White Sox fans who watched a basic-but-welcome webcast on the Texas Rangers' site got to witness a 14-3 thrashing suffered at the hands of the defending World Series champs, and the game wasn't even that close. The Rangers led 14-0 before Mark Payton took it upon himself to rip a solo shot and a two-run double in consecutive innings to give the score a "Bears first half" feel.
Yet it wasn't all bad, because Dylan Cease and Nick Nastrini bookended the game with two scoreless innings apiece. Prelander Berroa gave up the cycle and six runs over two-thirds of an inning, and Bryan Shaw opened a portal to hell in his second inning of work. Remove those innings, and the White Sox would've won, or at least lost in a sleepier fashion to which people are accustomed.
As it stands, however, the White Sox are 3-7 with the worst run differential in the Cactus league, which makes it a little hard to buy what Cease tried to sell:
“I’m really excited for this rotation,” said Cease outside the White Sox clubhouse at Surprise Stadium. “I think a lot of people are sleeping on us.
“You see the way the ball is coming out of Michael [Kopech]’s hand right now. Garrett [Crochet] is nasty. [Erick] Fedde is super nasty, he locates well. I think this team has a ton of potential and I think we’re being slept on, for sure.”
So, it’s not just the five starters, but the entire White Sox team deserving attention in Cease’s mind?
“For sure,” Cease added.
Today's game against the Angels will be on MLB.TV, and re-aired at 11 p.m. CT on MLB Network in the event it's worth watching. In the meantime, here are a bunch of articles I'dd bookmarked for sharing over the past week.
Spare Parts
While most teams, including the White Sox, are playing with comically small names on the backs of their jerseys, the Royals and a few other teams have larger lettering. In Kansas City's case, the Royals "essentially got a waiver because the lobbied hard for it." This is maybe the one way the Sox can emulate the Royals to everybody's delight.
Ben Clemens assesses the league's deepest teams by examining win projections when their three best players are removed. Most of the teams at the bottom of the standings aren't particularly affected by this exercise because they're already bad, and it's hard to get meaningfully worse. The White Sox are built different:
In terms of broad conclusions, the teams least affected by dropping their 10 best players are largely the ones that are already bad. The Rockies, Athletics, Nationals, and Royals are all in the top 10 of least-affected teams, and they sport four of our five lowest projected winning percentages at full strength. Pity the poor White Sox, who have so little depth that they managed to get quite a bit worse even starting from such a low floor.
The White Sox preview from Baseball Prospectus is mostly a roast, because when writers who don't spend much time thinking about the White Sox get a load of all the bad decisions they've made, they can't help but tear into them anew.
Since taking over as White Sox GM, Chris Getz hasn't yet put his stamp on the roster, but he's left his mark with non-player hires, including the White Sox's first mental performance coach, as well as a full-time dietitian. The counterpoint is that the White Sox should've made such hires years ago, but I'm more interested in evidence that the bottleneck at the top of the team's decision-making chart has loosened.
Kris Bryant's seven-year, $182 million contract with the Rockies is among the game's strangest deals, mostly because nobody thought the Rockies were in a position to make use of his early years, so what would happen when decline set in? After two injury-marred seasons, it's looking even uglier than most imagined. As for his part in the decision, Bryant gave a pretty memorable quote: "I guess I didn't do as much research into the prospects as I could."
