We’re Back!
What better way to return to blogging than to rip on the team that made stupid ball popular, the 2005 White Sox. Looking at their team struggling this year I couldn’t help but notice how many of the same players remain from the World Series winning luck machine. Here’s the majority of the two rosters, with stats for players who are now different. (Podsednik remains but has been injured, while Crede is out for year now but had contributed for most of the season up until this point). The stats for hitters are career AVG/OBP/SLG and career ERA/WHIP/OBA for pitchers.
| Position | 2005 | 2007 |
| 1B | Konerko | - |
| 2B | Iguchi | - |
| SS | Uribe | - |
| 3B | Crede | - |
| LF | Podsednik (.275/.342/.379) | Mackowiak (.259/.332/.406) |
| CF | Rowand (.284/.342/.453) | Erstad (.285/.340/.413) |
| RF | Dye | - |
| C | Pierzynski | - |
| DH | | Thome (.282/.410/.564) |
| SP | Buehrle | - |
| SP | Garcia (4.07/1.30/.254) | Vazquez (4.35/1.27/.259) |
| SP | Contreras | - |
| SP | | - |
| SP | Hernandez (4.13/1.26/.241) | Danks (4.34/1.55/.280) |
| CL | Hermanson (4.21/1.36/.263) | Jenks (3.36/1.30/.238) |
| RP | Cotts (4.55/1.44/.244) | |
| RP | Politte (4.40/1.37/.252) | MacDougal (3.93/1.46/.261) |
| RP | Marte (3.16/1.27/.224) | |
The only player on here who is way past their prime is Erstad, so I think for most of these guys you would expect something like their career line everything else taken equal. Going down the list of changes, Podsednik/Mackowiak is a wash, Rowand is better than Erstad, Thome is better than
The main point I’m trying to make is that taking both of these teams in a vacuum separately, you would expect both to be decent ~.500 teams. In reality one of them overproduced to create an expected Win-Loss of 91-71 and beat that by pure luck alone by 8 wins to finish 99-63, and followed that up with an obscene playoff rampage.
Now if they really had some kind of superior strategy or heart then with the same manager and players they should be able to reproduce it year after year. Maybe not win 99 again, but at least they wouldn’t be sitting at 29-37 in fourth place right now if it were true. What we need to remember though is that while the 2005 Sox weren’t running into outs and giving away other outs through bunting, nearly all of their positional players were outslugging their career averages and their starting pitching was anomalously healthy, leading to absolutely gaudy numbers from 5 journeymen relievers in the pen.
There’s nothing that annoys me more than a team that’s lauded for all the wrong reasons while they continually shoot themselves in the foot in an apparent effort to cancel out all of the good fortune they keep receiving. At least I don’t think anyone of us will have to watch them back in the playoffs anytime soon.
Labels: sabesin2001, White Sox
posted by John at
9:57 PM
2 Comments:
Gah, Dye and Thome were so wasted on that team in 2006.
Dye: .325 EqA/1.007 OPS/10.5 WARP3
Thome: .332/1.014 OPS/7.9 WARP3
Thome's had better years but Dye hasn't come close to that kind of WARP since he posted 20 FRAA in 1999!
(file under: more reasons to hate Ozzie.)
Dye was out of his mind last year. Kind of like Ordonez this year, except his stats will probably finish even better.
The White Sox have benefited from a few outliers propping up their sinking ship for the past couple years and now they're just plain sinking.
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