It turns out the White Sox pried the wrong left-handed hitter away from Cleveland.
While César Hernández slugged .299 for the White Sox during the regular season and .286 over 11 postseason plate appearances, Eddie Rosario can't be stopped. He's raked since joining Atlanta, and took it up a notch in the NLCS by winning the series' MVP award. He led the Braves over the Dodgers in six games by hitting .560/.607/1.040, going 14-for-25 with a double, a triple, three homers and nine RBIs. Those in Cleveland who saw Rosario disappoint are left scratching their heads.
Rosario probably wouldn't have been enough to reverse the Sox's fortunes against the Astros, who shook off a couple of rough performances and an injury to Lance McCullers Jr. to rally for a convincing victory over the Red Sox in six games, so both Houston and Atlanta enter the World Series playing their best baseball.
The two teams will get two days off before starting Game 1 in Houston. We'll see if Rick Hahn uses the 48 hours of downtime to provide his usual end-of-season address. Just about every team's GM has already done the same this month, providing a summary of what they saw during the (post)season, staffing changes, health updates and a few possible hints about a winter shopping list.
Instead, we've had to learn about White Sox injuries in dribs and drabs, like Evan Marshall's Tommy John surgery via James Fegan ...
... and Yasmani Grandal's knee surgery straight from his Instagram account.
Like an umpire review, the longer we spend standing around, the less confident we can be of what's being discussed on the other side. The White Sox waited 10 days between the end of the 2020 season and the shocking decision to fire Rick Renteria, which retroactively justified the delay in having a conference. Today marks a dozen days since the offseason began, which makes it easier to think that some changes are in store.
SPARE PARTS
Jon Greenberg dug into each Chicago team's season-ticket pricing and notes the White Sox are raising prices, although they had lowered their ticket prices over the course of the previous decade commensurate with product quality and demand. He's expecting the Sox to make a big push at the gate in 2022, given that 2021 attendance looked pretty good when taking into account the restrictions for the first half.
The Sox had 40,000-plus crowds for their two home playoff games and they were regularly drawing crowds in the 35,000 range for weekend games once their capacity limits were eliminated. They finished with the 13th-highest attendance in baseball at 1,596,385. (The White Sox waited a couple of weeks longer than the Cubs to go full capacity because of their sales strategy for June games.)
Like the Cubs, the Sox were looking forward to an offseason of being able to sell group packages and an assortment of mini-plans, along with 81-game packages. Given the excitement around the team, and the likelihood of free-agent additions this winter, expect the Sox to make another big jump in attendance in 2022.
In his overview of the division, Dan Szymborski isn't a fan of the way the White Sox have handled Andrew Vaughn thus far.
Vaughn did a respectable job picking up the outfield on the fly and even briefly cosplayed as a second baseman and a third baseman. But while he showed a solid eye at the plate, as in A-ball, not a lot of power came out of it; he struggled to a .613 OPS in the second half, and righties dominated him with breaking stuff all season. In the end, Vaughn would have been better served at Triple-A, which already would have been a big leap; the White Sox didn’t get anything from him they couldn’t have gotten from any other random fourth outfielder on a one-year deal. [...]
The fundamental problem in right field didn’t go away, where they ended up getting a .227/.297/.374 line out of the position overall. They might be content to use Vaughn here next year, but I’d rather they be more ambitious and let him get time in Triple-A to learn how to leverage his pitch recognition abilities into professional power and escape the Ben Grieve Trap.
As Luis Robert's career appears set to take off into the stratosphere, Michael Ajeto suggests that it'd be cool if the White Sox could revisit the official pronunciation of his name. While it might not be possible for English speakers to nail the consonant sounds at the beginning or end of "Robert" -- I, for one, can't roll my R's despite repeated efforts -- getting the vowel sounds correct would be a good start.
In Cuba, they roll the R and the first syllable makes a “Roh” sound, while the second half makes a “burr” sound, while “eating” the T. Outside of Cuba, the first half is similar, with the second half making a “burt” sound. Either way, neither is consistent with the pronunciation that the team has instructed people to use.
I wouldn't rule out that Robert is comfortable enough with the anglicized version because our attempts at the real pronunciation might be just as grating to the ear, but it's worth knowing either way. (James Fegan said that he's been trying to get it right for years, and he's settled on "Roh-burrt" for now.)
And if Robert would prefer his surname being said truer to form, then it starts with the broadcast booths. We were well into Alexei Ramirez's career when we learned that he pronounced his name "Alice-A" instead of "uh-LECK-see," but in the end, Gene Honda was the only official voice that formed a new habit.
Daryl Van Schouwen surveys said voices of the White Sox to hear what they saw from the team, and what they're expecting to change in the offseason. Jason Benetti says his work on ESPN informs his perspective:
“Doing the Statcast shows I do for ESPN makes it difficult for me to watch ground balls offensively,” Benetti said. “The White Sox [third at 46.1%] were the only team in the top 12 in ground-ball percentage to make the playoffs this year. The slugging percentage in the league on ground balls is .266. Slugging the ball is really important.”
Three of the final four postseason teams were among the bottom four in ground-ball percentage. Tim Anderson’s ground-ball rate was 55%. Eloy Jimenez’s was 48%. Abreu (46%) hit into 28 double plays.
“That’s not sustainable over the long haul,” Benetti said.
Whenever I see some Twitter CHUD getting dunked on for stupid comments about the neighborhood around 35th and Shields, I'll click on his name and see that he's some out-of-towner with 13 followers. Then I'll wonder why this guy and his brain drippin's are being made available to me, because my experience on this planet is no better for having known it.
Ian Bogost picks up on this context collapse and suggests connection limits would right a lot of wrongs on the Internet. In the middle of it, he inadvertently created the perfect mission statement for the Sox Machine relaunch:
Wouldn’t it just be better if fewer people posted less stuff, less frequently, and if smaller audiences saw it?
On the subject of social media and my old employer's demands, here's a worthwhile video about the Ozzie Guillén-Bobby Jenks flap. Whenever Sox fans stump for Ozzie to return to the dugout, I understand the impulse, but I don't understand why anybody would expect it to work out any differently, only faster.
(Photo by Dale Zanine/USA TODAY Sports)
