White Sox: The rising kings of Chicago
The Chicago White Sox are poised to take over as the city’s dominant team in 2020
Chicago has always been a Cubs town at heart, and that won’t change in 2020.
What will change is the balance of power. For the first time in nearly a decade, the South Side White Sox are poised to supersede the North Side Cubs as the city’s dominant baseball power in 2020.
Not since 2012 have the White Sox won more games than the Cubs. Since Joe Maddon’s arrival as manager prior to the 2015 season, the Cubs have a .581 collective winning percentage, light years better than the White Sox’ .439 record over the same period.
The Cubs can also claim the 2016 World Series, the 2017 NL Central title and wild card post-season spots in 2015 and 2018. White Sox fans haven’t had a rooting stake in the post-season since 2008, when their heroes won the AL Central but flamed out in four games in the division series round.
At the box office, the Cubs are even more dominant. For more than a quarter century, Chicago’s North Side team has unfailingly outdrawn its South Side team, and that’s irrespective of the teams’ performances. In 2005, when the White Sox won the World Series while the Cubs finished four games under .500, the Cubs out-drew the Sox by three quarters of a million fans.
Since the arrival of the ‘Bleacher Bums’ in 1968 – that’s 51 seasons ago – the White Sox have been the better draw only eight times.
Eighteen different times – including annually since 2014 – the Cubs have out-drawn the White Sox by more than one million fans. Never in their history have the White Sox out-drawn the Cubs by anything close to a million fans.
Those long-held and often inbred loyalties are not about to change. But the power balance undergirding them is likely to change. While the Cubs enter 2020 as a franchise on the cusp of decline, the Sox are poised to emerge as a front-rank team. What follows is a look at the reasons why the White Sox are poised to overtake the Cubs as Chicago’s marquee team.
Young blood
One of the signatures of teams on the rise is the presence of maturing young talent. The Cubs certainly had that in 2016 when they won the World Series with a lineup centered around 24-year-old MVP Kris Bryant, 22-year old Addison Russell, and 23-year-old Javier Baez.
There’s plenty to do to shape the look of both Chicago teams before the 2020 season begins, but as of now all the young blood favors the White Sox. Both teams project to have five players age 25 or younger occupying regular roles next season. The table below shows the 2019 production of each as measured by WAR.
Cubs WAR White Sox WAR
Addison Russell +0.1 Yoan Moncada +4.6
Albert Almora -1.0 Eloy Jimenez +1.4
Vic Caratini +0.9 Lucas Giolito +5.6
Ian Happ +1.2 Dylan Cease -0.2
Nico Hoerner 0.0 Reynaldo Lopez +0.5
Total +1.2 Total +11.9
Based their 2019 performances, the White Sox have far and away the more talent-laden young core. At an average age of 23.6, they are also younger and less experienced than the Cubs youngsters, meaning there is more time for growth.
Raise your hands everybody on the North Side who – following their self-destructive 2019 seasons — expects Ian Happ, Addison Russell and/or Albert Almora Jr. to emerge as stars in 2020. Seeing no hands, we’ll move on.
Trending – position players
Improvement is a process, not a moment. That means one of the key indicators of future success is positive movement over the past several seasons. A team whose central cast isn’t proceeding on an upward tack is a team in trouble.
Here’s another table, this time comparing the change in performance over the past three seasons of each team’s six central position players for 2020. Again, the yardstick is WAR, specifically the change for each player from 2017 to 2019. The more positive the total, the higher of an uptick that team is on.
Cubs Trend White Sox Trend
Anthony Rizzo -0.3 Jose Abreu -2.4
Kris Bryant -2.5 Yasmani Grandal +0.3
Javier Baez +2.0 Tim Anderson +2.9
Kyle Schwarber +2.2 Yoan Moncada +2.9
Willson Contreras -0.8 Eloy Jimenez +1.4
Jason Heyward -0.2 Adam Engle +1.5
Total +0.4 Total +6.6
The data illustrates a fact Cubs fans probably won’t be eager to grasp. The production of their core is static. Worse than that, the centerpieces – Bryant and Rizzo – have both regressed since 2017, although in Rizzo’s case only marginally.
Contreras and Heyward are also static producers, meaning that most of the team’s positionak growth potential lies outside the core. Logically, that would be players we’ve already dissed – Happ, Almora or Russell –or possibly Nico Hoerner, the rookie second baseman-designate.
By contrast, the White Sox’ core is dynamic. With the sole exception of the recently re-signed Abreu, it’s young and development-oriented. Finally, as demonstrated by the bottom lines (+6.6 for the Sox, +0.4 for the Cubs), almost all of the position player growth dynamism rests on the South Side.
Trending – pitchers
Because there are so many uncertainties surrounding the White Sox rotation, at this stage the same exercise performed on each team’s core pitchers yields a less-certain outcome. Of the Sox projected top four starters for 2020, Dylan Cease was lightly used in 2019 and Dylan Covey sat out the entire season recovering from arm surgery.
That means most everything we can project about the Sox rotation flows from the experience of just two arms, Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo Lopez.
