Overall, I outlined seven games in which the coaching staff failed this team miserably, and it’s quite possible that with a replacement level coaching staff those games would have landed on the winning side of ledger rather than in the loss column.
But we can’t just go out and say that the coaching staff is worth negative 7.0 WAR. It’s not as clean as that. I feel confident in saying that four of the above seven games would have been wins under an average coaching staff. Add in the base running, which has coaching at its core and I truly believe the coaching staff is worth negative 5.5 wins.
To go full circle, that’s as much as Jose Abreu was worth to this team last year, just in the opposite way.
Rounding down, I believe the White Sox record with a league average coaching staff would be 55-49, putting them squarely in the Wild Card lead.
I know it’s not perfect, and there is no set formula, but it’s hard to argue the evidence. The truth is that bringing in a 5.0 WAR superstar wouldn’t help this team, because the coaching staff would just push the club back to league average.
It’s depressing to admit, but the White Sox coaching staff is worth negative WAR, and maybe that fact will cause a war of sorts in the front office when they try to sort out just exactly what has gone wrong in 2015.