Can the White Sox avoid the defensive pitfalls of 2024?

Hot take: White Sox brass knew their offense wouldn't hit in 2024. They knew they weren't investing in bullpen stability anymore, and while the level of chaos surprised them, a lot of blown saves were always a possible outcome. They also knew trading Dylan Cease would throw their rotation in a flux, as the ill-fated Mike Clevinger reunion followed it.

But their defense, rather than serving as a strength, once again competed o be the league's worst. That's where the bottom fell out, and how what was hoped to be a garden-variety last place team in baseball wound up authoring one of the worst seasons in history.

As the Head & Shoulders commercials used to say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. But with another roster coming off 100-plus losses, free agent shopping on a remarkably similar level to last offseason, and yet another winter spent entertaining trading an All-Star caliber starting pitcher with two years of control left, the White Sox front office very much has a second chance to protect a young and rebuilding team from falling into the void by building a stronger defense.

And maybe not so much a strong defense, because actual stalwart defenders with more than negligible offensive skill are not exactly free for the taking. But simply not repeating the least successful projects from a disastrous previous season is usually the fastest way to stop hemorrhaging runs.

So what were they? Well, since public defensive metrics are flawed for even determining outputs, let alone inputs, we don't really know. But it might be fun to try to figure it out. Current 40-man roster members are in bold:

Grossman had a long reputation prior to arriving in Chicago, which dictated his trade value far more than his 25 games with the White Sox, and he went back to being an above-average hitter in Texas. But man, Anthony Hoopii-Tuionetoa only has to accomplish but so much for the deal to look like a fair bit of arbitrage.

Separately, we finally have a chart confirming what was previously suspected: It's bad for the White Sox that Luis Robert Jr. got hurt.

Catching metrics built upon framing, blocking and throwing capture only a portion of what pitchers and coaches consider a well-caught game, which testifies to why some White Sox personnel didn't feel the team spiraling into a 21-game losing streak just as Maldonado was purged was a coincidence, even for all his faults. That said, a team with as little margin for error as the 2024 Sox really could have benefitted from better framing and blocking.

Saber Defensive Index focuses more on everyday regulars and spits out totals for players' entire seasons, even when they switch teams. The contributions are less isolated, but the White Sox still have plenty of telling representation.

Judging by article comments, we don't need to spend much time explaining that Sheets' defense served as an unscalable hurdle to him providing value and that his bat had not performed well enough to demand priority over DH opportunities. But these days, it's always nice to see that not all the computers are trying to tell you that you're crazy.

Which of the Andrews should DH?

In ways both good and bad, Benintendi just earned the DH slot a bit more.

He more consistently dominated these charts, and just as importantly, he hit like a DH. A .263/.328/.500 batting line after the All-Star break is such that while Benintendi becoming a primary DH at age 30 in Year 3 of a five-year contract isn't anyone's ideal, he most recently performed at a level where he would be an asset in this role, rather than it just being the spot where he can do the least harm. The White Sox's 7-6 walk-off winner against Oakland on Sept. 14 provided an enticing proof of concept, as Zach DeLoach kept the game tied by cutting down a runner at home from left field, setting up Benintendi to hook a slider off the right field foul pole to end it.

Such an allocation is a lot easier to swing in a world where the White Sox did not retain Vaughn, or where Vaughn was the scratch defender that DRS and SDI felt he was in 2023. As of Friday, Vaughn is being retained as a worthy project for chasing his offensive ceiling, and when his defensive ratings have tilted one way or the other, it's usually been the red side of the ledger.

Here, their hand has already been tipped to a degree. Vaughn manned the DH spot around half-time over the final two months of the season, and Benintendi's metric struggles were often defended by the coaching staff as a veteran gamely playing through Achilles soreness. The addition of Austin Slater's platoon bat adds a potentially more able corner defender, but not someone who would unseat Benintendi in left on a regular basis.

The catching situation

From a more simple perspective, Edgar Quero can't be assumed to crack the opening day roster or assume a full-season catching workload at age 22, and Chuckie Robinson hit worse than Maldonado after his midseason call-up. As such, the White Sox need to add a veteran counterpart to Lee for simple depth reasons.

Lee was a rookie last year, and his raw athleticism and throwing talent drives curiosity of how he could benefit from the presence of bench coach Walker McKinven, whose Milwaukee tenure aligned with the Brewers squeezing solid production from backstops who previously had middling defensive reputations. At the same time, Lee's numbers -- offensively and defensively -- are what they are and his game calling is still seen as a work in progress. If the Sox brought in a veteran game manager to start over him, it wouldn't feel unearned.

How much a team spends on a backstop when they already have their catcher of the future in tow and are mandated to cut payroll is likely minimal. In a market where Danny Jansen and Carson Kelly might be the top prizes, finding even a proven framer might require a bigger guarantee than Slater received. In a world where the Sox could find themselves just seeking someone who calls games and manages pitchers well, they really could get a re-do on the Maldonado signing, and simply opt for someone whose strengths and weaknesses are less extreme.

I don't know is on third

Bryan Ramos, Miguel Vargas and Lenyn Sosa can't all play third base at once, but these defensive numbers indicate you shouldn't be too torn up about it.

Ramos collected these ratings at just 22 years of age, and has been dutiful about keeping conditioned for the position, but maybe his late-season work in the outfield portends a long-term move. If you want to parse small differences in a few hundred innings of DRS, Vargas outplayed Ramos defensively and hasn't had the benefit of committing to a single position for a while. Sosa's on-field decisions quite noticeably worsen when his range is stretched, and his two sparkling innings at first base were the rare moment where it wasn't stretched last season. He headed to the Venezuelan winter league resolute about expanding his range, and now Sosa is slugging .830 there.

Which dovetails into the larger point that anyone who hits their way into regular at-bats here probably earns the right to grow on the other side of the ball. And since none of them have done this yet in the majors, there should be plenty of runway for Ramos and Vargas to stake a claim. Since Vargas and Sosa are both out of options, a secondary option for them has to emerge somewhere, and as the roster currently stands there's an argument (see above) to train someone to pick away from Vaughn's workload at first base. If I expanded the DRS standings far enough, Brooks Baldwin's work at second base -- still curiously inferior to his play at short -- would appear. That it didn't represents the level of meaningful defensive downgrade any member of this trio would be from Baldwin up the middle.

The glove-oriented ambitions of last year's team fell apart once early panic about the offensive woes drove them Pedro Grifol to shove Sheets back into right field before the close of April, with Fletcher's stalwart corner defense not re-emerging until Grady Sizemore took the helm. For now, the primary change to this structure is that it won't be Sheets being thrown into the fray the next time this happens, and that Sizemore's leanings on this matter remain as some part of the decision-making process. Perhaps the real revelation from these metrics is how under water the shortstop position was for the Sox all year, but between Jacob Amaya not hitting well enough to easily hold onto a stopgap role and Colson Montgomery's hulking frame hopefully taking over the spot for good in 2025, it's an open question whether the pieces to improve upon well-above glovework at the most important spot on the dirt are even in-house yet.

Trading Benintendi is surely another few hot months at the plate (and off of his contract) from being realistic, and Vaughn is looking like Ryan Fuller's second-most interesting reclamation project, so it would be really easy for this White Sox defense to look very similar to the group that disappointed in 2024, and fall into the same traps. They have a first-time manager in Will Venable and a front office that only started showing hints of rolling out the defensive team they envisioned in the final six weeks of last season, and this is their chance to show they're more capable of finding solutions than the last group.