Standings suggest everything has gone right for White Sox, which would be wrong

If a time traveler told you back in early March that the White Sox will be 12 games over .500 and 3½ games up in the AL Central on Memorial Day, the news would be pleasant, yet not a surprise.

If, an hour later, a different time traveler popped up and told you that Eloy Jiménez underwent surgery that cost him the entire first four months of the season, while Luis Robert suffered his own major tear at the end of April, you'd probably start retracing your actions over the previous 60 minutes to wonder what threw the previous timeline so drastically off course.

Yet those realities coexist, maybe not comfortably, but with staying power nevertheless. After a sweep in Yankee Stadium sent the White Sox into their first three-game losing streak of the season, they responded by winning six of their next seven, including two of three against the first-place Cardinals. The offense runs hot and cold, but the starting pitching seldom sputters, and any Cleveland fan will tell you how that can paper over a lineup with some bald spots.

This display of resiliency is what allows a White Sox fan to look at Baseball Prospectus' new injury ledger with a sense of pride, rather than with great apprehension. By league standards, the White Sox sneak into the top third for the fewest games missed (311, which ranks 10th). They're doing even better when it comes the projected production they've lost. BP says the White Sox are missing just 0.915 WARP this season, the sixth-lowest total in the league.

But in the context of the division, the White Sox are jostling with the Twins in the cellar of an AL Central that's healthier than the rest.

The White Sox's missing WARP seems low when considering the team has lacked what PECOTA labeled their second- and fourth-most valuable position players, and for weeks now. Then again, PECOTA was already generally pessimistic about the White Sox, and with Jiménez's abysmal defense and Robert's concerning strikeout numbers, their early-career ceilings required them to prove the algorithms wrong. Robert's first 25 games foreshadowed an ability to do so, so you're not wrong if you think the White Sox have lost more than the numbers reflect.

(Conversely, if the White Sox are 12 games over .500 with Andrew Vaughn in left instead of Jiménez, perhaps that's an example of how ugly defensive projections can materialize in actual results.)

Regardless of whether you use PECOTA projections or a RealFeel approach to projecting lost WAR(P), there are ultimately two ways to parse the data. Glass half full, you might shrug off a White Sox outfield that's only hitting .209/.293/.380 in May, eeven though that's bottom-10 production. When Jiménez and Robert are injured and Adam Eaton is playing hurt, what can you do besides exercise patience? Meanwhile, Cleveland's first basemen are hitting .177/.249/.256, and that's with everybody healthy. The White Sox are in a position to receive a surge of talent during the second half of the season, as long as they don't bank on smooth rehabilitation periods. If they can maintain this lead in the Central until then, we're talking serious dreaming fuel.

Glass half empty, the White Sox don't have as much production to spare from here on out. That theory will be tested with Michael Kopech moving from the bereavement list to the injured list with a strained right hamstring.

That's another injury that won't affect the White Sox's projections, because Kopech's two-year absence gave him a wildly wide array of outcomes that made a systematic approach to evaluating him kind of impossible. As we saw, Kopech excelled in a role that developed organically and seemed to benefit everybody, so it'll hurt more than algorithms say. That kind of flex pitcher can be a luxury to temporarily go without, just as long as the White Sox's five other starters remain secure in their sterilized bubble. Protect them at all costs.

(Photo by David Banks / USA TODAY Sports)