Image credit: Jamie Sabau-USA TODAY Sports
Translated by Marco Gámez.
There’s really no way to redeem the Chicago White Sox in 2024. They won’t be remembered as a team where one or two important young players made their first impact in the majors, or one whose fans could anticipate emotions like those brought on by a superstar individual every time it is his turn to bat or pitch. They don’t have a pleasantly aggressive style, nor interesting and fun personalities. They are simply one of the worst and least enjoyable to watch teams of the last half century. So the biggest thing of the season for Sox fans, the thing they’ll be rubbing their hands a little bit about as they wait to see if it comes to fruition, and what they should be able to get excited about when it happens, will be when they trade Erick Fedde.
If you have to be a team that hardly cares about anything, this isn’t such a terrible thing. It will be better received if the Sox trade a healthy Fedde than if they trade Garrett Crochet, because even if they get more in a trade for Crochet, Sox fans will know that it is a recent first-round pick they are watching go, having only contributed significantly to a destitute iteration of the team. Fedde is every fan’s favorite trade chip during a rebuild: a newcomer, signed for cheap this offseason, who isn’t attached enough to the team to be mourned when sent to another team, but who is still good enough to have suitors lining up for him.
In this case, it’s an especially encouraging sign that Fedde has been so good in his return stateside, from the perspective of White Sox fans. From the moment news of the deal broke, the involvement of Chicago’s new pitching guru, Brian Bannister, in targeting and drafting him in free agency was clear. When Bannister came to town, he brought with him the promise of a new approach on the mound. Bannister believes primarily in natural features and believes in sinking shipments and getting them cut. He doesn’t fit the modern, hyper-optimized vertical mold, even though the Sox’s 2023 ace (Dylan Cease) was as clear an example of that approach as anyone in baseball. Just before the season started, the Sox traded Cease, and the man who took over his vacant job is as good a horizontal movement guy as any good starter in the league. This graphic shows the vertical and horizontal movement of your sinker (gray), changeup (blue), slider (light red), and cutter (dark red).
Fedde, unlike Cease in 2023, has the DRA ready to embrace his resurgence. His 3.78 DRA and 85 DRA- are very similar to his 3.15 ERA. Neither his 22.1% strikeout rate nor his 6.2% walk rate will dazzle you, but together they make for an impressive profile. The heaviness of his sinker and cutter and the way he stretches the zone horizontally have helped him induce a fair amount of ground balls. He’s a legitimately above-average starter, though not an ace.
Although (as Robert Orr pointed out, while wisely naming Fedde the White Sox’s most interesting player in March) Fedde and Bannister talked about the way he reinvented himself in the training facility during the offseason, he hasn’t changed in any way. his repertoire significant. The big exception is his swept pitch, which essentially didn’t exist the last time we saw him this side of the Pacific Ocean. Back then he was more of a curveball and slurve pitcher. The sweeper is a much harder pitch, with less vertical depth but plenty of sweep, capable of fooling a respectable number of batters when combined with the sinker or cutting fastball. His cutter and changeup are also a little firmer, but it’s not a big difference. He hasn’t taken advantage of the extra three miles per hour (5 kph) at all. This graph shows the mph of his pitches, including his curveball (yellow), by year.
Most of all, though, he’s changing the way he attacks hitters, with pitches that look and move like they always have. He’s narrowed his arsenal down to (more or less) three pitches each depending on which side of the plate the batter is on, with two of them leading the way on each side. The sinker and sweeper dominate against righties, with the cutter mixed in as a lesser option. The cutter and changeup are his main weapons against lefties, while he uses the sinker as an occasional surprise attack. Here is his pitch combination against left-handed hitters.
Now comes the big and important test. The Sox have to do well, but they also have to get lucky. Not everyone in MLB believes in Fedde, even after this success. If they were 100 good innings away from believing in him as a playoff-caliber starter, he would have received more than $15 million over two years this winter. Because he signed for so little, he’s easily transferable, but the Sox have to wait and make multiple calls and develop some suitors to determine where and when they can get the most value for a pitcher the team has control over for a while. year and a half more, at a very reasonable price, and with much less than a year and a half of successful past. Each day they wait gives them more information and more influence, but it also increases the risk of Fedde getting injured, torpedoing his courage.
The broader issue here is that Fedde still doesn’t throw 96 or 97 mph. Bannister famously doesn’t believe in the value of vertical movement on the fastball as much as the rest of the league, but right now, the rest of the league is Chris Getz’s constituency, so he has to convince some of his counterparts that they don’t care about it, either. Fedde is an old-school pitcher in a new-school league. The sweeper is a weapon, but he throws it nearly 40% of the time to right-handed hitters. It’s unclear what “unlocks” a team might have in mind against him, and that always makes a potential executive nervous when attempting acquisitions. The rest of the league is probably banking on Fedde getting caught out a bit soon, given the lack of top-end velocity and the compressed vertical band of his effective locations. They probably don’t know what they’ll do if the need to make a major adjustment arises, and that will hurt his value.
Maybe it’s good news for White Sox fans. What the team needs is to hold Fedde another four weeks, let him get off to a bad start, and respond with a good one, where he changes up his sequences a bit or shows an unexpected decision to throw that backdoor sweeper against lefties … or something. It could be almost anything. Given that Fedde is one of the few aesthetically pleasing things about the 2024 Sox, it should be considered good news for South Side fans that he needs to keep pitching for them for a handful more at-bats. They can enjoy those games, and then the Sox can get the kind of value they desperately need to extract from him, with no chance of taking any top-10 picks next year.
The bad news is that he could get hurt or his performance could drop off forever and all that value could evaporate. And the way things have gone for the Sox this year, that seems all too likely. Getz has to gamble. Fedde has to continue his own rebuild. And fans just have to cross their fingers.
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2024-07-01 12:17:09
#White #Sox
