The 2024 season has been an abject embarrassment for the Chicago White Sox. With only nine games remaining in the season, the 2024 White Sox have won a grand total of 36 games. They will have to win eight games to end the regular season to avoid being objectively the worst team in baseball history. Suffice to say, that outcome is simply not within the realm of possibility — especially when there's a systemic rot that's plaguing the ballclub.
In particular, the White Sox's interpretation of the data available to them has been described by a former employee as “comical” as “no one knew what was what”, as reported by Brittany Ghiroli and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic. One of the worst applications of the data they have gathered has been in their outfield positioning instructions — with former member of the team Tommy Pham attesting to this.
“That’s a huge area I felt could be better. They know it,” Pham said.
Given that the White Sox franchise is a multi-million dollar organization, it's not as though they are lagging behind in terms of the resources that they can use to improve the team, or at least put the players they currently have in the best position to succeed.
However, the Trackman data the White Sox have been using, which they have divided into two sets (one coming from a third-party source and one interpreted by the analytics people in the organization), have had a tendency of being “dramatically different” — leading to further confusion.
One of the primary areas that has been affected by this poor use of analytics in the organization has been the team's outfield defense. They rank among the worst teams in the MLB in outfield defensive metrics, thanks in large part to their poor positioning that comes from poor coaching.
In fact, the poor coaching is something dragging down the entire White Sox organization. On the pitching side of things, players were not given pointers on how to deal with specific hitters. Rather, coaches were very vague in their instructions, resorting to amateurish pointers instead that left players at such a huge deficit, preparation-wise.
This isn't too surprising given how pitiful the baseball the White Sox have played this year has been. From top to bottom, the organization has been a mess — and this terrible use of analytics, a key weapon that has helped teams overcome talent deficits in the past (cough, moneyball Oakland Athletics, cough), is simply another symptom of the illness the franchise is dealing with.
White Sox fall from grace with a loud thud
The White Sox's demise was swift, although it wasn't one that many could have seen coming back in 2021. Three years ago, the White Sox won the AL Central division with a 93-69 record. From there, however, things only went from bad to worse to unbelievably and historically terrible.
Just to provide a summary of why the White Sox are this bad, they literally have just eight hitters tally a positive WAR total (per Fangraphs) this season — none of whom have been more valuable than 1.0 WAR. In fact, five of those players aren't even on the White Sox's big-league roster anymore.
Building up the roster from the ground-up is necessary to turn the White Sox's fortunes around. But they will also have to make wholesale changes within the organization so that they aren't always playing catch-up to their peers in the data interpretation department.
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