I get Joe Sheehan's (formerly of Baseball Prospectus) email newsletter abut 5 times per week. He's given permission to forward this article to increase his readership so I've included the whole text below. It's about the Sox, KW, and crazy Ozzie. I enjoy his Newsletter immensely so I thought I'd pass it along. You can sign up
here if you like it.
<!--quoteo-->QUOTE <!--quotec-->The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. II, No. 18
June 14, 2010
If you had to pick two teams to make 41 straight outs, last night’s combination would have been in the mix. Neither the White Sox nor the Cubs are especially adept at gettting hits or reaching base. Ted Lilly, a strikeout/flyball pitcher, is very good at preventing baserunners, and Gavin Floyd has been just as good in years past. “Good pitching beats good hitting,” is a cliché that can be debated forever, but I know that good pitching bitch-slaps bad hitting. Ladies and gentlemen, Chicago Baseball 2010!
The White Sox were two runs away from completing a weekend sweep of the Cubs, moving back to within 6 ½ games of the AL Central lead and maybe, just maybe, putting last week’s headlines about internal rifts and potential firings behind them. Alas, Lilly was just a little bit better than Floyd, who allowed back-to-back hits with two outs in the seventh for the game’s only run. Floyd then watched his teammates put runners on second and third with no one out in the ninth, but fail to score. For want of a single, a ballgame was lost.
This is nothing new for the White Sox, who have had a frighteningly one-dimensional offense for the last six seasons, so much so that the statistic “runs scored on homers as a percentage of total runs” has been named the “Guillen Number.” The White Sox are 12th in the AL in average, 11th in OBP, 13th in 2B+3B. They have added some walks (208, eighth) and speed (second in AL in steals and attempts) this season, but the overall product is tenth in the league in runs despite being third in homers. This year’s lineup features two good hitters in Paul Konerko and the completely out-of-the-blue Alexis Rios, and nothing else. Andruw Jones still has a decent EqA, but that’s simply due to an April in which a bunch of his fly balls left the yard. The middle infielders have been disastrous—neither Gordon Beckham nor Alexei Ramirez has a .300 OBP. Carlos Quentin looks like a one-season fluke, also with a sub-.300 OBP. Those three players, all 28 or younger, were supposed to be the core of a strong offense. They’ve sunk the ship.
You can’t blame Kenny Williams for that kind of failure. Ramirez was never going to be a star, but he’s played better than this, and the other two players are well off anyone’s projections for them. Williams’ brutal offseason is a reason why the Sox have disappointed, though, as he spent his time bringing in or retaining players who have failed to add anything to the offense. Juan Pierre has a .316 OBP that is just killing the Sox.in the leadoff slot. When he broke his finger, Mark Teahen was hitting .255/.340/.387, good for this team, bad for an corner player in the AL. Mark Kotsay, who hasn’t been useful in years, was signed to be a platoon DH. He’s at .202/.299/.364. Jones is the big win, with his .211/.328/.469 line, and even that’s inflated. Jones is hitting under .200 with a sub-.700 OPS since April. Williams, who got most of his attention for declining to retain Jermaine Dye, deserves more criticism for what he did than for what he didn’t do. He identified the wrong solutions to the Sox’ offensive problems.
I’m fascinated with Williams, who started his reign as White Sox GM with some terrible trades, then became a savvy collector of pitching with some ability to win minor deals. Williams taught me that being a GM is a bit like being a player, where you can become better over time, improve, the same way a player can learn the strike zone or develop power or perfect a new pitch. It’s one reason why I like to see owners hire GMs with low profiles who have some upside in the role rather than retreading ones just for their experience. Williams isn’t a bad GM; he’s an above-average GM who had a bad winter. It happens. The idea that his job should be in jeopardy is a bit silly.
Ozzie Guillen’s job should not be, either, despite the combination of poor team performance and the usual displays of temper. There’s an element of the coverage of Milton Bradley in play here as well; because Guillen has a reputation, any time he blows up or says something out of line, it becomes a bigger story than it might otherwise become if someone else said the same thing. Covering Ozzie Guillen’s running mouth is, I suppose, rewarding for the people paid to do it, but it’s not a baseball issue. Moreover, the attention paid to Guillen’s inability to self-edit distracts from the fact that he is, like Williams, good at his job. Guillen runs a pitching staff well, extracts value from starters and matches up the bullpen sensibly. He doesn’t do a lot of stupid things with the offense. Check out the Sox stolen-base numbers: 65 of the team’s 91 attempts are by the two players who can run. They have just 17 sacrifices, about one every four games. The 13 intentional walks seem like a lot, but six of them have been to get Randy Williams, his sidearming lefty specialist, out of facing a right-handed batter. An unemployed Ozzie Guillen would be on the market for about 13 seconds and might well beat the Sox back to the postseason.
I won’t pretend I have information that you don’t. I’m working off the same reports you are. What I can say is that in an environment where winning is the expectation, where success has been had, and where strong-willed individuals are in place, conflicts are going to arise. The presence of those conflicts doesn’t necessarily mean that the situation is intractable. I was talking to a female friend last summer, and I can’t for the life of me remember why, but we were talking about our last fights, and I told her about this brawl I had with my best friend up in Inwood Park when we were…I don’t know, 11? 12? (He probably remembers better, since no one forgets getting their ass kicked like he did.) Anyway, she said, “I've always thought it was cool that guys could do this. Just take swings at one another and just be over it. Women work out their issues in a much more complicated fashion.”
