The Chicago White Sox: Who's to Blame?

12 games back on September 22nd and mathematically eliminated from the postseason (thumb pointing downwards while making a loud farting noise). I’ve heard some White Sox fans say “Well, they made a good run…”. Really? “Made a good run”? Yes, they had a few pretty good streaks like when they won seven straight a few weeks ago and they went on the 25-5 tear and that’s admirable. But like all businesses, baseball is a bottom-line business and the Chicago White Sox did not get it done this year. Statistically, all around, they were better than last year, just not by much. The pitching stats are almost identical to last year.


STAT  2010 / 2009

ERA 4.06 / 4.14

SO 1,024 (season not yet over) / 1,119

WHIP 1.356 / 1.351

BB/9    3.1 / 3.2

K/9      7.1 / 7.0



Offensively, they were slightly better than last year, but certainly not substantially.


STAT 2010 / 2009

AVG. .269 / .258

OBP   .332 / .329

SLUG. .411 / .426

OPS    .759 / .740

OPS+   102 / 91

wOBA  .333 / .325

RUNS  702 / 724

SB    144 / 113


I’m showing avg. only because people are still just use to it being a foundation for batting statistics, but that is rapidly changing. On-base percentage (OBP) is far and away a much more valuable statistic. As you can see, the avg. for this year was .011 better than last year, but the OBP was only .003 higher. The object of baseball is to score more runs than the other team, whether it takes nine innings or not. How do you score runs you might ask? Why, by getting on base, of course! You’re killing me Smalls! (If you haven’t seen the movie Sandlot yet, you’re not American and you hate apple pie). Another side note, if you love baseball (and America) as much as I do, then you MUST read Moneyball by Michael Lewis. I’m going to try not to butcher the explanation, but in his research for his book Lewis found that the Oakland A’s organization devised a logarithm to show that OBP is three times more valuable than slugging, three times! That’s redonkeylous, but Lewis breaks it down further in verbal terms. Let’s say in any given inning, the leadoff man launches a homerun and starts out the team’s slugging percentage for that inning at 4.000, but then the next three batters make consecutive outs, dropping the SLUG% from 4.000, to 3.000 to 2.000 to 1.000 for the inning. 1.000 isn’t bad, right? Well, what would be the result if the OBP for an inning was 1.000? How many runs would be scored? The answer is…an infinite amount! The half inning would never end! Players would just keep getting on base, never making any outs. Don’t like my explanation? Me neither, read the book. And while you’re at it, check out all the saber metric statistics provided for free on fangraphs.com and baseball-reference.com since Baseball Prospectus charges for their work. I’ll get to the point soon I swear. Then your eyes fall upon the SB number and you say to yourself, wow, the White Sox have close to 30 more stolen bases this year than last year and are second in the AL. Well, they also have 22 more caught stealing that last year too and lead the AL. You may say that that’s natural considering the spike in attempts, which is true; however, throughout the body of work of an entire season, in order to have a positive run value for stolen bases a team has to have a success rate of at least 70%. The Sox are hovering around 67%, so in their entirety, the stolen bases have in fact run the Sox out of more scoring situations and innings and have been more detrimental to the team than helpful. As the table shows, the White Sox are just about on pace to score the same amount of points as last year, even with all of the extra stolen bases. Of course the OBP is nearly indistinguishable from last year, yet there’s many more stolen bases and they’re still on pace to score the same amount of runs…

The White Sox have only made the playoffs once since winning the World Series in 2005, and they had their asses handed to them by the Rays after winning game 163 against none other than this year’s Central Division Champs, the Twins. The White Sox went 5-13 against the Twinkies this year, and were 30-39 versus the division. The Twins were 40-29 within the Central. I said months ago in this blog and on sportstownchicago.com that the White Sox had to win the division, thru the division. The numbers above tell the story.

So who’s to blame for this failure of a season? Well, Ozzie’s little DH-by-committee experience did not work, nay, it failed miserably. Kenny allowed Ozzie to have too much input in who should be on the roster, unless it was Jerry who told Kenny to give Ozzie the lineup flexibility that he wanted. Ozzie and Kenny have been a pretty good tandem throughout the years, one saving the other’s behind and vice versa, but things are coming to a head. There was another blow up between the two in August. It probably had to do with Kenny telling Ozzie that he had about enough of his NL-style of on field managing and that he was going to get a slugger in the lineup to try to salvage the season, not to mention that it was going to be somebody who can protect MVP candidate Paul Konerko. It seemed like a pretty significant slap to Ozzie’s face, but if I was in Kenny’s position, I would have smacked him with the same force. I think Ozzie did a great job this year, especially with the bullpen. He didn’t over-manage as much as he has in the past and like I expected him to do again this year. Unfortunately, his season-plan was a monumental failure.

Some of the blame also lands on the players, especially on the starting pitching. Yes, they pitched similarly to last year, but the point was to pitch BETTER than last year. The first month and a half they were awful. Then they turned it on for about two months. Then the big games arrived in August and September and they were hot for a while, and then they were really hot, but only because they wet themselves. Danks pitched well in a big game, in 2008. Floyd has no-hit stuff, inconsistently. Peavy is still looking for his latissimus dorsi. Sweaty Freddie wasn’t as sweaty as a Freddie could be sweaty because when you pitch well below the league’s fastball average you need the corners otherwise you get pounded. Buehrle was Buehrle with a full belly from eating innings. Jackson was an excellent pickup who has now proven twice that he can pitch in the AL. Don’t even say it was a bad deal since trading away Hudson with his 1.65 ERA and 0.89 WHIP in the weak NL West. If you don’t like the move, you’re Matt Spiegel’s “out of town stupid”.

So, it’s Jerry’s fault, by default. It’s Kenny’s fault for not trusting his gut and playing to his sandlot of a ballpark and jamming his lineup full of base-clogging sluggers who get on base 41% of the time they step into a batter’s box (Jim Thome). It’s Ozzie’s fault for the awful execution of making the lineup and wanting Mark Kotsay to get way more at-bats than he deserved. It’s the players’ fault for not playing up to their ability and not staying healthy. It’s Joe West’s fault, because I said so and this is my blog.


Tape & Pinetar:

The Bears are 2-0 and will be 2-1 before midnight Central Standard time on Monday evening. The question is exactly how well will they play against the Packers in that loss.

The Bulls have a shot at obtaining Carmelo Anthony if they give up Noah. Do it, now.

The Blackhawks are 6-1 to repeat a Stanley Cup Championship, yet they are not the favorite to win as the Washington Capitals are 5-1. (The Penguins are also 6-1).

PREACH