There are only three teams worse than the Chicago White Sox this year. At least one of them is a 100-loss team in the making. Does than mean the White Sox are as well? And if they are, wouldn't that be tragic considering that we were just talking about them as a titan of the AL Central?
Stories have come out recently about the murky team culture in Chicago, about how Pedro Grifol is terrible at unifying the team and that it's basically every man for themselves. There's no real team groupthink, everybody's on different pages, which is why we have so many tanking position players. Then you have the whole Tim Anderson stuff, which...as heartbreaking as it is to see the Sox' star fall, it's even more heartbreaking to see Anderson's, cause he was a league talent for a while. Last year I figured was a down year, but he's gone from a contact hitting phenom to hitting .238 with only 21 RBIs in 95 games. It is the first time that Anderson has hit below .300 since before his 2019 breakout, and 2018 Anderson, at the very least, didn't try and start a fight with one of the best contact hitters in baseball.
Say what you will about the whole Ramirez-Anderson thing, Ramirez has remembered to hit over .275. No wonder his punch connected.
On top of all that, now that the smoke has cleared from the deadline, there's just not a ton going on with this team anymore. Luis Robert will probably be the one White Sox player to actually leave this season with something he can be proud of. Cease, Moncada, Grandal, Kopech and even Andrew Vaughn are all having comparative down seasons. Vaughn is second in RBIs on the Sox with 62, but he's only a .250 hitter, and is only okay on defense. In fact, lots of great hitters on this team, like Eloy Jimenez, Yasmani Grandal and Tim Anderson, are terrible on defense, and are dragging the team down. And there's a lot of veterans on this team, namely Grandal and Elvis Andrus, who are decent for a lark but are honestly cooked. I hate that somebody like Andrus seems so inconsequential, as he was a great pick-me-up for them last year.
You can at least see the germs of ideas the Sox could use going forward. They at least have Jesse Scholtens picking up the slack in the rotation, eating 6 innings per game and lowering his ERA to 3.20. Zach Remillard does look like a promising 2nd base replacement going forward [though, again, if they hadn't been so greedy a year or so ago they could still have Nick Madrigal at said position]. At the same time, Lenyn Sosa is back up, and he could be an infield choice going forward. And Gregory Santos might be the answer in the ninth going forward. This is all assuming there isn't an even bigger shakeup that finds some of these people leaving somehow, but...with the White Sox, you never know.
It will be interesting to see how the White Sox display the results of the long farm system roll out as they begin to figure out the new heirs apparent, or if they will, in fact, keep Luis Robert around after 2023 or just push for a full rebuild.
Coming Tomorrow- You think a guy is done being an MLB option for teams, then all of the sudden he's leading off for the Cubs.
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