Whether anyone threw a punch isn’t the issue. The issue is that sometimes, guys go at each other, get it off their chests and move on. This is actually a hell of a lot healthier than the manager talking to his pet transcriptionists for one paper and the GM talking to his pet transcriptionists for the other, all behind the words “an anonymous source,” until the situation blows up and the only winners are the guys in circulation and ad sales.
The White Sox management isn’t the issue, it’s the players. Given that there’s a core of veterans here playing in front of a farm system that isn’t terribly strong, there isn’t a path to rebuilding. Williams has to try to upgrade the roster with an eye towards overtaking the Twins, and Guillen has to manage with that goal in mind. Here are some short-term solutions:
Give Brent Lillibridge another shot. The now-utilityman has a career .185/.264/.281 line in the majors, and .255/.321/.379 in Triple-A, so this is probably optimistic. On the other hand, he’s 26 years old, so if he’s ever going to be a player, it’s now. The White Sox have to take some upside risks, and giving Lillibridge the playing time currently being spent on Kotsay and Jayson Nix is one way to take a stab at upside. Lillibridge can play some third base and some right field, either of which would get Carlos Quentin to DH, where he belongs.
Send Beckham down for a couple of weeks. His strikeout rate is way up and his power is way down, both signs of a player who is overmatched. Remember that he was drafted just two years ago, and it was only his great play in the minors in 2009 that forced the Sox’ hand in promoting him after a mere 59 minor-league games. It is entirely possible that we were fooled by one big year and that he’s not ready. The Sox need Beckham to be a star for years to come, so living with Omar Vizquel at second base for 20 games or so may be the price they have to pay to get there.
Slide Juan Pierre to the ninth slot. The “second leadoff man” theory is in play here, where you take someone who can run but not hit and bat him in the spot where his occasional left turns at first base can do the most good. The primary problem with this idea is that the Sox may not have anyone who can improve upon Pierre’s .316 OBP in the top slot. I’d run Lillibridge or Alexei Ramirez up there for a couple of weeks and see what happens.
This may all be shuffling of deck chairs, but with a rigid roster, there isn’t much to be done. There’s no OBP to be called up from Charlotte, where the best hitters are Tyler Flowers and Dayan Viciedo, neither of which is getting on base even a third of the time. Viciedo is hitting .283 with some pop, but he walks less than once a week and would get eaten alive in the majors. Calling up Flowers became less likely over the weekend as A.J. Pierzynski crossed 10 years in the majors and gained veto power over any trade.
The Sox offensive failures have served to mask the pitching problems, as the team is ninth in runs allowed in the AL. It’s an unusual situation in that no one Sox pitcher is below replacement-level, but just four -- John Danks and three relievers – are above average. The Sox, in fact, have used just 12 pitchers all year, the same 12 who broke campe with the team. (They’ve used just 27 players overall, as Lillibridge and Donny Lucy have replaced Teahen and Ramon Castro during DL stays.) Dan Hudson seems ready for the majors, with 86 strikeouts and just 21 walks allowed in 71 1/3 innings, and while he may be better than Freddy Garcia at this point, that’s a hard transaction to make when Garcia is 6-3 and has the second-best ERA in the rotation. You cannot replace Jake Peavy and his contract or Mark Buehrle and his, which leaves Gavin Floyd, whose peripheral numbers show that he’s not far from the pitcher he was in 2009. The bullpen has similar problems; Bobby Jenks has been disappointing without becoming Trevor Hoffman; and no one else has pitched their way off the roster, though Scott Linebrink is trying. The solution to the team’s pitching issues, as silly as it sounds, is for the current staff to pitch better. Collectively, this group should be an asset from this point forward.
Sadly, that may be the answer for the offense as well. While Williams may be able to acquire an upgrade at DH or in right field or perhaps second base, he’s unlikely to fill all three holes from outside the organization. For the Sox to close the gap on the Twins, they need Ramirez, Quentin and Beckham to hit. If those three don’t bring their bats around to the cause over the next four weeks, Williams’ focus has to turn from winning the AL Central in 2010 to winning it in 2011, by trading away Paul Konerko and anything else for which he can get value.
<b>Administration</b>
Two weeks ago, I asked everyone subscribed to the newsletter to send it to one friend who wasn’t a subscriber, as part of a push to grow our numbers. That was successful, so let’s do it again. I very much appreciate not just the subscription money you’ve all sent in, but your eagerness to make suggestions and offer your time to help me with this project. Remember the mantra: Individuals will recognize and support quality if given that option. That’s been proven true so far, but I firmly believe I’m just scratching the surface of the potential audience.
This doesn’t have to be a state secret: 364 people have signed up so far. That’s about 10% of the people getting my Twitter feed, somewhere south of 5% of the readership of Baseball Prospectus. I firmly believe I can tack a zero onto that number by continuing to write about baseball the way I do, so long as I can get the word out that this product exists.
I’m working on the Web site that should become joesheehan.com. With that in mind, and noting that no changes are imminent, let me ask: is there anyone who would not be happy if this product shifted from an e-mail newsletter to a Web site product, protected by a username and password? Similarly, if anyone has strong feelings about the two delivery systems, I’d appreciate the feedback. Again, no changes are imminent, I’m just taking the temperature of the audience.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I generally agree with everything Joe said. It's nice to know that the Sox have very little in terms of reinforcements for their current shitty lineup. The Cubs definitely suck as well, but I feel like we have more on the farm to imporve our team in the coming years.
