Team Offense, Chicago White Sox

The 2018 series on team offense continues with the Chicago White Sox. The White Sox finished twenty third in the major leagues and twelfth in the American League in 2017 with 4.36 runs scored per game.

I am using RotoChamp as a source of default lineups. That Rick Renteria order is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):

Best lineup: 4.78
Probable lineup:4.67
Worst lineup: 4.50
Regressed lineup: 4.39

The first thing that struck me about the White Sox lineup is that the team should be better at hitting for power than getting on base, making them like the Orioles. The second thing is a lack of depth. There are really only three good hitters on the team going into the season; Jose Abreu, Avisail Garcia, and Yoan Moncada. True rookie Ryan Cordell could be better than that league average projection, but he is an old rookie. Adam Engel and Tim Anderson have some room to grow, but their minor league numbers don’t wow me, either.

Note the LAT puts Moncada, Garcia, Cordell, and Abreu together in the lineup. When a team lacks depth it’s best to put the better hitters together to generate as much offense as possible at the top of the order. I’d rather see Wellington Castillo batting second than Tim Anderson.

The good news is that the White Sox should generate more offense this season if things go well. They don’t have a lot of backup, however, if one of their top hitters goes down with an injury.

You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.

Help support this series and the LAT by donating to the Baseball Musings Pledge Drive.

Previous posts in this series:

March 18, 2018

Leave a Reply