One of these days, Statcast will unveil a new metric that will actually make the White Sox look impressive.
Monday was not that day.
Statcast posted a whole slew of baserunning data, broken down into stolen bases, extra bases, and a combination of the two, and as you might expect, there isn't much to take away from the White Sox's baserunning exploits as a team. They were below average, and while they didn't finish dead last, it might be partially because their league-worst OBP simply didn't give them enough opportunities to run, as evidenced by the lack of individual outlier performances.
When it comes to the 121-loss 2024 White Sox, the offensive data is more fascinating for the individual assessments of baserunning plays. If you click on the camera icon at the end of the White Sox's row, there's video for every baserunning play, and you can sort by particularly impactful extra-base attempts. Here's a good example of Tommy Pham turning a double into a triple because Connor Joe had issues containing a carom:
And on the flip side, here's Paul DeJong getting cut down at home plate on an agonizingly long journey from first base on a double to the gap.
I can see this being a pretty fun tool to use in a season with high-leverage situations that matter, or even just a year where the White Sox aren't scoring the fewest runs in 50-something years.
Particular to the 2024 White Sox's weakness-dominant portfolio, the more enlightening part is flipping the extra bases leaderboard to sort by the fielding team. It puts a finer point on the arm value leaderboard, which is where you'll find a defining output. The White Sox were the worst team in baseball at preventing extra bases, and by a decent margin. Combine it with the more ordinary form of below-averageness when running the bases themselves, and that's another area where the deficits combined to form chasms that Pythagorean win percentage and other forms of expected records couldn't quite capture
Again, here's where you can see some of the White Sox's uglier efforts by sorting through the individual videos after sorting by impact, and get a head start on highlighting the most exploitable defenders. It's not perfect with assigning individual blame on the fielder's side due to what appears to be a zero-sum nature of plays. Sometimes fielders are charged with yielding extra bases on weird bounces off the sidewall or successful hit-and-runs, and while those are credits to hustle, they're not demerits for the efforts in the field.
But if you click through enough videos, you'll see the extra bases that are truly the product of efforts and abilities within the margins. Most of them involve Andrew Benintendi.
Benintendi ended up with the second-worst score with regards to preventing extra bases, with his -5 runs finishing ahead of only Nick Castellanos. He had company with Tommy Pham, whose difficulty going gap to gap in center field taxed his ability to make strong throws to second.
But since we were just talking about how the White Sox will have to contend with providing better defense for a potentially strikeout-starved staff, Benintendi's position could be an early battleground if resting his Achilles fails to make a meaningful difference from 2024 to 2025. Between Austin Slater and Mike Tauchman, Chris Getz has supplied options for improvement in left, provided they won't be stretched beyond value in center themselves. (Here's Dominic Fletcher flinging a ball around the warning track as a reminder of what that looks like.)
While we wait for the White Sox to stop making the same decisions that lead to the same mistakes, these leaderboards will at least allow us to diagnose the imbalance between bases gained and bases allowed a little more precisely, especially if it once again takes the form of improbably clumsy one-run games where 90 feet made all the difference.
