This wretched White Sox offense wounds all it touches

It hasn't been "Better at the Ballpark" this season for the White Sox, nor for seemingly anyone tasked with getting through this miserable 2024 campaign. If only from tracking usage, the most popular slogan for this year's team is, "It's been tough."

"It is tough," said Nicky Lopez. "The type of player, especially that I am, not really a guy who can hit home runs, more of a team guy trying to get on base and move runners, it's tough when we're all struggling. It's tough when our year is like this and we're losing a lot. Baseball is an individual sport so to speak, but you never want to fall into that trap of just looking at your numbers."

"The one thing it's been tough to get these guys to realize is: Trust the guy next to you," said hitting coach Marcus Thames. "It's hard. Everybody wants to get the big hit. If you trust your teammate, things can happen. But when you're up there trying to hit a three-run homer when nobody's on base, that makes it tough."

From the way White Sox defenders have been crashing into each other recently, this effect is playing out elsewhere, but their league-worst offense is where you can most acutely see the shortcomings of individual pieces of a deficient roster conspiring to make an even more deficient whole. After Tuesday night's shutout loss, the Sox are averaging just 3.02 runs per game, the worst clip the league has seen since 1972.

The Sox hit for the least power (.118 ISO) in the game by a lot, reflective of the lack of talent, but they're not taking at-bats that would cajole the most -- or even the expected -- production out of what they have. It's not that jarring, since they've been at the very bottom of these categories in past seasons with clearly more talented groups, and is part of the reason White Sox brass don't see Thames' stewardship as the issue. However, Sox hitters take the second-fewest walks and swing at pitches out of the strike zone at the fourth-highest rate.

If hitting is contagious as it's so often said, where confidence and patient approaches encourage others to keep the chain moving, does a historic level of struggle not have the similar effect in the opposite direction?

"Yeah, you can definitely see that sometimes," said Andrew Vaughn, the team leader in hits. "We're all humans. We all want to go up there and get it done. Sometimes, the guy behind you picks you up. Sometimes, it doesn't happen. This game is hard and it's hard to hit."

The level of losing, professional embarrassment and public scorn that these White Sox players are experiencing, despite their most common misdeed being simply that they're miscast for their current roles, literally has no historical precedent. Especially with the way the baseball schedule demands a daily focus, rather than reflection on a franchise-wide, ownership-level failure that is already calcified, makes it likely that we won't see the most frank player quotes about how difficult it's been to be a part of this disaster until afterward.

But float the premise that almost everyone on this team has more talent than their 2024 numbers reflect, and there's plenty of agreement.

"Absolutely," said Gavin Sheets. "It's been a tough year for everybody. You can learn from it. Not just try to change it next year, but learn from it mentally, physically. It's a full season and a lot of guys have never played a full season in the big leagues, so learn from that side of it. Take the mental grind of what the season has been and try to bounce back from it next year."

That can sound like buttering up a group that was never expected to excel offensively. But take the 50th percentile PECOTA projections from before the season -- which already pegged the Sox to lose 96 games -- and try to spot the over-performers. Red indicates significant underachieving, bold signifies beating expectations, and they're sorted in descending order by plate appearances, so the lower down you find one, the less it means.

Relief prospect Jarold Rosario sure is cooking down in Winston-Salem (1.84 ERA over 14⅔ innings with a 38.2 percent strikeout rate since being acquired), so at least DeJong's solitary breakout was not in vain. Tommy Pham defied the aging curve slightly better than the model expected, but not enough to significantly impress other team's projection systems, and the umpteenth year of hoping Yoán Moncada could stay healthy still managed to have diminishing returns from previous ones.

Everyone else seems to have been sucked into this hole together.

"Everything's a lot more magnified when you're losing," Lopez said. "Numbers are magnified. People start pressing a little bit, people start trying to do too much, so to speak. People start trying to do stuff for their individual numbers, which is tough, but it's also human nature when you're not winning. When I was on the Braves when we were winning, no one really cared about their numbers, just how can we win a baseball game."

"Obviously, it's been a miserable season for me personally, but I think there's some positive things," said Andrew Benintendi, who is having a strong second half that he credits to a mechanical fix. "My view on it now is different from when I was a younger player. I would chase it more as a younger player. Now, you just got to let it come to you. Which is hard at times, too, because you want to do what you can."

The problem is the White Sox have a lot of young hitters trying to find themselves in a situation where everything feels broken, and if anything will be trying to introduce more and more important ones next year. From a development standpoint, this season doesn't matter, and the White Sox haven't significantly departed from a long-term view in player movement in some effort to avoid a historical stain on the franchise.

But the thing about precedent-smashing failure is that there's no real precedent for how difficult or harmful it will be on everyone that experiences it, even if everyone on the ground is trying their hardest to make the best of it.

"Just keeping upbeat, staying upbeat," said Thames of his approach. "We just had a hitter's meeting and I've got to keep doing it. That's all I know. I've always been that way and my job is to be in the box with those guys and hopefully they can finish this last month strong."