It took three games, but the White Sox finally notched their first Cactus League win on Monday. What's more, it was a 10-1 rout of the Seattle Mariners with some of the uplifting moments that had been exclusively reserved for the other team.
Sure, the White Sox scored all of their 10 runs off pitchers who aren't in the Mariners' immediate plans, but their lineup featured an equal amount of walks and strikeouts, and they played errorless ball in the field, while the Mariners balked in a run due to pitch-clock pressures.
Andrew Vaughn had a couple of line-drive singles, and went from first to third on one of Yasmani Grandal's. Elvis Andrus tripled off the left-center wall and made a diving catch at second, looking more natural than he feels out there. Jake Burger smashed his second homer of the spring, and this one didn't hurt anybody. Romy González aced his first outfield test with a nice running catch in the left-field corner, which helped Sean Burke close out two perfect innings in his spring debut.
All that action, and it only took two hours and 23 minutes.
There's a lot to like, especially when Andrus is lifting the ball to the pull field and making great plays on the other half of the diamond, because those are the elements that made him such a strangely exciting use of $3 million in late February.
But if you're looking for things that might be predictive, it's three games into a long spring schedule, so the options are more limited.
As I mentioned in my write-up of Saturday's game, I am paying attention to the kinds of hits and hitters that stand out more than they should thanks to shifts and the lack thereof, and while it's only three games, I want to talk about two hitters so we all can watch them a little more closely over the coming weeks. They won't be playing in the World Baseball Classic, so we should be seeing them plenty.
Yasmani Grandal
Grandal singled in both of his plate appearances on Monday, and both showed how much more room he has to operate on the right side.
His second-inning single probably gets snagged by the second baseman in shallow right field, but with a traditional alignment, it found plenty of room in front of the right fielder.
The second single probably would've landed safely even in 2021, just not nearly as comfortably.
These are the singles that I figured we'd see more of when word leaked of MLB's crackdown on shifts last September, and while Connor McKnight mentioned on the broadcast that teams could theoretically put the left fielder behind the second baseman to replicate the same stacked right side, a St. Louis radio host relayed word from Cardinals manager Oli Marmol that the league doesn't consider that strategy within the spirit of the rule.
This is all good for Grandal, at least to a point. If all he's hitting are singles, everybody still has to watch him try to run.
Gavin Sheets
One of the reasons why Gavin Sheets has seen plenty of action despite serious shortcomings in his game is that he's been watchable in the clutch.
The Bill James Handbook 2023 says Sheets converted 32 percent of his RBI opportunities last year, and while that's nowhere close to the top of the league leaderboard, he finished a couple tenths ahead of José Abreu (31.8 percent). Were everybody as capable as Sheets, the White Sox offense might've stood a chance. Instead, they had Grandal (21 percent), Adam Engel (20.5), Leury García (20.5) and Josh Harrison (19.9) overcrowding the bottom 30 ... out of more than 350 hitters.
Sheets often made it look pretty simple, too. Unlike Grandal, Sheets has the inside-out club in his bag, which often allowed him to thwart shifts with ease. He's notched nearly a couple dozen hits against shifted infielders on the left side over the last two years.
Some of those hits are resounding singles, but a whole bunch of others could be considered unremarkable grounders that would be hoovered up by a typical infield alignment on the left side. Here are 10 from 2022 alone.
That might not seem significant, but he's only accrued about a full season's worth of plate appearances during his MLB career, so the absence of a cluster of hits changes the outlook considerably. Remove a dozen singles from Sheets' record, and instead of .244/.304/.439, you're looking at .222/.284/.417, which is not what you want from a guy who doesn't have a position.
So when Major League Baseball announced a shift ban, I immediately thought of how it should give Grandal a better shot at bouncing back when he needs all the help he can get. Once I started thinking about the rest of the lineup, I wanted to see what Sheets looks like against more traditional alignments. He's great at taking what the defense gives him, but what if the defense has less to offer him going forward?
In his favor, he socked a solo homer to right field in the Cactus League opener Saturday.
In the other column are a pair of grounders with that inside-out swing that might've been singles in another life, but instead turned into routine outs. Here's one from his final plate appearance on Saturday ...
... and here's another one on Monday.
We can't take these two grounders and say Sheets is screwed. We have all of five plate appearances to work with so far, and the other three don't have this problem (a lineout to right and a groundout to first are the others). These GIFs are just a way to illustrate that his damage will have to take a different shape. On the bright side, he beat the throw to first base to avoid the double play and give his Cactus League RBI percentage a good start.
