How The White Sox Can Make The Playoffs for the 2019 Season and Shock The World
White Sox aren’t expected to have a winning season but if some things come together this year, 2019 could be a good season for the team.
Things have not been good for the White Sox recently. The team has missed the playoffs 12 out of the last 13 seasons. They have been below .500 for the past six seasons. A terrible 2018 season and terrible offseason give most fans little reason to be optimistic for the upcoming season.
But White Sox fans – like all fans, deserve to have optimism and hope. If nothing else, they are due for some success.
Now, the White Sox lost 100 games last season, but thanks to a full year from Michael Kopech, and offseason acquisitions Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, they can – oh wait. Guess we’ll have to find another way to get there.
So how can the White Sox be contenders this year? Well for starters they’re going to need an easy route to the playoffs (which is rare to come by in the American League) as this team isn’t going to win 95-plus games. However, FanGraphs predicts that the Oakland Athletics would take the second wild card with only 84 wins this year. I think FanGraphs is underselling the competitiveness of the AL a bit, but maybe it’s possible the White Sox can take that second spot with 85 wins, as the Minnesota Twins did in 2017.
Of course, the White Sox are still going to have to finish 2019 with a better record than the 2019 Twins, as well as the Tampa Bay Rays, Athletics, Los Angeles Angels and any other team competing for the spot, or somehow finish the season with a better record than the Cleveland Indians. Unfortunately, Cleveland was able to hold on to hold to ace Corey Kluber this offseason, thanks in part to Rick Hahn stupidly giving Cleveland the payroll flexibility to hold onto Kluber through the trade of mediocre designated hitter Yonder Alonso.
Retaining Kluber means it’s pretty unlikely Cleveland will fall into the White Sox reach, so their best hope will likely be through the second wild card. The worse the Indians, A’s, and Rays are, the better the chances are for the Sox. While it’s likely they will all decline a little bit, we will need those teams to fall a lot for this to work.
Fangraphs predicts the White Sox to win 70 games in 2019, as does Baseball Prospectus. Other sources picks are a little bit more generous, but I’ll prefer to use a data-driven website as a starting point. What the White Sox need to do is take their projected 70-win team and beat the projections to the point where they become a team that wins 85-plus games.
It’s unlikely but it’s not impossible, as teams with a lot of young players and prospects ( like the White Sox now) have significantly beaten their projections and shocked the world in the past. Next, we’ll look at the teams’ projections by position and see how this could conceivably happen.
Catcher, First Base, and Second base – are held down by Welington Castillo, Jose Abreu, and Yolmer Sanchez. These players were all significantly worse in 2018 than they were in 2017 and that’s part of the reason why the Sox ended up declining by five wins over their previous season. For these players to revert to their 2017 slash lines isn’t that improbable, because we’re merely asking the players to do something they did before.
Castillo needs to bounce back after a 2018 PED suspension, and Abreu needs to bounce back after having the worst season of his career as (per baseball-reference) he fell from 4.7 WAR in 2017 to 1.7 WAR in 2018. Given that this bad season was mostly due to weird injuries and a prolonged mid-season slump, it isn’t unrealistic to see him bounce back given how great of a hitter he is.
At second base, Sanchez returns to his original position, and the Sox will need him to play like the player he was in the first half of 2017, and not 2018 when he put up a weak .678 OPS. Lame. If all three players bounce back this could bring the White Sox up four wins from 70 to 74.
Shortstop – Tim Anderson. Now, this is where it starts to get really important. What would we like from Anderson? Presumably a 30-30 season (the White Sox have never had one of those, ever), an on-base percentage significantly above .300, and better defense at shortstop. FanGraphs predicts a 1.8 bwar for the Sox at shortstop, and Anderson will need to beat that projection by at least one win (although hopefully 2), in order to get the win total up to 75.
Third base– Yoan Moncada. The White Sox are projected a 2.5 bwar from this position, and we need Moncada to be the player he was supposed to be and beat this projection by two wins, bringing the Sox win total to 77. Moncada will need to go from hitting .235 with 17 home runs to hitting .280 with 30 home runs. A tall order, but at least his defense will likely improve as he moves to third base.
Outfield – Jon Jay, Eloy Jimenez, and Daniel Palka. This one is tough because the White Sox will have to choose between Adam Engel’s terrible bat or Palka’s horrible glove. That choice could have been avoided for $330 million, but that’s neither here nor there. Jay is projected for a 0.8 bwar in 2019, and it’s fair to say he could beat that by a full win.
The problem with Palka is that his bat is projected to decline from his breakout rookie season, and his defense is even worse in right field than left field where it would be easier to hide him, yet right field really is the only position available for him at the moment due to Hahn’s roster construction.
Eloy Jimenez projects for a 3 bwar, which is excellent for a rookie but we’ll need him to outperform that for the Sox to be contenders this year. I think he could do this, because his defense is probably better than what he has been given credit for. Overall the White Sox will need to out-perform their outfield projections by at least 2-3 wins bringing the teams win total to about 80.
Designated hitter – Yonder Alonso is pretty much the same player he is ever year, so it’s unrealistic to expect any significant improvements, and I was already generous enough with the projection for Jose Abreu.
So for the White Sox to contend this year, they will more or less need Eloy Jimenez and Yoan Moncada to become super-stars, Tim Anderson to be a near all-star, and for Abreu, Castillo, and Yolmer Sanchez to return to their 2017 selves. That’s just the offensive side of things.
Starting Pitching – this is probably the most important part. While Carlos Rodon and Reynaldo Lopez can be counted on as average to above-average starters the rest of the rotation is full of question marks.
Lucas Giolito and Dylan Covey were two of the worst pitchers in baseball last year, and significant improvements from them would really help the teams win total. Giolito put up an atrocious negative -1.3 WAR last year, so an improvement to being a solid starting pitcher could net the White Sox two to four more extra wins. That still isn’t enough, as Ivan Nova is just plain mediocre, and he will likely be gone at the trading deadline to make room for Dylan Cease , who the Sox will also need to be good once he comes up.
What the White Sox will need from their rotation is a big breakout season from one of their guys to become an out of nowhere ace. Whether it’s Giolito, Covey, or Carson Fulmer, one of those guys will need to become ace-like pitcher to get them to be an 85-plus win team and compete for a playoff spot.
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This will require a lot of luck, but baseball team’s get lucky a lot, and the law of probability states that luck is certainly something the White Sox are due for. They won’t win because Hahn is a genius, but if the players come together, rally around each other, and have some unexpected breakouts, it’s possible the White Sox could make the playoffs this year. If they did make it to the postseason as a wildcard, their opponent would most likely by an AL East team, and how fun would it be to beat Chris Sale in a wildcard game?