The Cubs’ rotation is far more settled, not that that is necessarily a good thing. Between them, Jon Lester, Kyle Hendricks, Yu Darvish and Jose Quintana will average 32.5 years of age next season, a point at which a pitcher’s production can be expected to decline.
Lester, the oldest, will be 36 and coming off a season in which he produced his highest ERA since 2012.
Here’s the table:
Cubs Trend White Sox Trend
Jon Lester +0.6 Lucas Giolito +2.9
Kyle Hendricks -0.1 Reynaldo Lopez -0.7
Jose Quintana -0.8 Dylan Cease -0.2
Yu Darvish +1.6 Dylan Covey +0.2
Total +1.3 Total +2.2
In a calculation of the chances of the White Sox overtaking the Cubs, the least certain aspect is the status of the teams’ pitching staffs. Adding to the uncertainty is the likelihood that the Sox’ 2020 plans will be shaped by events yet to occur, including the potential signing of a free agent arm.
At the same time, the Sox already hold a statistical edge at the key mound positions, and any changes are likely only to increase that advantage.
Flexibility
Perhaps the biggest factor favoring the White Sox’ chances of overtaking the Cubs is the fact that the Sox have substantial payroll flexibility, while the Cubs have virtually none at all. That means the South Siders will be capable of addressing any perceived or developing weaknesses either in advance of the season or as it moves along.
The Cubs are pretty much resigned to following Plan A, the existing cast of characters, minus any they unload for financial reasons. They have virtually no flexibility whatsoever.
Opening day is still a long way off, but as of the moment the Cubs project to start the season with a 40-man payroll of about $213.6 million. That’s about $5.6 million above the $208 million luxury tax threshold.
The Cubs can thank such deals as the combined $63 million they owe Darvish, Heyward and Lester this coming season. Cubs fans have no real beef; the Lester and Heyward deals contributed to the team’s 2016 World Series win, and no price is too high to pay for a ring.
But there are consequences to winning, and the Cubs are paying for that 2016 championship right now.
The more recent signings of Craig Kimbrel ($16 million in 2020), Tyler Chatwood ($13 million in 2020), and Hendricks ($12 million in 2020) further constricted the maneuverability of team president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer. As a group, those are the reasons why the Cubs are discussing trading away Bryant, Contreras, Schwarber and/or Baez.
There may come a time when the White Sox can sympathize with the financial woes of rich teams like the Cubs, but that time Is not now. The Sox approach the 2020 opening day with a projected payroll of $106.2 million. That’s more than $100 million under the luxury tax threshold – probably a meaningless figure for the South Siders – but it’s also nicely short of the franchise’s record payroll of $128 million in 2011.
The recently signed Grandal is the only Sox player who will earn more than $15 million in 2020; unless they trade somebody the Cubs are likely to open 2020 with six such hefty financial commitments. Among them, Anderson, Moncada, Jimenez and Engle – the projected core of the offense for several seasons going forward – won’t even reach arbitration 3 status until 2023 at the earliest.
The schedule
The final factor favoring the White Sox in the 2020 in-city battle is the schedule. Their schedule simply projects to be easier.
Again, it is necessary to acknowledge that much is likely to change from the end of the 2019 season to the beginning of 2020. But it doesn’t take a professional analyst to recognize that the American League Central is likely to be baseball’s weakest division. The White Sox play nearly half their schedule – 76 of their 162 games – against AL Central foes.
More from Call to the Pen
- Philadelphia Phillies, ready for a stretch run, bomb St. Louis Cardinals
- Philadelphia Phillies: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
- Boston Red Sox fans should be upset over Mookie Betts’ comment
- Analyzing the Boston Red Sox trade for Dave Henderson and Spike Owen
- 2023 MLB postseason likely to have a strange look without Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals
The Cubs play 76 times against NL Central teams, two of which – the Cardinals and Brewers – made the 2019 post-season. More than a few analysts see the Cincinnati Reds – with Eugenio Suarez, Trevor Bauer, Sonny Gray, Luis Castillo, Scott Schebler and Aristides Aquino – as an emerging threat.
For what such comparisons are worth, if you rank all 30 teams in order of their 2019 records and then calculate how many times the Cubs and White Sox play each team, it works out that the average 2019 rank of a Cubs opponent is 15.43 among the 30. The comparable figure for the White Sox opponents is nearly a full place worse, 16.38.
In short, the Cubs project to have the harder 2020 schedule.
The Sox will also carry at least a bit of relative momentum into 2020.
For the entirety of 2019, the Cubs had by far the better record, finishing 84-78 compared to the Sox 72-89.
But that 12 and one-half game advantage disappeared almost entirely across the season’s final two months. For August and September, the Sox went 26-30, just one and one-half games worse than the Cubs’ 27-28. And for the final month alone, the White Sox were marginally the better team, going 12-14 to the Cubs’ 11-16.
Next. Konerko's Hall of Fame Case. dark
In short while the Cubs’ performance steadily stagnated and declined through the final third of the 2019 season, the White Sox’ performance steadily matured and improved.