PHOENIX -- Anyone who has found their way to this website already knows that last year's White Sox team thought improving on the margins could produce a less ugly season, even without an infusion of talent.
Well here the Sox are again, but with an organizational structure and coaching staff more of the current front office's design, and game results that they will have to own.
"Baserunning, taking our leads, secondaries understanding the run value that can provide to a team without having raw speed, necessarily," said Chris Getz when asked what success would look like for the 2025 White Sox. "You don't need to have the fastest team in the league to create runs on the basepaths. Defensively, first-step quickness, understanding what a first step can do in regards to saving runs."
The numbers explain Getz's fixation.
The 2024 White Sox were 24th in baseball by FanGraphs' all-encompassing baserunning metric, and 21st in Statcast's measure of Extra Bases Taken Run Value. The latter breaks it down to reveal a grating detail for a team that feels it needs to win on the margins to counter their lack of offensive firepower. The Sox lost a relatively meager amount of runs from getting thrown out on the basepaths last year, but frittered away many more via the bases they failed to take, as they were the most conservative team in the sport in terms of advance rate. Only the Yankees have tried to take the extra base less often than the White Sox over the last three years.
"When you talk about the commonalities of winning ball clubs, the margins are won there a lot of times," said first base coach Jason Bourgeois. "We have the Dodgers being really, really good at it, and we have the Yankees being the worst at it. But those teams do win. At the same time, does our lineup look like theirs? No. It's that gray area of teams that really have to maximize their potential."
Bourgeois didn't promise constant action, since the White Sox positional core doesn't flaunt much standout speed. But it's clear the correction is intended to come in the form of more aggression, especially when it comes to showing data to players who don't view themselves as speed merchants that they've been bypassing viable opportunities to take a larger lead, test slower outfielders, gun for a hustle double against weaker throwing arms, or score from second against deeper outfield alignments. With that in mind, it's been unsurprising to see a spate of Sox runners picked off or thrown out on the basepaths early in spring as they probe the limits of what they can get away with.
In a pre-game batting practice, it's been common to spot Bourgeois demonstrating the visual cues he uses to measure out a 12 feet for a primary lead off first base, and another 18 feet for a secondary, or 14 and 21 feet from second, and talks about memorizing the steps need to reach each. He stresses leading with the right foot on leads off the bag, to make it easier to dive back on pick-offs. But his big effort this spring is figuring out how much information from an improved organizational data pipeline every player is ready to digest. Does everyone want daily reports on how much longer their lead off first should have been, what balls in the dirt they could have advanced on? Or would it be more useful if it was meted out in chunks that displayed real trends?
His current platonic ideal for this approach would be Korey Lee. If it seems surprising that Statcast regards Lee as only having average slightly above-average raw foot speed, it's probably because he was the team's most aggressive runner for taking extra bases on balls in play among regulars, and their most effective one. Despite running on a team-high 42 percent of advancement opportunities, Statcast had Lee with a perfect success record in 2024.
"Last year a lot, we saw how it affected us on the defensive side and we can put it in our shoes now, and we can be the ones putting pressure on other teams," Lee said. "That's how I grew up: West coast baseball, San Diego baseball. You're taught to run hard, you're taught to take the extra base. Even as a catcher, you can put the pressure on in any situation. I feel that when I'm behind the plate. It's just realizing what that brings to the game and that can push a winning team."
Focus on extra bases can sound like a rehash of the FAST principles that the White Sox clubhouse was openly disavowing by the end of 2024, but a breakdown of how tepid the roster was about taking extra opportunities demonstrates how the mentality never truly took hold. Lee and the departed Nicky Lopez were the only true envelope-pushers, with newcomers Bryan Ramos, Miguel Vargas and especially Brooks Baldwin hinting at possessing more moxie than the mean toward the close of the year.
The overriding logic the White Sox are touting is that even a team lacking in burners should work to max out the runs that can be wrung out from sound baserunning, if the roster doesn't resemble the 2022 Cleveland Guardians. But also a whole new manager has come in, assessed the Sox offensive personnel and determined that this team needs to take the extra base to live. The question is whether Will Venable will be more successful in securing buy-in.
"Will is leading the charge when it comes to this," Bourgeois said. "We had a presentation about lead distance, about teams that still take advantage with a slower speed component, on the importance of really drawing throws and being perceived as a threat. When he leads the charge like that, you'd be amazed how everyone gets into it."
Venable's other passion project is defenders employing regular pre-pitch movement, and parsing the matter might reveal it to be the defensive side of the same coin. While it's arguably as marginal of an issue as extra bases, it's an element of the game so omnipresent and constant that it disappears unless you pay attention to it: the way every defender on the field goes from casually grazing to snapping into their stance as each pitch is delivered.
The White Sox feel improved first steps on defense can come from being more intentional on what movement leads up to their initial moment of reaction. Though at first glance, "pre-pitch movement" might be a slight misnomer.
