Great mirages in recent White Sox spring training history

On March 12 last spring, Oscar Colás was hitting .400/.419/.633 in Cactus League play. By that day, probably the entire White Sox beat had written up at least one article per person about the glory of a young player being tasked to win a roster spot in spring and responding in kind.

He went 5-for-36 with a walk for the rest of spring, and then went and had the 2023 season alongside the rest of the Chicago White Sox.

Approach any member of the Sox Machine community in the quiet repose of their study and they will readily admit that spring training performance is deeply unreliable. The competition is mixed in quality. The opposing attack plans are vanilla. It is long enough for the evidence behind even a reserved statement like “well, he looks locked in right now” to have ebbed away by season’s start. Is Mark Payton going 4-for-11 with a homer and a double evidence of a José Bautista-esque late-career breakout? Most would hesitate for at least a beat.

But we are humans. Our brains seek to recognize patterns in all we observe, even if what we’re observing is Yoán Moncada facing an A-ball pitcher (and maybe bunting for a base hit?). We’re all here because we believe we can understand this game if we put the work in, and that approach is not conducive to admitting that we don’t know ball well enough to actually discern what’s happening in spring training.

Maybe remembering all the times we've been horribly misled would be informative?

2023: Is Hanser Alberto a god?

We all intellectually understand that a veteran contact hitter can find a bunch of grass over 40 at-bats. But Alberto instead led the team with nine extra-base hits in 16 games, forcing Leury García out to pasture in the process. He would manage 10 more XBH in a White Sox uniform before getting released at the start of June, but not before he kinda sorta had a not-insignificant role in the play that marked the end of Tim Anderson's run as an effective core member of the team.

Here's a more challenging case: Reynaldo López was excellent out of the bullpen in the second half of 2022. A dominant spring where he allowed two runs and seven total baserunners in 9⅓ innings seemingly affirmed that Pedro Grifol was probably doing the right thing by anointing López as his top dog out of the bullpen.

Several blows to the head later, López had four blown saves and six homers allowed in his first 15 appearances. He wound up being the first example Grifol’s 2023 approach of sticking with embattled veterans until neighbors started calling about the smell, and maybe the most haunting part of it all is that by mid-May they had the issue effectively licked. An early front side dip in López’s delivery was flattening out his heater, and leading to a proliferation of the “please kill me” fastballs that ran arm side back over the heart of the plate. 

After addressing the matter, López posted a 1.88 ERA with just two homers allowed over his last 53 appearances on the year. Was he getting away with mediocre heaters in spring, or as often happens with relievers, did a mechanical issue sneak in quietly and then waylay him for a month of the season without warning? Neither scenario speaks well of our ability to assess this group of players in Cactus League, most of whom we have not watched develop for six seasons prior.

2022: Micker Adolfo belongs on this roster!

The other side of the coin to contact hitters BABIP’n themselves to Cactus League supremacy is power hitters with completely disqualifying contact issues can hit a handful of missiles through the Arizona air and look like world-beaters.

With the qualifier that Micker Adolfo is an extremely pleasant person with power that is electrifying to witness first-hand, the media member who insisted Adolfo was going to earn himself a roster spot by going 10-for-23 in spring – with nine punchouts – knows who they are! (Because we still bicker about it endlessly.)

Adolfo cleared waivers at the end of spring, had a poor year at Triple-A Charlotte and has not been in affiliated ball since. He had a strong indy ball campaign last year that hopefully helps keep him in the sport. But his major league dreams are battling against pitch recognition issues that were greater than a couple hot weeks in Glendale could dispel.

This was also the same spring in which the Craig Kimbrel trade and Garrett Crochet's Tommy John surgery were announced on the same day, and "left-hander who looks OK in camp" swiftly became a must-roster player. Bennett Sousa allowed two homers (but somehow only allowed one earned run?) in Cactus League action, but posted a 10-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio and became that guy. He too was done with the Sox major league roster for good by June and has been part of four different organizations since.

On the one hand, if he pitched better, Sousa would probably move around less. But his travels also speak to the fact that he throws high-80s sliders from the left side and a lot of teams see the raw ingredients and envision a scenario where he could be impactful. If you're scanning Cactus League action to fill out the roster, you're subject to seeing these sort of guys during a hot month of command and becoming filled with grander ideas.

2021: Let me explain this tweet

I had been hearing from scouts for a bit that Paulino was a nice little get for an August waiver trade for Luis Avilán, with the premise that pretty much anything would be a good get in an August trade for Avilán. But those voices were only getting louder as Paulino carved for 5⅓ whole innings in big league camp in 2021 and earned himself a spot in the Triple-A rotation to start the year.

You would think a strong spring and placement on the doorstep on the majors would be fertile grounds for a very tepid prediction, and you would be wrong, and possibly the wrongest you've ever been in your professional career.

