The White Sox disproved a lot of things over the course of the 2024 season, but one of them is the saying, popularized by John F. Kennedy after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, that "victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan."
With the Sox, failure was authored by a byline count in the dozens. An efficiency expert might point to Jerry Reinsdorf and call it a day, but that would obscure the thoroughness of the collapse. The Sox not only lost the war, but just about every battle, too.
For instance, take another saying that lost a lot of meaning: "As [X] went, so went the White Sox." How many players could that apply to? In previous seasons, Tim Anderson and Yasmani Grandal. In this one, definitely Luis Robert Jr., Yoán Moncada and Eloy Jiménez, because they were supposed to have at least one dynamic talent. James even used it for Gavin Sheets, in the sense that if you saw him regularly playing out of position, you were watching returns diminish in real time.
If that's the case, then it also can be said of Dominic Fletcher to some degree, as his inability to define himself as a major league hitter at the start of the season undermined Chris Getz's first attempt to define the White Sox's style of play, or acquire a potential member of the next good White Sox roster. The Sox optioned Fletcher to Charlotte before the end of April, and when he returned in May, he didn't respond well to Pedro Grifol's sporadic playing time, going 1-for-16 in eight games before injuring his shoulder on a catch at the wall.
When the White Sox fired Grifol, Grady Sizemore played Fletcher enough to establish his defensive bonafides. But even in the initial afterglow of his return, Fletcher himself lamented his batting average felt empty because he wasn't driving the ball as consistently as his successful big league cameo in 2023. Sure enough, a .280 August gave way to a .164 September, giving back all the production he gained from the point of his April demotion and then some:
- April 23: .203/.277/.271
- Year's end: .206/.252/.256
The White Sox right field picture remains as open as ever, and when Fletcher reports to spring training, he will be in the same position as he was a year prior: seeking to prove that he's capable of hitting MLB pitching and holding down a strong-side platoon role in right field. It's just that now he's a year older, and he's already seven months older than Andrew Vaughn. There are 241 more plate appearances on the record arguing against Fletcher's ability, and the White Sox started carving out alternate paths with the acquisition of Austin Slater.
Discussing Fletcher's individual merit grows stale at this point, if not well before. However, because Fletcher was acquired in a trade for Cristian Mena -- and because of one unusual detail about said trade -- it gives us two questions that are more interesting to consider.
No. 1: What did the White Sox lose out on by trading Cristian Mena?
At this point, not much. Mena's first full season in Triple-A at Reno looked a lot like his audition in Charlotte in 2023, where he struggled between allowing too many walks or too many hits, but there were a few differences. On the plus side, he gained a little bit of velocity, and made his MLB debut, even if it was an emergency measure that didn't succeed. But his season also ended in late July due to a forearm strain, so now durability is a doubt for the first time in his career.
Basically, he's in the same position as Fletcher, where a year of weaknesses going unaddressed lends some credence to the idea that he's more or less met his ceiling. It's just that he doesn't turn 22 until later this month, so there's more time to dream.
If his season shook out the same way in the White Sox organization, Mena would have accumulated a lot more airline miles between the Charlotte and Chicago rotations, but now he'd deal with a lot more traffic going forward. Things that hadn't happened when Mena was in Chicago include but aren't limited to Jonathan Cannon's adaptability, Davis Martin's return, Sean Burke's late emergence, Ky Bush righting the ship, Noah Schultz's first full, healthy season and the drafting of Hagen Smith. All of this would more than likely would have made Mena just as likely to be traded, assuming he could pass a physical.
No. 2: What would've happened if the White Sox acquired Jake McCarthy instead?
After the White Sox completed the trade in early February, Bob Nightengale wasted no time planting a seed a doubt, writing in a notebook the following weekend:
The White Sox had their choice between outfielder Jake McCarthy or Dominic Fletcher for Diamondbacks pitching prospect Cristian Mena, before taking Fletcher. Certainly, they relied heavily on the advice of assistant GM Josh Barfield, who was the D-backs' former farm director.
Based on the performances that followed, the White Sox chose the wrong left-handed 26-year-old battling a "fourth outfielder" label.
| Player | PA | HR | BB/K | SB/CS | OAA | AVG/OBP/SLG |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fletcher | 241 | 1 | 11/58 | 0/0 | 2 | .206/.252/.256 |
| McCarthy | 495 | 8 | 31/78 | 25/6 | 6 | .285/.349/.401 |
Note the Outs Above Average column, because that's the biggest factor in the discrepancy between each player's WAR valuations.
- Fletcher: -0.4 bWAR, -0.8 fWAR
- McCarthy: 1.3 bWAR, 3.0 fWAR
Baseball-Reference.com uses Defensive Runs Saved, which considered Fletcher Gold Glove-caliber and McCarthy decent in a corner, but if Statcast truly predicts next year's DRS better than DRS does, then perhaps Fletcher's only edge isn't one.
The decision looks obvious now, but it was less so after the 2023 season, when McCarthy struggled to produce an encore to a productive rookie season that garnered some down-ballot ROY support. He lost 40 points of batting average, 100 points of slugging, and, like Fletcher, found himself crowded out of the everyday outfield mix by Corbin Carroll, Alek Thomas and Lourdes Gurriel.
McCarthy ended up playing his way back into the mix with better production inside the strike zone. He made more contact, putting himself in position to benefit from swings in BABIP. Throw in a Gold Glove finalist performance in the field, and now he's ... in a position to get traded again, because the Diamondbacks are apparently obligated to hold an extra center fielder in escrow every winter.
The knock on McCarthy is that he doesn't hit the ball hard. His bat speed, average exit velocity and hard-hit percentage are all near the bottom of Statcast's percentiles. He'll have to reach the high end of his batting average range and pair it with plus defense to be a reliable regular, and that's already eluded him once.
What he does have is excellent speed, which translates not only to match Fletcher's best work in the field, but also runs laps around him on the basepaths. Throw in an eight-inch height advantage, which makes it easier for McCarthy to hit home runs by accident, and McCarthy's edge in tools put a lot of pressure on Fletcher's more authoritative contact against right-handed pitching to carry the day. It couldn't.
Perhaps the White Sox were so cursed that Chicago McCarthy would've looked like Chicago Fletcher, and Arizona Fletcher would've filled the same purpose of Arizona McCarthy, but the version of McCarthy that rebounded in 2024 would've fulfilled Getz's wishes for improved defense and strike-zone control from right field. He doesn't appear to have the kind of ceiling to alter the team's overall trajectory, but neither the front office, media, nor fans ever held such illusions about the trade. It simply represented the first chance for a new regime to identify the position player traits they value and show their ability to acquire it, and instead it became another bullet point for how the White Sox set the modern MLB record for losses in a season.
