It doesn't matter how good the White Sox are supposed to be. It doesn't matter how bad the Royals end up being. It doesn't matter if the White Sox transplant a good chunk of Kansas City's brain trust into their own dugout. When the dust settles, the White Sox are going to lose the season series to the Royals by one game. no matter what. 2023 marked the third straight such season, and it felt like the end result of too much time lying down with dogs.
2021: The White Sox lost the season series to the Royals, 9-10, despite finishing atop the AL Central, but hey, the Royals were an ordinary kind of subpar at 74-88, so that kind of stuff happens.
2022: The White Sox once again went 9-10 against the Royals, and it was characteristic of their struggles to find escape velocity from .500, because Kansas City finished the year 65-97.
Given this history, it should come as no surprise that the Sox finished 6-7 against the Royals in the era of the less division-heavy schedule. But it should also come as extra damning that Pedro Grifol's charges couldn't win more than they lost against a 106-loss Kansas City team. He supposedly got the White Sox job because he was great at identifying the Sox's flaws from his position in the Royals' dugout, but he showed no knack for correcting those flaws, or exploiting any weaknesses he should've known full well from his decade with Kansas City.
The Royals only finished .500 or better against two teams they saw twice in 2023: The White Sox (7-6) and the Astros (5-1). The Astros can write it off as a fluke, but they should also consider it a warning.
The last 10 years
| Year | Wins | Losses | RS | RA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 9 | 10 | 80 | 85 |
| 2015 | 9 | 10 | 68 | 80 |
| 2016 | 7 | 12 | 80 | 101 |
| 2017 | 10 | 9 | 103 | 98 |
| 2018 | 7 | 12 | 78 | 92 |
| 2019 | 12 | 6 | 113 | 86 |
| 2020 | 9 | 1 | 70 | 28 |
| 2021 | 9 | 10 | 72 | 71 |
| 2022 | 9 | 10 | 74 | 71 |
| 2023 | 6 | 7 | 55 | 73 |
| Total | 87 | 87 | 793 | 785 |
The games
- May 8: Royals 12, White Sox 5
- May 9: White Sox 4, Royals 2
- May 10: Royals 9, White Sox 1
- May 11: Royals 4, White Sox 3
- May 19: White Sox 2, Royals 0
- May 20: White Sox 5, Royals 1
- May 21: White Sox 5, Royals 2
- Sept. 4: Royals 12, White Sox 1
- Sept. 5: Royals 7, White Sox 6
- Sept. 6: White Sox 6, Royals 4
- Sept. 12: White Sox 6, Royals 2
- Sept. 13: Royals 11, White Sox 10
- Sept. 14: Royals 7, White Sox 1
Defining Hitters
Andrew Vaughn: The White Sox hit just .242/.288/.372 against the Royals, and their .660 OPS was the worst of any team to see the Royals at least twice. At least Vaughn understood the assignment. He hit .348/.388/.630 for his highest slugging percentage against any opponent near sea level, with three homers and four doubles out of his 16 hits.
Tim Anderson: He went just 7-for-36 against the Royals with no extra-base hits and two walks, which was symptomatic of his entire season. He'd generally excelled at giving the Royals a taste of their own BABIP-related medicine, hitting .312/.349/.454 over 92 games since the start of the 2019 season, but he had nothing for them, or anybody, this year.
Classy Michael Massey: The Royals outhomered the Sox 18-11, which is something that shouldn't happen. Massey played a big part in that. He hit .300 against the White Sox over 11 games, but he slugged .800 on the strength of six homers.
Salvador Perez: He was neither good nor bad against the Sox this year, hitting .279/.298/.419 with home homer, one walk and 12 strikeouts over 11 games. That seems like a profile the Sox should steer away from given their difficulty defending the strike zone, but the Sox keep adding former Royals to their decision-making ranks, so everybody is bracing for the inevitability.
Defining Pitchers
Michael Kopech: The Andrew Vaughn of pitchers, Kopech threw his best start of the season against the Royals, facing the minimum and striking out 10 over eight scoreless, one-hit innings. He allowed more baserunners in his two-thirds of an inning on Sept. 12, in which he threw just 10 of 20 pitches for strikes.
Dylan Cease: The Royals do a good job of summing up Cease's difficulties in repeating his Cy Young runner-up campaign. In 2022, he struck out 26 batters against just 20 baserunners over 17 ⅔ innings. A year later, Cease gave up 21 hits alone over 15⅔ innings. He only issued four walks, but his strikes were so much more hittable.
Jordan Lyles: Lyles went 0-3 in four starts with a 6.66 ERA, but he somehow pitched 24⅓ innings, which is a perfect distillation of his season. He should've been able to pick up a win in the no-decision, but that's the game where the Royals blew a 9-0 lead and won 11-10. Sometimes the offense arrived early, sometimes it arrived late, but the White Sox always managed to do enough to prevent him from leaving with a victory.
Cole Ragans: The White Sox had enough difficulty hitting the Royals' decidedly mediocre pitchers like Brad Keller, Jackson Kowar and end-of-the-line Zack Greinke, so when Cole Ragans showed up and threw six innings of one-hit ball, it laid bare how much worse it could get for the White Sox if Kansas City actually developed good arms.
Defining characteristics
Quick games: The average White Sox game took 2 hours and 41 minutes to complete, but 11 of their 13 games against the Royals came in under that mark. It makes sense, considering how often the games only featured one functioning offense.
Dumb things: Neither team covered themselves in glory over the course of 13 games, which you'd expect from two teams that combined to lose 207 games. The Royals lost a 9-0 lead, while the White Sox lost a game on a walk-off balk. Those sorts of dumb things.
Unimpressive managers: The White Sox and the Royals were the last two teams to fill their managerial vacancies, and both hired managers who could've very well ended up with the other team. The White Sox hired Grifol away from the Royals, while Kansas City hired the archetype many White Sox fans considered ideal in Matt Quatraro, who was formerly Tampa Bay's bench coach. Grifol definitely came off as more of a stiff, but that might be due to higher expectations. Plus, Grifol had a previous Rays bench coach as his bench coach, and a fat lot of good that did anybody.
