The White Sox Fumbled Away Their Future in Historic Fashion
Just a few years ago, the South Siders were building a World Series contender. Now they might be the worst team in baseball.
After an 11-season playoff drought that saw all the cornerstones of their 2005 championship roster gradually go their separate ways, the Chicago White Sox burst back onto the scene in a big way during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. Winning 35 of 60 games, Chicago finished with the seventh-best record in baseball on the strength of a historic amount of Cuban talent and a generally young, exciting lineup. Highlights of the resurgent season included a Lucas Giolito no-hitter in late August and the most home runs (96) of any team in the American League.
Although they lost to the Oakland A’s in the first round (blowing a 1-0 lead in the best-of-3 format), the White Sox’s core — Eloy Jimenez, Luis Robert Jr., Yoan Moncada, Giolito, Dylan Cease, Nick Madrigal, Dane Dunning, Michael Kopech and Andrew Vaughn — seemed poised for a very bright future. All were 25 or younger and had helped Chicago’s farm system rank sixth (per Baseball America) the year before. Then, as if to silence doubters who wondered whether they could maintain their revival over a full schedule, the White Sox posted a nearly identical winning percentage in 2021, winning the AL Central for the first time since 2008.
Again, they ended up losing in the first round of the playoffs — this time to the eventual AL champ Houston Astros in the Division Series. But every young team has to go through these growing pains. While nothing in baseball is guaranteed, and your window to contend is never as wide-open as it seems like it should be, teams like those White Sox — young, talented and with a growing track record of regular-season success — tend to be good for at least the next handful of seasons. Sometimes, they even turn into dynasties.
Unfortunately for Chicago, though, they’ve proven to be a huge exception to that rule — perhaps as much as any team in baseball history.
The White Sox have started the 2024 season with an MLB-worst 3-15 record, and they are dead last in pretty much any category you can look at, ranging from run differential to Elo rating. Coming off 101 losses last season as well, it’s safe to say that any hopes and dreams from their breakout of just a few years earlier have fallen back to earth, hard.
We can provide statistical context for just how much Chicago’s once-promising future has gone off the rails. Let’s try to predict how many Wins Above Replacement1 per 162 games any team will have over the following three seasons, based on the following factors:
Average team age for batters and pitchers.
WAR/162 from batters and pitchers that season.
Overall WAR/162 the previous season.
For some teams, this works really well. The 1998 Philadelphia Phillies, for instance, were a mediocre team coming off a bad season, and they had young batters and a middle-of-the-pack pitching staff age-wise. We’d expect that team to produce 86.6 WAR over the next three seasons, and sure enough, the Phillies had 86.8 WAR.
Most teams aren’t this close; the average guess is within +/- 19.6, or about 6.5 wins per season. (Predicting things three years out is hard, especially with simple models!) But much like how I approached my historical dive into NBA teams who squandered bright futures, this method gives us a baseline from which we can make comparisons between teams’ potential and their reality.
For the 2021 White Sox, we’d have expected them to produce 127.4 total WAR/162 over the 2022-24 seasons, which ranked third-highest in MLB behind only the Los Angeles Dodgers (139.8 predicted WAR) and the Tampa Bay Rays (134.1). They were younger than similarly rising rivals like the Braves and Padres, and had more of a prior track record than the Toronto Blue Jays, who also were on an accelerated path in their own rebuild.
Instead, if we include their early 2024 pace, the White Sox have actually produced just 29.6 total WAR/162 during that span — a shortfall of 97.8 wins. Only one team in AL/NL history fell short of their predicted 3-year WAR total by a greater degree: the 1914 Philadelphia Athletics, who went from winning their second consecutive pennant to one of the worst three-year stretches of baseball the game had ever seen.
Those A’s suffered such a dramatic change in fortune because owner/manager Connie Mack decided to sell off almost literally the whole team2 rather than have them poached by the rival Federal League. (It would take a decade and a half for Mack to build another dynasty, but he did do it — and then tore it all down again.)
The current White Sox have no such dramatic backstory. Their downfall came courtesy of injuries, missed development potential and the attrition of player transactions, all crashing down on the franchise at once.
The crown jewels of the rebuild, Jimenez, Moncada and Robert Jr., have struggled to stay healthy. They’ve collectively played 667 out of a possible 1,026 games for Chicago since 2022, and both Moncada and Robert Jr. are currently on the IL with long-term injuries. Vaughn’s career has yet to meaningfully take off and he has a brutal .448 OPS so far this season. On the mound, Kopech has been healthy but never developed into a good starter and is now coming out of the bullpen. Garrett Crochet is pitching well this season, but before 2024 he lacked the command to fully maximize the value of his blazing fastball.
Meanwhile, Dunning was traded for Lance Lynn before the 2021 season; Lynn was good that year (5.0 WAR) but fell off quickly and was sold at last year’s deadline. Madrigal was dealt to the Cubs at the 2021 deadline for closer Craig Kimbrel, who had a 9.00 ERA in 3 appearances that postseason. Giolito fell off in 2022 and was shipped at last year’s deadline to the Angels ahead of his free agency. Cease was sent to the San Diego Padres for prospects this March.
If you’re keeping score at home, that means nearly all of the young players central to Chicago’s rebuild have either battled injuries, underperformed relative to expectations or are no longer with the club. Add in veteran losses like Carlos Rodon, Tim Anderson and Jose Abreu, plus leadership changes that saw the team move on from Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn in the front office and burn through managers Rick Renteria, Tony LaRussa, Miguel Cairo and now Pedro Grifol since the initial 2020 breakout, and little remains of the promising group that was supposed to be one of baseball’s top teams by now.
Perhaps some of that promise can be reclaimed when Moncada and Robert Jr. return from injury and the returns from last year’s deadline sell-off hit the majors. But nobody would have predicted back in 2020 and 2021 that the White Sox would be the worst team in baseball. It took a historic fall from grace to send Chicago from the game’s next potential dynasty to the dregs of the league.
Filed under: Baseball
Using my JEFFBAGWELL version — that’s the Joint Estimate Featuring FanGraphs and B-R Aggregated to Generate WAR, Equally Leveling Lists.
Of the 1914 Athletics’ 20 best players by WAR, 5 were gone by the 1915 season (including 3 of the top 4 — Eddie Collins, Home Run Baker and Chief Bender), 11 were gone by 1916, and 16 were gone by 1917.