly while staying healthy. He’s heading into just his age-31 season, and projection systems have him pegged for some sort of a bounceback. Basically though, how much is a handful of steals, 10-15 homers and a decent batting average worth to you? He’ll actively hurt you in OBP leagues, but in batting average ones he could be a nice late-round pickup.

That probably qualifies as good news compared to Garcia, who has taken on the form of Dayan Viciedo 2.0 to this point in his career. It’s important to note that Garcia won’t be 25 until nearly midseason, but he hit just .257/.309/.365 last year while somehow playing nearly 150 games and accruing over 600 plate appearances. There’s really no fantasy consideration here, and the team would be much better suited signing Austin Jackson to play right than letting this play out again. At this point, it’s hard to get a read on if that’s likely.

The only other real option to vulture playing time away from LaRoche at DH, for what it’s worth, is Mike Olt. Steamer projects him to be the second coming of Tyler Flowers, so….we don’t need to waste too much ink on that.