"Will's big on being 'weightless,'" said Colson Montgomery, example 1A of someone the White Sox want to employ positioning, routes and well-timed first steps to counter a lack of the shortstop position's typical speed. "You want to go slow to fast, not fast to slow."
It doesn't take much explaining to White Sox fans that they have been watching substandard defense for the last few years, and a second-to-last ranking in Statcast's Outs Above Average statistic would only confirm their priors. They didn't rate well in the infield or outfield, but the breakdown of jumps for the latter -- where every Sox outfielder not named Dominic Fletcher scored below-average for their burst to the baseball -- guided team officials' attention toward this specific inefficiency with their first steps.
And in this case as well as baserunning, the 2025 White Sox would trade the cost of mistakes and misfires in exchange for reclaiming the runs they've been losing by standing flatfooted.
"Very calm, moves early, takes risks, and when you do that, you put yourself in position to make those 60-40, 50-50 plays," said Bourgeois, describing that the qualities that make Fletcher's jumps exceptional come down to dominating the first five feet, no matter what. "If you have a five-foot circumference around you, your [route] decision is made outside of that, but you need to have movement going before that. It's really, really anticipating the timing off and the angles that you choose, and then having the burst to really finish off the play -- and there the angles and things like that come into play. But if you get off the ball early and dominate the early reaction component, you're going to find yourself making more plays."
As Bourgeois spoke, the White Sox outfield was less than 24 hours removed from a classic example of a fielder seeing a big swing, freezing in place from indecision as they made their read, and ending up late to the spot of wound up being a shallow popup into no man's land. As inevitably as not every Sox outfielder will grow to fully adapt Fletcher's fearless style, these plays will still happen. But when tossup plays on would-be extra-base hits to the gap are determined by who is getting to their top speed a half-second faster, the White Sox are emphasizing "more energy off the baseball."
It's easier to ask outfielders to make bolder route choices faster if there's more robust preparative information to offer in terms of batted ball tendencies, weather conditions and field dimensions, and the Sox feel they're in a better position to ask their players to keep themselves informed. And another benefit to trying to catch up to the practices of the rest of the league is that it's possible to bring in veterans from other organizations who have already become converts to the concepts they're trying to emphasize.
"The staff is on board with really trying to be aggressive when it comes to the way we practice, first-and-third defense, pick plays for pitchers, our bunt defense, and I think that's the way we have to play to beat the higher payroll teams," said Josh Rojas. "The key to winning games this year is not giving teams the extra bases. Teams like the Dodgers and Yankees, if they get runners in scoring position with less than two outs, it feels like they always score. It's limiting those opportunities. Not letting guys take first-to-third or letting guys getting an easy second base on weak contact. Even when there's an opportunity to pick a guy off; there might be one opportunity in a week to a pick a guy off second. But if we're hesitant to take that opportunity and don't take it, that's another run that might score."
Rojas' gusto for hunting every extra out is part of why he's quickly becoming a leading player voice during infield drills. But furthermore, his mid-career transition to becoming positively rated defensively in multiple spots of the infield is rooted in the source of focus on pre-pitch movements fueling explosive first steps that the White Sox are trying to preach.
If you watch the on-deck hitters while a new pitcher is warming up, you'll see them trying to sync up the timing of their first move with that of who they are about to face. As a defender, Rojas seeks to time up hitters in the same way, gearing up a bounce in his step so that he's landing in time to explode to the ball on contact, or "when he is landing ready to hit, I want to be landing as well." Continuing the hitter-like focus on his timing, Rojas will go back and review how well he timed opposing hitters upon an IPad. With time and dedication, it starts to serve as information on what direction to go in as well.
"What I do on offense, is I look at timing first before I look at any other mechanics, and so that's what I have to do for defense. Maybe I made a bad throw or maybe I booted a ball, but before any of that, let me see what my timing was," Rojas said. "When I have that timing perfect with a hitter, I can feel when he's early or when he's late. If I'm landing with him and he's getting his swing off, I can feel already that ball is probably going to be my left or right."
Everyone in spring training sounds like they're reinventing the wheel while just talking about perfect adherence to the sports fundamentals. There are 29 other coaching staffs scattered across Florida and Arizona telling their charges that if they were more engaged on the wind conditions, spray charts and how the pitcher was attacking in that at-bat, that half second of indecision about whether a soft opposite field flare was going over their head or not would have disappeared.
A benefit that the White Sox have is that improving upon last season's level of play doesn't require unprecedented reinvention. The level of offensive talent in camp does not look improved, the pitching talent present looks years away from its prime. But the 2024 reached unfathomable lows not just because of talent drain, but regularly providing bottom of the league performance in areas that they believe simply demand more attention, training and effort than what was being given. And they don't need to become best in the league in baserunning or first steps on defense to see a big difference.
"There's a lot of value in just being average," said Lee. "If you're an average baserunner, then you've just got to think a little bit ahead of time about trying to get to the next base. And that's what we're going to try to do."
