Most of the talk about Chicago’s amazing season so far is either about the hitting, which is chugging right along despite some serious slumping here or there. Or even the pitching, which looks like it may be running out of steam (please notice how both references cleverly tie in to old trains). As long as the Savannah Bananas keep furnishing hitters and if management can cleverly find a blister somewhere on Sean Burke so he can get a few weeks of R&R like Davis Martin before the stretch run, both may work
out just fine.
That leaves … fielding.
The team’s defense certainly seems to pass the eyeball test with better marks than in recent years, with many fewer bizarre incidents. But should we trust professionally-developed algorithms, or our lying eyes? The algorithms aren’t horrible, but they aren’t impressive, either.
Let’s take a look. For this look, we’ll go with Baseball-Reference. Defense is the category where B-R and FanGraphs are most likely to disagree, because there is some subjectivity to how they value things, but using both all the way through would provide way too many numbers to try to cope with.
Within B-R, we’ll go with the most easily comparable figure, which is Defensive Runs Saved. DRS is created in a way that the league average at each position is zero, so figuring out good versus bad is fairly easy.
And we’ll go by position.
First, a strong point — pitchers
Amazingly, at least amazingly if you remember all the pickoff throws to Row Q in recent years, White Sox pitchers score third best in the majors at fielding their position. Yep, they’re at +7 DRS, behind only the Mets and Cubs. There are obviously a whole lot of players involved in this case, so no one or two pitchers get the credit, but the staff as a whole is defending extremely well.
That’s good, because …
Yuck — catchers
White Sox catchers have been very good at throwing out runners with larcenous intent, nailing 27% compared to an MLB average of 23%. But that’s where any goodness ends. And boy, is the bad stuff bad.
As a team, they’re 29th, at -10 DRS. Why, you ask?
Well, it may not seem quite as awful as back when Zack Collins was chasing every third pitch back to the wall behind home plate, but the several catchers used by the Sox this year are the runaway leaders in allowing wild pitches. Sure, the pitchers get charged with those, but everything that touches dirt is called a wild pitch these days, and catchers are supposed to block most of those. They haven’t — 60 times they haven’t, five worse than any other team (Angels) and twice as many as the better backstops.
There have been so many different bodies behind the plate, it’s only fair to call it a position-wide problem, not an individual weakness.
The just sorta blah — the infield
The infield positions on the South Side share a defensive trait — they’re all slightly worse than average.
That’s a good result at first base, where most scouts figured Munetaka Murakami would be awful. He’s not. Mune scores a -2 DRS — not good, but not terrible, either. That’s in 789 innings of 1,188 the Sox have played, with the two subs while he was on the IL, Miguel Vargas and Jacob Gonzalez, bringing the score up just one point. Overall, the first base D is right in the middle.
It may be a surprise that second base scores more below average, at -4 DRS, 20th in MLB. Half of that is on Chase Meidroth, who has played all but 90 innings at the position, to the tune of -2 DRS. Meidroth makes some terrific plays (and we may forget the awful ones) but his subs — Sam Antonacci being the key — have racked up -2 in just a handful of games.
Even more surprising may be third base, given that the TV crews constantly say what a great fielder Miguel Vargas is. Turns out, he isn’t. The third base total is -3 DRS, and Vargas is good for 921 innings of the coverage there. What he is really good at is catching the ball — only two fielding boo-boos, second-best in MLB. What he’s really bad at is throwing the ball — eight throwing errors, second-worst in MLB for third basemen.
Then, there’s shortstop. Overall, Sox shortstops score -4 DRS, good for 20th place. Colson Montgomery, who has covered 787 of the 1,188 innings, is even worse, at -6 DRS, ranking last of 18 shortstops with qualified innings according to FanGraphs. He has made only eight errors, only two of those throwing, but comes up short (get it?) on getting to balls. (Being slightly below-average on defense would be perfectly fine for a power hitter destined to knock more than 30 homers, but his recent slump also puts Colson at a just-below-average 98 OPS+ even though OPS tends to favor power hitters, and the strikeouts … well. Too bad it’s too late in the season for another Arizona intervention like the one that saved his career last spring.)
So, every infield position is poor, but none are horrible.
At the extremes — the outfield
The three outfield spots cover the gamut in defensive performance, at least as far as DRS is concerned.
Right field is right in the middle. As a team, the Sox score just below average there, at -2 DRS. Most of the action in right these days involves Braden Montgomery, who has handled 576 innings at a completely neutral 0 DRS. He had several predecessors in the spot, none noteworthy. As for Braden, his fantastic arm is unfortunately balanced by a tendency to throw before actually catching a ball on the ground, leading to leakiness.
Center field is the true bright spot of the D. The team scores a +6 DRS, good for seventh in MLB, with Tristan Peters amassing all six runs in his 791 innings patrolling the area. Combine that with his sudden surge in hitting in August, and every team is apt to be sending a bunch of scouts to cover Savannah Bananas games from now on.
As for left, that’s sad, especially for those of us who consider Antonacci our favorite player. The eyeball test hasn’t seemed bad, but the data is very unhappy: -12 DRS in left as a team, last in the big leagues. Most of that isn’t on Sam, but he’s at -5 for 771 innings, which is, to put it bluntly, lousy. We can’t even blame Andrew Benintendi’s defensive incompetence for the problem, because he’s been nailed to the bench for all but 55 defensive innings. Heck, we can’t even say, “At least he’s not as awful out there as Andrew Vaughn was,” because Sam’s even worse — at least worse than Vaughn’s first year, when in a similar number of innings he was only -2 DRS. (Vaughn got much, much worse his second year in the outfield, so we have to hope the same thing doesn’t happen with Antonacci.)
So …
It’s unlikely Chicago’s drive to the postseason will be led by fancy glovework, but it shouldn’t be killed by defensive lapses, either. Except maybe behind the plate.
