Back on Opening Day, I forced everybody here to look at how a White Sox team with 13 Chris Getzes playing all the non-pitching positions would fare during the 2024 season. There wasn't really a point besides pointing out Pedro Grifol's proclivity for unctuous overstatement, and I wanted to see what he ran the risk of requesting when he said his whole team should play like his boss, who has since fired him.
The simulations, all run on Out of the Park Baseball 25, yielded an average of 33 wins because a team with Getzes for catchers routinely allowed more than 200 stolen bases and 250 passed balls. When I replaced them with Martín Maldonado and Korey Lee to resemble something a little closer to real baseball, the 11-Getz White Sox went 50-112.
What I considered a goofy way to figure out the worst possible scenario turned out to be nine wins better than what the 2024 White Sox actually accomplished, and it's entirely on the offense. The 11-Getz roster produced 557 runs, which struck me as implausibly low because they managed just 41 home runs in 162 games. And indeed, the actual White Sox ended up lapping their simulated peers twice, finishing with 133 homers.
And yet the actual White Sox scored just 507 runs, the lowest total by any team in a full season since the 1971 Padres, who did not benefit from the DH.
With some distance from the wreckage, it's worth using any regained sensation to take another run at comprehending what we just witnessed.
Besides the laughable lack of power, another reason why the 11-Getz output of 557 runs seemed implausible was the idea that the previous season provided its own sensible range of "bad" to "worst." In 2023, we watched a miserable White Sox offense score 641 runs, finishing 14th out of 15 American League teams. They were thoroughly unproductive, sunk by a number of 10th-percentile outcomes, and yet they still finished comfortably ahead of the 50-win Oakland Athletics, who scored 585 runs while openly tanking and playing half of their games in a pitcher-friendly ballpark.
If you told me that the White Sox offense would be way worse in 2024, 585 runs would qualify as such, right? Cynicism was not hard to find this time last year, and still a more dire potential scenario was hard to conjure.
In fairness, that scale wouldn't account for a leaguewide drop in offense. The average AL team scored just 4.27 runs in 2024, down from 4.55 in 2023. Take what was thought to be a worst-case total of 585 runs and cut it by 6 percent to match the leaguewide trend, and that knocks it down to 549.
(I even checked to make sure the putridity of the 2024 White Sox didn't skew the leaguewide numbers, and they only played a small part. The season-to-season decline when including every team is 6.2 percent. Count only the top 14 offenses from each year, and it's 5.9 percent.)
In that context, 507 runs is slightly less extreme, but it's still difficult to comprehend. As previously mentioned, the White Sox hit 133 homers. Of the 17 other teams to score fewer than 515 runs in a modern-length season, none of them hit more than 107. That's a 26-run head start over the competition, and in the end, it was just another lead that they nearly blew, due to the second-worst OBP of the group (.278), and by far the most strikeouts. It was a rough year, in case you hadn't heard.
While the OOTP simulations couldn't fathom the fall of the offense, it did nail the general shape of it. Here was the WAR leaderboard among position players in the 50-win simulation:
| Rank | Simulation | Actual |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chris Getz, CF, 2.5 | Luis Robert Jr., CF, 1.4 |
| 2 | Chris Getz, 3B, 0.6 | Yoán Moncada, 3B, 0.3 |
| 3 | Chris Getz, IF, 0.2 | Paul DeJong, SS, 0.2 Nicky Lopez, 2B, 0.2 Andrew Vaughn, 1B, 0.2 Zach Remillard, UT, 0.2 |
And it also captured the fecklessness on both sides of the ball. It simulated the White Sox pitching staff giving up 879 runs, and while actual Sox pitchers also benefited from the friendlier environment by allowing considerably fewer runs than feared -- Josh lost a steak dinner bet over this, you may have heard -- on the whole, the simulated run differential with 11 Getzes (-322) wasn't all that far off from what the 2024 White Sox actually did (-306).
Just like the vote about whether to kill the guy who played Mr. Belvedere at the Guy Who Played Mr. Belvedere Fan Club meeting, it shouldn't have been that close. The whole point in simulating a season with 13 Chris Getz clones was to poke fun at Grifol's sycophancy, which both grated and eventually failed to secure sycophancy's traditional goals. Any bar that could possibly be set was supposed to be buried, but the White Sox didn't call JULIE before digging, and they blasted through water, sewer and gas lines before opening up a portal to hell.
Now that you've seen what's down there, it's hard to rule out ever seeing it again, no matter how unlikely it seems.
