The White Sox rumor mill is creaking to life as the second half of the season approaches, starting with Lucas Giolito and a plausible potential suitor, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Jon Morosi relayed the notion on Wednesday:
The Dodgers are interested in White Sox RHP Lucas Giolito, one of the top available pitchers, sources say. Giolito, who went to high school in LA, has a 3.45 ERA this year. The Dodgers have an @MLB-best 9 of the industry’s top 100 prospects, per @MLBPipeline.
That's a start, and we'll have to see how many more names will surface in trade rumors over the fortnight to come. Jon Heyman offered a stopping point earlier in the week when he said the White Sox are considering four players off-limits, at least when it comes to active shopping.
“What I’m gathering from other sources around the league is that they’re open – not saying they will trade them – open to trading almost everybody with the exception of a few players, those players being (Dylan) Cease, (Luis) Robert, (Andrew) Vaughn and (Eloy) Jimenez,” Heyman said. “So, basically four players that they don’t want to trade. Does that mean that they wouldn’t consider it or wouldn’t listen to offers? I’m not sure about that. But I expect those four players to stay and anyone else could be dealt.”
On one hand, you could construe that as progress, because Bob Nightengale's list of untouchables from last October only had Cease and Vaughn. On the other, I wrote back then that I didn't really get why the Sox held Vaughn in such high esteem, and the answer isn't any more clear a half-season later. Maybe Vaughn being off limits just means he doesn't have sufficient trade value, but putting him in the same category as Dylan Cease and Luis Robert Jr. suggests a certain amount of value.
Vaughn finished the first half of 2023 hitting .244/.319/.432. He leads the team in RBIs with 53 on the strength of the team's best performance with runners in scoring position, although that split is regressing on him (.167/.242/.300 since the start of June). Otherwise, not much stands out, and a couple of new Statcast leaderboards on Baseball Savant show how his future contributions may be capped.
There's the new Fielding Run Value leaderboard, which shows Vaughn ranking toward the bottom among first basemen at -3. I wouldn't buy into that number entirely because a half-season of defensive stats can be weird (he's one run better than two-time Gold Glove winner Matt Olson). DRS puts him at 0 on the season, so I'd probably describe him with phrases like "a little below average," or "average at best."
Either way, the problem isn't so much what Vaughn's doing now, but how much improvement is possible. It's hard to see him making any leaps, because he's fighting a two-front war against a lack of reach and a lack of speed.
Regarding the first shortcoming, he's a small target at first base, and that surfaced a couple times in the last two weeks, turning potential outs into infield singles.
As for the latter, there's also a new Statcast leaderboard for baserunning, and that doesn't do Vaughn any favors, either. The Runner Runs stat isn't very descriptive, because while he's tied for third-worst in baseball, it's a 33-way tie.
The more telling number is the Advance Attempts Above Average stat. Vaughn's tied for the sixth-worst score at -14 percent, and his company in the top 10 comprises seven catchers, a 40-year-old (Miguel Cabrera), and a couple of journeymen first basemen (C.J. Cron and Rowdy Tellez).
This stat feels more stable to me. It's backed up by FanGraphs, which says Vaughn has the least baserunning value of any qualified player. It also jibed with my own observations, including a couple of plate appearances in the opener in Oakland on June 30 that prompted me to tweet the following:
The video of those plays in question, so you can judge for yourself:
I feel like I'm nitpicking a player who hasn't been the problem for the White Sox, but I also think first base is a hard position to sum up generally. I don't really care to use WAR and WAR alone for this discussion, because the defensive penalty for the position makes most of them look unimpressive. José Abreu and Paul Konerko spent most of their careers hovering around 2-3 fWAR, which suggests it'd be easy enough to find an upgrade. Experience would tell you that's not really the case.
You could use scale to understand that Vaughn isn't approaching Konerko or Abreu territory at 0.2 fWAR and 0.6 bWAR, but when isolating the non-hitting parts of his game, I find it easier to understand how much work remains for his bat.
To be fair, Vaughn doesn't seem like a finished product. He's seeing results from a conscious effort to get more lift, and he's also drawing more walks, which was supposed to be part of his game all along. It wouldn't be shocking if he hit .280 or better over the course of seasons to come, raising the other slash-line numbers along with it.
The counterpoint involves two questions:
No. 1: What if he doesn't get better? The threshold for meaningful offense at first base is a high one, and Vaughn might not be equipped to meet it on a routine level.
No. 2: So what if he does? And then you circle back to the questions about his defense and baserunning.
And as we go round and round, you can pull in the conversation about Rick Hahn's difficulties making trades, even if the redundancies result in his manager fill out a lineup card with four first basemen on it.
At least at that point, the discussion is less a bare-knuckled brawl over whether Vaughn is actually good, and more of an exercise in expanding imaginations, which serves a greater purpose. If Hahn is not willing to consider shopping the one first baseman other teams might actually want, then it really limits the ways the Sox can reshape their roster into something more flexible.
