PECOTA thinks highly of some Chicago White Sox players

The Chicago White Sox are a good baseball team with lots of really good players. Their ceiling as a team is commonly debated in the baseball community but there is no doubt that they are at least contenders in the American League. Nobody who studies baseball thinks they are anything short of a really good baseball team.

PECOTA is a system that evaluates players using sabermetrics ($). The system is owned by Baseball Prospectus. A metric like this is going to be more kind to the good teams so it should be no surprise that it thinks highly of most of the White Sox players.

Of course, the games still have to be played on the field so these predictions should be taken with a grain of salt. However, seeing PECOTA think that the White Sox players are going to be this productive is a good thing because previous events have led to that diagnosis.

When you see this stuff, there are things that pop out that you might agree with and things that you might disagree with. They seemed to disregard how good Luis Robert was last year. That sort of makes sense because he only had the short 2020 season and a mostly injured 2021 season to work with.

The projections ($) are based on that little amount of playing time that he had. However, despite the “disappointment” in his projections, he still has the second-highest (Yasmani Grandal) WARP (WARP is Baseball Prospectus’s version of WAR) on the White Sox. He is going to be great.

PECOTA certainly thinks that the Chicago White Sox are a good baseball team.

Seeing guys like Tim Anderson, Jose Abreu, Andrew Vaughn, Yoan Moncada, and Eloy Jimenez have great stats on this is amazing as well. These are impactful players that need to be great as PECOTA predicts if they want to be dominant in the division again.

There were also some pitching predictions ($) made by PECOTA as well. Most of this is exactly what you would expect. Lucas Giolito, Lance Lynn, and Dylan Cease lead the starters in projected statistics. Liam Hendriks, Aaron Bummer, and Craig Kimbrel lead what should be a great bullpen.

Unfortunately, they don’t see Dallas Keuchel bouncing back from last year very much. However, they do see Michael Kopech taking back a spot in the rotation with the loss of Carlos Rodon. He doesn’t have full-time starter innings projected here but this level of production would replace Carlos Rodon well enough.

These are just projections, as mentioned before, and shouldn’t be taken as locks. When the White Sox are showing players with these types of predictions, it is a good feeling as a fan because they are great. Hopefully, we get to see this happen in 2022.