This was the same spring where Evan Marshall dominated so much in Cactus League that he later blamed it for throwing him off his game and delivery mechanics, and Codi Heuer looked primed to follow up on a dominant rookie season, only to have hitters slug .566 against his fastball once the games started to count.

2020: Obviously this was not a normal spring

There were a lot of reasons why the 2020 regular season results did not align with how players looked in March prior to the outbreak of a global pandemic. In the last game before the literal sport got shutdown, Michael Kopech threw a scoreless inning where he was sitting a cool 100 mph. For safety precautions, he was interviewed outside the clubhouse after his performance near a loading dock, where we also talked to Nick Madrigal about the ground ball that had hit him in the face.

But even with all these qualifiers, Zack Collins hit .364/.548/.682 with more walks than strikeouts, serving as fuel for plenty of consternation when he was never really deployed as a DH option later in the year. Carson Fulmer, in the year after the spring where his offseason trip to Driveline was a big story, led the team in strikeouts while posting a 2.61 ERA in eight relief appearances.

Cheslor Cuthbert led the team in hits, and also in fielding errors. Cuthbert was just dominating the action at all times. Ask me what I spent most of my final days thinking about before COVID changed the world forever, and I would be dishonest if I said anything other than Cheslor Cuthbert. He popped out to short in his only major league plate appearance that season.

2019: Lucas Giolito defines the genre

One season after having a dominant spring and declaring that he was more confident in his stuff than he had ever been, only to become the WORST PITCHER IN BASEBALL, Giolito completed the circle in 2019. He arrived in camp with clearly and dramatically altered mechanics, and possibly worse results than ever.

Giolito's 8.84 spring ERA was marked by six home runs allowed in 18⅓ innings. One of those bombs was launched by a very young Alek Thomas, in his first spring after being drafted out of Mount Carmel the previous summer. Having gotten to know Lucas decently well over the last few years, I do not believe that being asked about Thomas' viral exchange with his father Allen in the Sox dugout was Giolito's favorite media interaction of his career.

Giolito would go on to receive Cy Young votes for each of the next three seasons. Sometimes they are just working on stuff.

In this same spring we got the other popular standards of Contact Hitter BABIP'n (Leury García batted .431), Fringe Reliever Shoving (Ryan Burr had 17 K, 0 BB in 11⅓ innings), and however you want to describe Yonder Alonso slamming five Cactus League homers before slugging .301 in the regular season and getting designated for assignment at the end of June, in what wound up being the final season of his career.

2018: Adam Engel changed his stance!

Engel has 13 career Cactus League home runs in less than 300 trips to the plate, so maybe he simply enjoys the splendor of the Valley of the Sun. But never was he more potent than slashing .383/.453/.702 in the 2018 spring as Rick Renteria floated him as a potential leadoff hitter. Yes, this team wound up losing 100 games

Our breathless coverage of Engel's altered stance and new leg kick did not age well, as he mildly improved to a .235/.279/.336 batting line for the following season. But it at least tempered coverage of his future and frequent mechanical changes, only for him to briefly bloom as an effective role player when the tinkering halted. But time has proven this to be only an Engel-specific evolution in baseball coverage.

Matt Davidson hit .328/.411/.594 this same spring, which looked real as he touted some of the most improved plate discipline in the game for the first two months of the season. It ebbed away a bit over the final four months, his level of in-zone swing-and-miss took center stage as a problem of its own, and Davidson was non-tendered at the end of the year. If only he had pitched some during the spring.

2017: Jacob May won the center field job

Had Engel's big transformation come a year earlier, it might have allowed him to win the opening day center fielder job in a race that was otherwise defined by post-hype prospect Jacob May duking it out with veteran non-roster invite Peter Bourjos. Giving May room to prove himself was more in keeping with the goals of the 2017 team, so when he slashed his way to a .319/.338/.478 line (while walking twice and whiffing 15 times), the Sox dealt Bourjos to Tampa at the end of spring.

In barely half the plate appearances he received in Arizona, May went 2-for-36 in the majors before the Sox pulled the plug. May never earned another shot, and a less-than-ready Engel wound up soaking up the bulk of the remaining playing time. One could argue that May's 2016 Triple-A showing could have predicted these results, and maybe a strong Cactus League shouldn't have carried so much weight. Then again, a ton of at-bats for a 30-year-old Bourjos on a team that lost 96 games while trading absolutely everyone might have only accomplished but so much. Will we feel similarly at the end of this coming season about some the races we're debating right now? Almost undoubtedly.

Tyler Saladino hitting .365/.431/.692 also stands out, but bursts of power production when his back wasn't besieging him with pain was sort of the Saladino story around this time. Brian Clark was probably the most effective reliever in Sox camp this year, and I had to click through and look at a few pictures before remembering who he was. Hope he's doing well.

Why did we spend 2,000 words re-living misleading White Sox spring performances?

For the same reason we watch spring baseball at all: to pretend to learn something when the real goal is just to pass the time.