KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- There's no easy way to tell major league hitters anything about staying the course that they haven't heard before. But White Sox hitting coach Marcus Thames still felt he needed to add his words to the quiet visitors clubhouse.
"I told the guys today just having good ABs, quality at-bats, trusting the guy next to you," Thames told me this weekend. "If we continue to do that, your numbers are going to be where they're supposed to be."
Thames wants his plans for hitters to be individualized, acknowledging the spectrum of routines between guys who want to take high-velocity machine reps from the iPitch machine, and batters who just want to know what the opposing starter throws and to hit flips to get loose. But he figures the best way to make it clear that something is important to the organization is to repeat it, so the mission statement about controlling the zone gets reiterated.
"We've got to get these guys to trust in their abilities," Thames said. "It's just making sure these guys understand how good they are. Keeping the main thing the main thing, and that's to go out and compete and trust themselves."
And in previous iterations of poor White Sox offenses, chase rate has been a good catch-all statistic to track their woes. They swung at pitches out of the zone more than anyone in baseball, and struggled to generate baserunners or find opportunities for hard contact as a direct result. Pedro Grifol arrived in Chicago in October of 2022 harping on the issue religiously, only to see it--if anything--worsen in his first season.
It's too soon to know if it means anything that the Sox entered Sunday as suddenly the 10th-best team in the majors at controlling chases so far per Statcast, and it's too hard to take any heart in it when the 16 total runs the offense has scored is the least through nine games of any White Sox team since the mound was lowered after 1968. That 1968 Sox team started 0-10, but finished 67-95, and such a rally would be welcome at this point.
"We have to find a way and find it quick and settle in to who we are," said Pedro Grifol. "[Chase rate is] part of it. That’s an area we targeted to improve. We’re better, but the flip side is we’re not chasing as much, we’re getting pitches in the zone, we’re just not hitting to where we’re supposed to."
"We are 1-7," Yoán Moncada said via interpreter before Sunday afternoon's game made it 1-8. "Two of our best players are out now. It has been difficult, but we can’t put our heads down. We have to keep our head up and try to battle and do whatever we can to make this team get going."
The White Sox offense looked short on weapons to a disqualifying degree before Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert Jr. hit the injured list simultaneously by the third series of the season. A potentially noisy element of looking at their chase rate this year is the Sox are shorter than ever on hitters whose game-changing power needs be coaxed out of the zone to be avoided. They also entered Sunday having seen the lowest rate pitches in the zone per Statcast, yet their walk rate (7.8 percent) has yet to see dramatic proceeds.
Even acknowledging the absences of Jiménez and Robert, the team's rare sources of potential star-level offensive production, tilting their start from poor to historically bad is that their veteran holdovers have not provided consistency. Neither Andrew Vaughn nor Andrew Benintendi have an extra-base hit and both entered Sunday looking as out of sorts as they've ever been seen in White Sox uniforms. The slow start bumped the latter from the leadoff spot in favor of Robbie Grossman ahead the series finale in Kansas City, and contributing a walk, a run, an RBI and two hits, but striking out twice with runners at third offered a sort of mixed bag for Benintendi operating in more of an RBI-focused role.
Even Yoán Moncada's generally successful efforts to remain productive (.792 OPS) while feeling his way into the season have not resembled a hot streak capable of carrying a team.
"I’m not in sync with my offense, but I’m heading toward that," Moncada said via interpreter.
"Our expectations have to stay the same," said Gavin Sheets, a rare early offensive bright spot (6-for-18, 3 XBH). "Show up ready to win, expecting to win, not expecting for things to go haywire if we have the lead or for things to go wrong. Even if it's early and it's not the start we wanted, we've got to be able to go out there early and expect to win."
But the expectations of how the White Sox will win also is currently looking like it might require some calibration. Their defensive personnel is improved, but they have not become magically mistake-proof, with teams challenging them on the basepaths regularly out of habit and three errors marking Sunday's blown 3-0 lead.
For all the emphasis on becoming a more athletic club that runs the bases better, FanGraphs rates their baserunning as a team as well below average so far. The injured Robert and utilityman Braden Shewmake share the team lead with one stolen base apiece, while Nicky Lopez is leading all of baseball with four times caught stealing. Your mileage may vary on whether there being a couple blown hit-and-runs mixed into that last figure is encouraging or not.
"That’s part of our game as a whole, being who we are," said Dominic Fletcher, who went 2-for-4 with a double in his best game of the season Sunday. "I think we are going to try to move runners, try to hit and run, get guys over. Do different things to try to get the offense going."
All those expectations were grounded in the idea that even if their offensive talent made contending very improbable, this White Sox team was going to define themselves by execution, and be the sort of situationally opportunistic outfit that had previously been their kryptonite. And the Sox have been defined by their execution: a 5-for-48 batting line with runners in scoring position that is the worst in the sport by every metric--especially total at-bats.
They have created a paltry number of scoring opportunities and then spurned them at an alarming rate.
"A little bit of pressing, we expanded a little bit in those types of situations," Grifol said. "Everybody wants to win here and the more we put ourselves in a position to win and we get runners out there in scoring position, we’re pressing a little bit. It will slow down and these guys will settle in and be who they are. I keep saying that, sound like a broken record. I don’t like saying it after losses like that, but it’s true."
Another thing Grifol has grown tired of repeating is that it's early in the season, noting that "I don't even believe in that shit." What the Sox manager does believe in is that the psychic weight of a slow start weighs heavier than an awful nine-game stretch in the middle of the season. What some players might be coming around to is that, well, maybe it should.
"Going up into the Braves series, we had some tough one-run losses," said Garrett Crochet, who is carrying a 2.00 ERA through three starts. "That was disheartening but we knew we were playing good ball. But now at the end of the day, I think the guys are starting to realize we are not playing good enough ball and I think that guys are starting to get pissed.
"I think we need to turn the corner soon. Everybody has some evaluating to do, myself included. Today, going into the fifth, it was my second opportunity for a shutdown inning and I just let the guys down. If everybody kind of pulls together and can look introspectively, we’ll be able to get out of this. But we need to turn it on soon."
Things will only get more challenging from here. The White Sox haven't even hit a particularly tough part of their schedule yet, and will rely on at least one call-up starter next week in Cleveland. If getting pissed is a game-changer, it's surely one thing the extended White Sox universe has in surplus.
"Getting pissed shows passion, and I think that at the end of the day, this is a game you have to play with passion," Crochet said. "It’s a long season so you have to fun with your teammates, you have to play the game hard. Getting pissed is normally the turning point for me."
