The White Sox return home after a winless seven-game road trip, but it's not exactly sweet. Fans who possess tickets are back in the unenviable position of deciding what to do with them, and once the game starts, the White Sox are required to pitch all nine innings.
Weather aside, there's no escape. It's in the rulebook and everything, at the top of Section 5 (Playing the Game):
5.01 Starting the Game (“Play Ball!”)
(a) At the time set for beginning the game the players of the home team shall take their defensive positions, the first batter of the visiting team shall take his position in the batter’s box, the umpire-in-chief shall call “Play,” and the game shall start.
I was hoping it'd be more vague, because it wasn't always a rule. The home team had the choice of batting first or second through 1949, and although a fantastic SABR Journal entry by Gary Belleville says the wisdom of batting second had largely been accepted in the early 1900s, teams had stopped choosing the opposite tack by the start of World War I, and specific to our interests, the White Sox always chose to bat second. It wasn't until 1950, under the commissionership of Happy Chandler, when Rule 26 ("The choice of innings shall be given to the manager or captain of the home team") was replaced by Rule 5.01 cited above.
Which is a shame, because while the White Sox are 1-13 on the road, they've only had to pitch eight innings in 11 of those games. The exceptions are their one victory, and their two walk-off losses, including one that took 10 innings to complete.
Obviously the games are shorter when the White Sox don't have to pitch the ninth inning because there are three outs missing, and the early averages bear that out:
- Road losses: 2 hours, 29 minutes
- Nine-inning games: 2 hours, 37 minutes
But it's not so much the extra eight minutes that prolong the agony as much as it's the extra half-pitcher that extra half-inning requires:
- Road losses: 4.3 White Sox pitchers used
- Nine-inning games: 4.77 White Sox pitchers used
That's a more detectable disparity. If you round to the nearest integer, it's the difference between a quality start and a game where that manager has to extend the leverage ladder. Over the course of an 0-7 road trip like the White Sox just endured, it's a difference of three or four additional relief appearances that nobody's dying to see.
What would that look like over the remainder of the season? It's hard to say, mostly because it's useless extrapolating the White Sox's current performance. They're on a pace to win 19 games, after all.
Fortunately, two esteemed analysts have run regression models recently, so we don't have to make up a win total out of thin air. Dan Szymborski says ZiPS now projects the White Sox to match my preseason prediction of 54-108, while Tom Tango's Naive Bayes methods has the White Sox ending up at 60-102. Or had. The White Sox went 0-3 since Tango's projection, so we'll use the more recent ZiPS figure.
Take those 54 wins and attribute 53 percent of them to home-field advantage, and you get 29 home wins and 25 road wins. Under standard MLB rules, the White Sox would be limited to pitching eight innings in 56 games.
- Nine-inning games: 506 appearances
- Eight-inning games: 240 appearances
- Total: 746 games pitched
But let's say Chris Getz, who never stops improving upon his plan to get 2024 White Sox games over as quickly as possible, successfully petitions Major League Baseball to allow the White Sox to bat first at home. The distribution of games pitched during that 54-108 season would then look like this:
- Nine-inning games: 258 appearances
- Eight-inning games: 464 appearances
- Total: 722 games pitched
The difference only comes down to one appearance a week, but that's assuming that the strategies remained consistent. In a world where nearly every loss only required the White Sox to pitch eight innings, more relievers might throw two-inning outings, knowing there's less chance of being required to contribute in the event of a short start the next day. Likewise, a struggling starter might get one extra chance to stick if the team knew that a dud outing effectively shortened the game for the bullpen all the same.
(For example, Chris Flexen gave up six runs over 2⅔ innings back on April 12, but if the White Sox batted first, it would've felt like 3⅔ innings instead, because he would've left 16 outs for the bullpen regardless.)
While Rule 5.01 seems impossible to argue against as written, there might be a loophole if the Sox can expand how sites are determined. From the rulebook's definition of terms:
The HOME TEAM is the team on whose grounds the game is played, or if the game is played on neutral grounds, the home team shall be designated by mutual agreement.
While Guaranteed Rate Field is technically the home of the Chicago White Sox, the expected drop in attendance could create an environment that feels far closer to 50/50, especially if the alleged road team's fan base travels well. If I'm Getz and I can save my manager -- whoever that is -- a couple dozen extra calls to the bullpen, this might be a case worth making.
The only drawback to this plan is that White Sox would never hold the advantage in extra innings, nor would their fans get to enjoy a walk-off victory over the course of the 2024 schedule. Then again, the White Sox haven't had a winning record in extras in any season under the zombie runner rules, and based on the results over the last few weeks, any kind of win would deserve a storming of the field and Gatorade bath. In the more likely event of a loss, everybody gets eight minutes of their life back. Besides the forfeiture of dignity required to rewrite the rulebook to accommodate a potentially historic brand of ineptitude, it's hard to think of a downside.
