Chris Getz can start new White Sox era by outdoing himself

Subtlety is not a club in Pedro Grifol's bag.

That was my biggest takeaway from the Year in Quotes series I cut short due to belaboring the point, and it's a theme that's continued into his second spring training with the White Sox. His attempt at a poker face in response to the escalating Dylan Cease rumors conveyed sheer terror, and his praise of Yoán Moncada's selfessness somehow opened a seam in the space-time continuum and took conventional wisdom back to the Reagan Years.

But before I can officially turn the page on this project of paying far too close attention to what he says, there was one quote from last September that I wanted to highlight, not just because featured some of Grifol's most blatant upward pandering, but also because it presented a cautionary tale.

Rewinding back to August, in response to Chris Getz's promotion to general manager, Grifol extolled the virtues of Getz's baseball mind. It required more benefit of the doubt than anybody should be willing to afford Jerry Reinsdorf, but Grifol wasn't alone in seeing some possible upside.

A few weeks later, Grifol then went even further by trying to sell Getz the player as some sort of paragon.

“I remember (Getz) as a player. He played that style of baseball. He was a smart player that ran the bases well and was as consistent as consistent could be,” he said last week. “That’s the kind of baseball he wants to see, and that’s the kind of baseball I want to see.

“When I was in Kansas City, that’s how we won championships: consistent baseball played every day and doing whatever it takes to win a baseball game. That’s where we’re trending.”

This kind of lily-gilding always gets Grifol in trouble, and he's had questionable wishes granted before. Watching the budget-conscious patch job over the subsequent winter, during which Getz filled most roster holes with older players lacking upside, I wondered whether there was a a non-zero chance that Getz gave Grifol what he asked for.

To test this theory, I purchased Out of the Park Baseball 25 and made some changes to the White Sox's Opening Day assemblage. Half of the 26-man roster comprised the pitchers the White Sox are expected to feature for most of the season, but they were joined by 13 Chris Getzes -- the 2012 version, which was his finest vintage -- to fill out the position player slots.

Then I simulated a dozen seasons.

The good news? The actual 2024 White Sox are not going to be as bad as a team with an all-Getz lineup. The bad news? Once you adjust for the biggest flaw, it might be a little closer than anybody cares to admit.

A White Sox team with an all-Getz offense produced between 26 and 36 wins, with a 33-129 record winning the Triple Crown for mean, median and mode. Run-scoring was a problem, as the team finished dead last in everything except batting average, stolen bases and baserunning. At least they took F.A.S.T.(s) to heart.

But run-prevention was an even bigger issue. While the White Sox labored to clear 500 runs in a season, they routinely yielded 1,100, even though the pitching staff was full of the Opening Day candidates you haven't come to know or love. Erick Fedde twice did his best Anthony Young impersonation, finishing 0-21 and 0-23 despite an ordinarily below-average ERAs on both sides of 5.00.

The problem was simple: A team with two Chris Getz catchers broke the model. They put the "battery" in "battery" by routinely allowing 200 stolen bases and 250 passed balls, along with a few dozen errors. While the rest of the positions took on water or capsized in ways familiar to White Sox fans who have watched right field or second base over the years, the primary Getz catcher rounded up (or down) to negative-10 WAR in two seasons.

While incredibly funny to think about, it defeated any chance at validity, because a -10 WAR season would violate the Eighth Amendment, and maybe the Geneva Convention. So, for the last simulation, I plugged in 2012 Chris Getz for only 11 roster spots, with Martín Maldonado and Korey Lee serving as the catchers.

That team went 50-112. They were limited to 557 runs because they hit as many homers as they did triples (41 apiece), and obviously that's not going to happen in real life.

However, the White Sox pitching staff yielded 879 runs, and that's something that ... might happen? It's kinda severe, but within the realm of possibility. After all, the 2023 White Sox -- a team with postseason aspirations, believe it or not -- scored the second-fewest runs in the American League (641) while allowing the third-most (841). Now that they're even worse on paper, why wouldn't they be even worse in practice?

As James wrote about the way Getz tells it, the angle is that these White Sox will have a higher baseball IQ:

“It’s players playing a cleaner style of baseball,” Getz said during Wednesday’s workout day. “Nine-plus innings of focused baseball, understand certain situations, being able to execute, and standing in the right position defensively and throwing the right pitches at the right time, throwing the baseball to the right base.”

This is akin to Getz taking over a restaurant that failed a health inspection and only talking about how everybody now understands that a bathroom floor isn't the correct place to store raw meat. A grand reopening with banners that shout "GROUND BEEF NOW IN REFRIGERATOR!" simultaneously and aggressively avoids and answers the question about whether the food is any good.

The potentially fatal flaw with building an IQ-first team is that it's hard to play "a cleaner style of baseball" in the face of consistently wrong scores. Losing is what leads to pressing, to trying to make stuff happen, to forcing things that won't work. It inevitably makes things look, sound and feel dumber. Look what happened to Grifol. He once made sense. Then he didn't.

There is a way Getz's plan works well enough. Take continued excellence from Luis Robert Jr., support him with other strong up-the-middle defenders, then hope for decent seasons from Andrew Vaughn, Andrew Benintendi, Yoán Moncada and Eloy Jiménez. Assume a bog-standard performance from the pitching side, and that probably results in an ordinary punting year, with the hope that the farm system starts replacing the fungible with potential fixtures.

But again, because the White Sox just lost 101 games with a far more projectable unit, you should also be aware of how quickly "bog-standard" can resemble a quagmire. An all-Getz offense is a severe way of estimating the worst possible scenario, but at least it's an amusing way of doing it. With Opening Day ushering in the regrettable tabulations of games that count, we'll need to capitalize on all the opportunities to make our own fun.

Postscript: I tried to simulate a season with 26 Chris Getzes, but no matter how hard I tried to establish the new roles and pitch values of Getz starters and Getz relievers, OOTP refused to recognize the White Sox having any pitchers to throw against Tarik Skubal, and thus rejected attempts to start the season. The computing power required for 162 bowls of "OOPS! All Getzes" cereal probably would've raised the Earth's temperature by 2 degrees, so the entire world is better off not knowing.