PHOENIX -- Over the course of spring training, the White Sox seized opportunities to show how much they've embraced a more modern-sounding approach.
Senior advisor to pitching Brian Bannister spent part of his recent media scrum thanking chairman Jerry Reinsdorf for reduced turnaround time in getting results back from their pitching lab. General manager Chris Getz lists statistically optimized secondary leads and outfield jumps as a primary measure of success this season, and might credit the "player acquisition team" during a presser at a moment that used to involve name-dropping a veteran scout.
And new director of hitting Ryan Fuller proudly touts the results of his inquiry to Trajekt about how well his charges' usage of their fancy new pitch simulator compares to the rest of the league (third-most, despite only having one machine) and can sum up the organization's offensive principles with a series of data outputs.
"From the DR to Chicago, it's the pillars of: swing decisions, contact and then impact; 95-plus mph [exit velocity] and between five and 30 [degrees of launch angle], and then making sure our training is looking and feeling the same regardless of levels," Fuller said.
Fuller is planning to check in with the major league team in Chicago after the first series of the season and be a regular presence during home games, but once they hit the road is when the process of roving through affiliates to ensure that consistency in training continues, culminating in a host of White Sox baseball operations higher-ups visiting the Dominican Republic at the end of April. And while Fuller would point out that the White Sox have some iPitch and eHack machines (yes, I find these names are silly too) to complement the one Trajekt that will stay with the major league club, he promised some traces of his more lo-fi days of hitting instruction would work their way through.
And so, every batting cage at the White Sox complex has a medicine ball sitting on top of an upside down bucket. When hitters are working with pitching machines, the ball is going to a pre-determined spot. There are catchers and coaches with cameras calling strikes during batting practice on the field. Fuller just thinks the consistency of strike zone feedback should be maintained all the way through the cage.
"It's just a feedback loop, and there's research into it," Fuller said. "In training there's nothing back there unless the coach says ball or strike and then a player might refute or say OK. But if it hits the med ball, you get feedback that you should've swung. That's a pitch down the middle that we're trained to take care of. If it doesn't hit the med ball, that's one we're OK taking."
Any hitting coach worth their salt would be emphasizing swing decisions with this franchise, as Sox hitters had the fourth-highest chase rate in baseball last season. José Abreu should be remembered for much greater things than this unfortunate correlation, but the last White Sox team not to finish in the top-10 for swinging at pitches outside the strike zone was from year before he arrived. The current White Sox roster is littered with hitters whose potential has been contingent upon getting their chasing under control, and the clubhouse conversations about offensive identity has hovered around making quality at-bats their personal brand, in lieu of standout power and bat speed.
"Having a competitive lineup, having depth, having a lot of different options, offensively I think that's the key to scoring runs when you maybe don't have the traditional amount of sluggers that some teams in the American League have," said Mike Tauchman. "We're going to have to find different ways to create some runs, but I think we the skill set and mix of players to do that."
"It's something that obviously can help me a lot," Lenyn Sosa said via interpreter of his machine work this spring. "It prepares you on how the pitcher's pitches move. That gives you a better understanding of how they pitch. It's completely different from facing someone you haven't faced before."
But in Fuller's view, shrinking the strike zone is more of a natural focus for major league hitters, where players are mature enough that their hot and cold zones are well-defined. Working to narrow Andrew Vaughn's focus to just where he's demonstrated he crushes balls rather than trying to cover the entire strike zone is just fitting for this point in his career development. For a 19-year-old George Wolkow, Fuller wants to be expanding where his hot zones are, using machines to pepper the massive teenager with the slider and sweeper shapes he struggled against in 2024 under the guise of exposure therapy.
"You don't want to tell a 22-year-old, 'Here are where your slug zones are, just stick with this.' We want to make them bigger and redder. But then with the older guys, a Michael A. Taylor, it's more solidified around what he's done in his career and make a game plan around him." Fuller said. "You have to work with the personnel in front of you, you have to work within what you think their bat path can cover. There's a lot of things that go into it. But that's why we always go back to, 'Where do good things happen?' and the med ball is always back there."
After three seasons of the day-to-day cage grinding of being the Orioles major league hitting coach, Fuller enjoys this mish-mash of different assignments. He's bouncing between discussing the efforts to re-establish the direction in Braden Montgomery's swing in performance camp and the work to shorten Matt Thaiss' bat path so that he could more effectively fight off pitches in the upper third. And it's fitting that he loves both establishing the building blocks of a professional swing and the finer details, because getting him to laud the importance of anything other than a holistic approach to hitting is quite challenging.
