The 2024 White Sox offense was beyond parody
Back on Opening Day, I forced everybody here to look at how a White Sox team with 13 Chris Getzes playing all the non-pitching positions would fare during the 2024 season. There wasn’t really a point besides pointing out Pedro Grifol’s proclivity for unctuous overstatement, and I wanted to see what he ran the risk of requesting when he said his whole team should play like his boss, who has since fired him.
The simulations, all run on Out of the Park Baseball 25, yielded an average of 33 wins because a team with Getzes for catchers routinely allowed more than 200 stolen bases and 250 passed balls. When I replaced them with Martín Maldonado and Korey Lee to resemble something a little closer to real baseball, the 11-Getz White Sox went 50-112.
What I considered a goofy way to figure out the worst possible scenario turned out to be nine wins better than what the 2024 White Sox actually accomplished, and it’s entirely on the offense. The 11-Getz roster produced 557 runs, which struck me as implausibly low because they managed just 41 home runs in 162 games. And indeed, the actual White Sox ended up lapping their simulated peers twice, finishing with 133 homers.
And yet the actual White Sox scored just 507 runs, the lowest total by any team in a full season since the 1971 Padres, who did not benefit from the DH.
With some distance from the wreckage, it’s worth using any regained sensation to take another run at comprehending what we just witnessed.
Besides the laughable lack of power, another reason why the 11-Getz output of 557 runs seemed implausible was the idea that the previous season provided its own sensible range of “bad” to “worst.” In 2023, we watched a miserable White Sox offense score 641 runs, finishing 14th out of 15 American League teams. They were thoroughly unproductive, sunk by a number of 10th-percentile outcomes, and yet they still finished comfortably ahead of the 50-win Oakland Athletics, who scored 585 runs while openly tanking and playing half of their games in a pitcher-friendly ballpark.
If you told me that the White Sox offense would be way worse in 2024, 585 runs would qualify as such, right? Cynicism was not hard to find this time last year, and still a more dire potential scenario was hard to conjure.
In fairness, that scale wouldn’t account for a leaguewide drop in offense. The average AL team scored just 4.27 runs in 2024, down from 4.55 in 2023. Take what was thought to be a worst-case total of 585 runs and cut it by 6 percent to match the leaguewide trend, and that knocks it down to 549.
(I even checked to make sure the putridity of the 2024 White Sox didn’t skew the leaguewide numbers, and they only played a small part. The season-to-season decline when including every team is 6.2 percent. Count only the top 14 offenses from each year, and it’s 5.9 percent.)
In that context, 507 runs is slightly less extreme, but it’s still difficult to comprehend. As previously mentioned, the White Sox hit 133 homers. Of the 17 other teams to score fewer than 515 runs in a modern-length season, none of them hit more than 107. That’s a 26-run head start over the competition, and in the end, it was just another lead that they nearly blew, due to the second-worst OBP of the group (.278), and by far the most strikeouts. It was a rough year, in case you hadn’t heard.
While the OOTP simulations couldn’t fathom the fall of the offense, it did nail the general shape of it. Here was the WAR leaderboard among position players in the 50-win simulation:
| Rank | Simulation | Actual |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chris Getz, CF, 2.5 | Luis Robert Jr., CF, 1.4 |
| 2 | Chris Getz, 3B, 0.6 | Yoán Moncada, 3B, 0.3 |
| 3 | Chris Getz, IF, 0.2 | Paul DeJong, SS, 0.2 Nicky Lopez, 2B, 0.2 Andrew Vaughn, 1B, 0.2 Zach Remillard, UT, 0.2 |
And it also captured the fecklessness on both sides of the ball. It simulated the White Sox pitching staff giving up 879 runs, and while actual Sox pitchers also benefited from the friendlier environment by allowing considerably fewer runs than feared — Josh lost a steak dinner bet over this, you may have heard — on the whole, the simulated run differential with 11 Getzes (-322) wasn’t all that far off from what the 2024 White Sox actually did (-306).
Just like the vote about whether to kill the guy who played Mr. Belvedere at the Guy Who Played Mr. Belvedere Fan Club meeting, it shouldn’t have been that close. The whole point in simulating a season with 13 Chris Getz clones was to poke fun at Grifol’s sycophancy, which both grated and eventually failed to secure sycophancy’s traditional goals. Any bar that could possibly be set was supposed to be buried, but the White Sox didn’t call JULIE before digging, and they blasted through water, sewer and gas lines before opening up a portal to hell.
Now that you’ve seen what’s down there, it’s hard to rule out ever seeing it again, no matter how unlikely it seems.
Author
What are our chances with 11 Max Venable’s?
Imagine if we had 11 Grady Sizemore’s.
If healthy, that latter is a playoff team. The Venable team would win MLB Jeopardy.
Grady would absolutely be in the HOF had he been even decently healthy over the course of his career.
