Let’s Act Like the White Sox Don’t Exist

Late Wednesday night, I was poking around the internet looking for inspiration. A badly timed bout of writer’s block had kept me working on my Spencer Schwellenbach article well into the evening, so I wanted to get a head start on Friday’s piece and pick a topic before I went to bed. That’s when I saw this, from Weird Twitter agenda-setter and Batting Around podcast host Lauren:

i think all the 2024 white sox team records should stand but somehow player records should get expunged. like, the MLB stat nerd community has a duty to figure out how stuff was handled when individuals were held responsible for plagues that effected cities in babylon

— lauren (@Very__Regular) September 5, 2024

Over the past few days, you’ve probably seen something about how the AL Central has four teams with winning records, but the White Sox have been so bad they’ve dragged the division as a whole dozens of games under .500. This fun fact relies on the Detroit Tigers keeping their heads above the break-even point — a delicate tightrope act if ever one existed — but it speaks to an exciting possibility: That the White Sox might be so bad they’re breaking the curve for everyone.

What if you hopped into the time machine and It’s a Wonderful Life‘d Jerry Reinsdorf when he was in law school? Show him what his legacy has become. No doubt he’d be fascinated by the unexpected course the Kennedy political dynasty has taken over the past 60 years, but focus, Jerry, focus. What if, instead of making hundreds of millions of dollars as a professional finder and exploiter of loopholes in tax law, you went into something more mundane and less lucrative? Criminal defense, maybe? Family law?

On a league-wide level, not a whole lot would have changed. If you erased the White Sox from the record — both the team’s own stats and those accumulated by their opponents — you’d wipe out roughly 11,000 plate appearances. But the league-wide batting average, OBP, and strikeout and walk rates would remain unchanged. The league’s slugging percentage would increase… from .401 to .403.

White Sox games only account for 1/15th of the league’s action, and abject as they have been, they’re not so far outside the norm as to skew the entire statistical outline of major league baseball in such relatively small quantities.

But while these drops of White Soxiness can’t color the entire ocean, they’re quite potent when taken in isolation:

The other 29 teams have a combined wRC+ of 117 against the White Sox, which turns the average hitter into Alex Bregman or Isaac Paredes. For other players, it’s done even more than that.

Baseball Reference has a nifty stat called tOPS+. It operates like any other -plus stat, in that it scales to 100, but instead of comparing a player’s performance to league average, it compares the player’s OPS within a split to the player’s overall OPS. (OPS+ isn’t as precise a tool as wRC+, but this post is more about fun facts than science anyway.)

As of Thursday, 121 players had taken 15 or more plate appearances against the White Sox this season. Seventy-eight of them — almost two-thirds — had a tOPS+ over 100, meaning they performed better against the White Sox than against the rest of the league. Almost exactly the same number of players have a tOPS+ of 150 or better (42) as have a tOPS+ under 100; in other words, the White Sox are as likely to make a hitter 50% better than normal as they are to make him worse.

In some cases, a lot better.

What happens if you take the worst team… maybe since the founding of the World Series, and put them up against one of the best hitters of all time?

There are 18 seasons in MLB history in which a player took at least 20 plate appearances against one team and posted an OPS of 2.000 or higher. These 18 seasons tend to come pretty recently: All but three are from the six-division era, and five are from the past eight seasons. That’s because the 30-team league and unbalanced schedule has allowed a hitter to hit that sweet spot where he hits enough to show up in this search, but not so much that small sample-weirdness starts to even out.

Are modern players beating up on single opponents more than, say, Ted Williams or Babe Ruth beat up on the St. Louis Browns? Just for fun, I looked up Williams’ team-by-team splits from 1941, and he hit .426/.578/.918 in 83 plate appearances against the Browns and .444/.588/.905 in 85 plate appearances against the Philadelphia A’s. Imagine how sick you’d get of watching an all-time great beat the hell out of your team 20 games a year.

All of this is to grease the skids for the notion that in six games against the White Sox, Juan Soto went 10-for-24 with six home runs and nine walks. That’s a wRC+ of 421. When I typed that number out for the first time, I reflexively put a period in front of it, because my brain scans any three-digit number that high as a slugging percentage.

Those six games, out of 136 in total, raised Soto’s seasonal slugging percentage by 34 points and his wRC+ by 11 points. But because he’s a future Hall of Famer in the midst of one of the best seasons of his career — even against good teams — Soto has a pretty high floor.

Let’s take a slightly less accomplished hitter: Alec Bohm. Now, Bohm’s no slouch — he was an All-Star this year and is in the midst of his best full season in the major leagues. What makes him interesting is that, thanks to the interleague play schedule, he got to face the White Sox only three times, totaling 14 plate appearances.

But he made the most of them: 6-for-12 with two home runs, a 340 wRC+. That was good enough to raise his wRC+ five points — again, in just three games.

The player who’s benefited the most from playing the White Sox got a few more cracks at them:

Tigers utilityman Zach McKinstry leads the league in tOPS+ against the White Sox. He hasn’t performed as well as Soto in absolute terms, but he’s coming from a much lower baseline.

McKinstry is having a season in line with his career norms: In the past four seasons, he’s never had a wRC+ lower than 77 or higher than 82. This year, he’s hitting .226/.283/.354, which is a wRC+ of 80, in 98 games.

Seven of those games came against Chicago, and in them McKinstry went 8-for-18 with two home runs. The games against the White Sox account for 7.1% of McKinstry’s season by both games played and plate appearances, but in those seven games he produced 13.8% of his hits, 23% of his weighted runs created, and 50% of his home runs. Against 28 non-White Sox teams, McKinstry’s seasonal wRC+ is 65, not 80.

So what would happen if you were able to wipe this year’s White Sox out of the historical record? Lots of things, most of them frankly insignificant. But if you did, I bet Zach McKinstry would be extremely displeased.