Recent White Sox teams have struggled to pull and lift the ball, despite playing in a park that would reward them handsomely for the skill, regularly lining up with their underperformance in power. Fuller acknowledges pulling and lifting's importance, before cautioning that emphasizing it has to be focused on the types of pitchers and game environments that allow for it. He would not tell righties to try to pull and lift against a lefty changeup artist dotting the outer half, nor coax Chase Meidroth out of swing geared for low line drives. Even a power hitter like Luis Robert Jr. has a more customized swing plan due his skill set. Robert pretty rarely pulls velocity in air, but since he can leave the ballpark pole-to-pole, Fuller wants him to stick with an approach that uses his bat speed more as make-up speed, stealing an extra tenth of a second to make good swing decisions, especially since Robert's been receptive to Trajekt work.
"He'll be the one to tell you, 'This pitch I don't see well, let's go see it,' and then, 'Now I understand, it's starting at that spot when it ends up at the spot I need it to,'" Fuller said of Robert. "We'll play games in there, too. It might be three innings and you have two-on-two: Luis, Sosa versus [Miguel] Vargas and Tim Elko was a really fun day. They were playing a three-inning game off a pitcher on Trajekt and trying to execute the game plan with me, with the [hitting] coaches back there moving it around and trying to get them out."
"If I’m able to carry on the work I did during spring training, I’m going to have a good season, especially in that aspect of my being patient at home plate," Robert said via interpreter. "I know I can carry it on."
As a team, the White Sox had the lowest bat speed per Statcast's bat tracking measurements last season, and that issue often gets cited as another reason why hiring a director of hitting was a necessary move. And under Fuller, the Sox have made use of weighted bats in practice this spring, which he feels is useful for both training bat speed and getting hitters used to making adjustments when their timing has been altered. But he's more comfortable couching such improvements as tailored to a specific hitter.
When Colson Montgomery and Caleb Bonemer work to make the loads of their swing more fluid and less stiff, Fuller says it's vital that the coaching staff consults a biomechanical assessment to know what movement their bodies can easily handle and repeat. When Miguel Vargas and Brooks Baldwin are swinging with more authority and bat speed in camp, Fuller points to their dedication to offseason strength and conditioning plans that have them holding positions in their swing more easily, and notes that how they're holding up at the end of the season will be a more meaningful measurement than anything available now.
"It's the goal every offseason to get stronger, but the way last season went with losing a lot of muscle mass and a lot of weight, I knew I had to change a few things this offseason," Baldwin said, telling a similar story to Vargas. "Mainly it's being able to drive balls more consistently to the opposite field, and basically being able to get the ball in the air and control my bat head a little bit better. I was having to use more of my upper body at the end of last year."
This time of year is the last point where optimism about theoretical improvements reach their height, before the rubber meets the unforgiving 162-game road and the real problems of this team's offense get put into stark relief again. The constant waiting list for the Trajekt machine in camp is great, and if all it achieves is boosting Robert's trade value, it will still be worth its price tag. Yet the offensive identity the major league team is rallying around is still rooted in finding ways to make life difficult for the opposition despite lacking the weapons that would instill fear.
"It seems like it’s a gritty group: Guys play the game the right way, play hard, and that’s all we can do," said Andrew Benintendi. "The past few years, we’ve struggled to score some runs. I think that we have to play the game the right way. We’ve been talking about it, guy at second base, nobody out, just get him to third. Just play the game the right way and in the end, the team with the most runs wins. It doesn’t matter how you get there."
That last sentence is true in the sense that there's no one method to fetishize. The sport is variable, matchups matter, and if a lack of power and talent were all that ailed the Sox offense, the offenses of their would-be contention window wouldn't have failed so miserably. The White Sox have to get better at everything, so naturally their hitting director wants to make sure nothing is left out.
"You want how to wear pitchers down," Fuller said. "That's the most fun part, where you get the starter out on the third or the fourth, they've thrown 100-plus pitches, you get into the bullpen early, and you wear them out for the rest of the series. That's obviously the goal.
"But there's going to be nights where you're facing a top-end starter and it's, 'Hey, we've got to jump this guy. This is going to be a fast-paced night where in the first few pitches, we're going to jump, ambush. We know the longer the at-bat goes, he might be gaining an advantage.'
"And there's going to be nights where you're more passive against guy who's not throwing strikes, really shrinking the zone. So it's going to be an identity that's going to be predicated on who we're facing that night, and what's going to be called for. But obviously, as a whole, at the end of 162 would it be amazing to have everyone say, 'Man, they grinded out every at-bat. They were really tough on the opposition. When we threw it over the middle, they hit it hard.' Absolutely."