I get what you’re saying, he was a great and complete player. But with only 4 healthy seasons in his career that’s sort of a big “if”. He’d essentially have to quadruple or at least triple his production.
Okay, so maybe if we had 38 Grady Sizemores….
I would love to watch a game where a lefty plays 2B, 3B, SS, and Catcher.
Team India has a lefty shortstop, and it feels like watching a game on a mirror.
https://x.com/Shawn_Spradling/status/1854935984275693947
Perhaps this year we can have an offense made up of equal parts Getz, Venable, and Sizemore.
I was trying to explain Brocktoon to my children the other day, and they weren’t quite understanding the brilliance of it. I think they were hung up on not understanding who Mr. Belvedere was.
Thank you, Jim.
Imagine if our GM didn’t know where the water, sewer and gas lines were.
Butt-kissing will only take you so far Pedro.
Are you a famous published author and SoxMachine is just your hobby Jim?
I should want the Sox to sign hitters capable of hitting over .700 OPS.
I shouldn’t want the Sox to sign hitters capable of hitting over .700 OPS, but only in the minor leagues, or with an aluminum bat in college.
Yes, but you learned that one the hard way.
2025 White Sox baseball: Please call JULIE.
I had incredibly hard times explaining my non-Sox coworkers, followers of the last place Bluejays, what was wrong with the White Sox during 2024. They thought that the Bluejays were bad and couldn’t fathom how much worse the White Sox were.
What’s wrong with the 2024 Sox in two words:
Jerry Reinsdorf.
I had this same issue with a couple of Army buddies who I keep in touch with who are respectively Cardinals and Reds fans. They’ve heard me lament the incompetence of the team plenty over the last few years, but when I was ringing alarm bells back in March they just marked it up to me exaggerating for the sake of being dramatic. No matter how many times I told them this was the worst team I’ve ever seen assembled in my lifetime and it’s probably going to be even worse after the deadline they just kinda shrugged and said whatever, then went about lamenting what was wrong with their own teams.
Somewhere around June they started to realize I wasn’t kidding. They’d always trusted my baseball analysis before but thought I was just going off the rails this year. I think they’ll never doubt my analysis after this.
Thanks for your service.
Thanks, retiring in the next year.
So you’re like the White Sox then.
Jeez, just shit on my whole career why don’t you?
🙂
I had a similar conversation with an Oakland fan before the season and he called me dramatic. Halfway through the season he apologized
In fairness, we follow the White Sox more closely than almost anybody else, even other White Sox fans, so we were uniquely positioned to see this train wreck slowly materialize.
I told my buddies in states where sports betting is legal that this team was one of the worst teams I’d ever seen and they could become rich men simply betting against them every game. I was right and they didn’t listen.
I explained how miraculously bad the white sox were to non-baseball fans and they got wrapped up in rooting for them to lose, it was a whole thing.
How about running a second half simulation in which the Sox didn’t make any of their deadline trades? (If you are really insane, also simulate a world in which they didn’t trade Robbie Grossman.) Add to the simulation Yoan Moncada playing third base in every game once he came back to the roster. How many games would that team have won? More than 41, right? 50, maybe? Maybe.
The trades, and sitting Moncada, were the right things to do for the future. But the Sox were as bad as they were in 2024 at least in part because they didn’t care how bad they were in 2024. And if they didn’t care, why should I?
The Sox had pretty much their best stretch of baseball all season with Moncada sitting on the bench.
True, but how much offense did they get from 3B? Could they maybe have won a game or two more with him? We’ll never know, because the Sox didn’t care to find out.
4-for-41 with 2 walks and 4 RBIs. Pretty much all of that split between Vargas and Ramos. And still, I would prefer they have seen what those two could do than give Moncada the time of day.
I agree.
The last paragraph is why I pay my dues for this site.
One thing that kept nagging me, and I don’t know if it’s burgeoning OCD or what, but the phrase, “…lapping their simulated peers three times,” I couldn’t get past. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I just kept thinking to myself an actual circuit track with two runners going around it running at constant speeds, with one completing three laps to the other’s one lap. In such a scenario, the faster runner would lap the other only twice: once halfway through lap 2, the other at the end of lap 3.
I need to lay off the energy drinks or something, because I spent way too much time (like, five minutes) thinking about that.
You are correct. People with burgeoning OCD make great editors, if you’re thinking about a post-career career.
“…twice times.”
*winces*
And tax accountants.
Skims quickly through the article with no reading comprehension skills …
So, we need to add more players like Chris Getz to improve the offense?
We could add a team of Mark Belangers and not only would the defense be the best in the history of baseball but they’d probably still score more runs.
sigh
We have to play into the farce, because that’s all we have if we are still here. But the more succinct way (and more boring way) of explaining the season is this: The definition of a 0.0 WAR team — a team entirely comprised of scrapheap guys and AAAA guys — should be around 50-112.
We were 9 wins below what we could expect for free.