Thanks to injuries and an unwillingness to promote their top prospect, the White Sox have had to give their plate appearances to outfielders whose skill sets would ordinarily be too narrow to play everyday.
As you might figure, whenever you give a player to extrapolate strengths and weaknesses over a surprisingly large sample, the result is some incredibly lopsided production.
Take Adam Engel. While he's improved enough offensively to float on the positive side of Wins Above Replacement, he's still a terrible hitter. He struck out all three times against Corey Kluber, capping off his evening with a three-pitch strikeout. All three pitches were sliders out of the zone, and all three swings induced pained, guttural responses from Tom Paciorek. "Anguish" isn't usually an emotion in Wimpy's bag, but Engel found it.
Engel now has 52 strikeouts against three walks over 163 plate appearances in the second half. He's somehow hitting .266 during this stretch, but there's not much supporting it.
Nevertheless, Engel gets the bulk of the playing time because 1) Leury Garcia keeps getting hurt, and 2) Engel is just about elite in center. Statcast loves him the most out of the defensive metrics, as he ranks third in baseball among outfielders according to their Outs Above Average metric.
In a cool development, Daren Willman and the Baseball Savant crew can now show how well outfielders cover ground in certain directions. In Engel's case, he's great at going back to the wall.
This comes as no surprise. Anecdotally, you can point to the three home run robberies in a week. Statistically, Engel starts shallower than any other regular center fielder, so he's literally playing to his strengths.
Then there's Daniel Palka. Like Engel, he's limited. Unlike Engel ... he's unlike Engel in every other respect. When it comes to his defense, all this playing time has caused some major suffering.
While Engel is the third-best outfielder in baseball according to OOA, Palka is the third-worst. While Engel covers ground adequately to superbly in every direction, Palka isn't a victor of any vector:
Engel needed 363 flies to accrue those 17 outs above average. Palka has needed just 112 attempts to hemorrhage those 15 outs below average.
He's especially weak on balls hit in front of him, and these charts have fortuitous timing, as Palka departed Sunday's game after his attempt to make a sliding catch on an ordinary line drive.
Fortunately, the injury looked worse than it was, tearing up the carpet instead of his knee. He returned to the lineup on Tuesday as a DH, where he continues to look more and more like an "H."
Palka was 1-for-3 on Tuesday, and he maintained a pair of encouraging trends. He drew a free pass from Kluber, which gives him a walk in six of his last 10 games. He also homered off Kluber, a majestic blast to right that gives him six over his last 12.
With Jose Abreu out for the Cleveland series due to another unusual and intimate malady -- an infection on his thigh stemming from an ingrown hair -- Palka pretty much has the White Sox' home run lead locked up. With all due respect, that's something that should've never happened. To his credit, he's doing his damndest to make his one strength stronger. The combination of walks and homers gives him a .293/.383/.782 in September.
As we've discussed lately, one of the most frustrating facets of this season is the White Sox' collective inability to convert any of these opportunities, especially on the position-player side. Nobody has quite done more with more. Omar Narvaez comes closest, but his work behind the plate still makes him a backup at best, so the Sox are still waiting for somebody to transcend their original label. Until that happens, we'll have to settle for Engel and Palka stretching their one skill as far as humanly possible.
