It could be fun to fix Luis Robert

Translated by Fernando Battaglini

The 2024 White Sox were baseball’s answer to the Titanic. There were many warnings that it was coming, but tragically, it was too late for the organization to turn away from the calamity. The result was a disaster so mismanaged that it could change the way teams are run on the brink of a horrible rebuild for years to come. There were also some unnecessary casualties, because perfectly saveable players were not moved to safety when they could have been.

The prettiest corpse of all is Luis Robert Jr., whose campaign, marked by injuries and regressions, was undoubtedly part of the problem, but who became a popular name early in the trade market, only to become essentially untradeable to mid-July. Robert had one of the most baffling and disturbing seasons of the many miserable seasons that made up the White Sox summer because, although it was cut short again by injuries, there is no adequate explanation for how bad it was. In 2023, at age 25, he had his healthiest (and therefore best) season to date, posting a DRC+ of 123 and hitting 38 home runs. Even though the Sox that year lost 101 games, it was arguably more than a silver lining. He broke through the clouds, with brilliant defense plus a thunderous bat. It was as if Juan González had played a defense of the caliber of Jim Edmonds.

Obviously, Robert was an unfinished product, even in his mid-20s. With swing rates (and especially chase rates) that everyone understood to be unsustainable, I needed to make some changes in approach. The challenge of his campaign at age 26 would be to mix just a minimum of selectivity with his lethal aggressiveness. It didn’t have to be much, because he was so successful at being aggressive within the zone that his tendency to chase got him into less trouble than one might expect. He had a 14.1 SEAGER in 2023, which is surprisingly average (average is more than enough, when one tends to hit the ball very hard and get it up in the air quite often, and when one has elite speed).

Robert also became a little more selective in 2024. He reduced his chase rate from 43.5% to 39.2%. That’s good news. And that is, unequivocally, where the good news ends.

Instead of seeing the ball better and passing up non-strike pitches for greater efficiency, Robert was simply swinging less as a matter of course. His swing rate in the zone dropped more than his chase rate, and while that was inevitable (his 79.6% swing rate in the zone for 2023 is almost implausible; have you ever seen a hitter swing four of every five pitches?), this is not true: his swing rate on each pitch type increased, his 90th percentile exit velocity decreased, he pulled the ball less and lifted it less. Specifically, Robert’s swing rate on hard pitches in the strike zone skyrocketed, as did his swing rate on breaking pitches outside the strike zone. He was caught guessing more often, so his called strike rate skyrocketed to 13.7% of all pitches. It’s not a high number, but it is kept low thanks to his high swing rate. If this tendency to take a lot of swings is combined with his rising strikeouts and called strikes, the strikes filled his at-bats like water filled the ship’s cabins. It’s impossible to survive that. Robert’s DRC+ plummeted to 83, and no one wanted him at a price that would make him worth Chris Getz’s time.

The White Sox still have Robert under contract through 2025, for $15 million. They can keep him through 2027 for no more than $20 million per year. Six months ago, he was one of the players in his prime with the most obvious surplus value in baseball. Now, it’s a question of whether he can recover enough to ensure the team wants to exercise his option for 2026. It’s a huge t-factor, because if you’re not generous with the White Sox’s organizational competence, you can make a pretty strong argument that a rebound is coming. Adjusting and improving his wild approach was going to be a difficult job, because it was partly his extremism in terms of swing rate that made him good, despite his flaws. Now, he is neck-deep in his weaknesses, and he will have to fight his way out of them. It’s not as simple as going back to your old approach, because that approach was fragile and is now broken.

However, given his extraordinary talent, could better training help him find his way again? It seems eminently possible. The White Sox should know that they were a terrible team from start to finish in 2024, and therefore should approach the collapse of their best hitter with a touch of hope and skepticism. Did it really go bad or does everything just stink around it? Will better training and an overall less toxic team environment make it fairly easy for you to leverage your talent? That seems almost certain. However, three key questions still remain:

1. Can the White Sox successfully detoxify their locker room and dugout over the winter?
2. Even if they did, can they afford to spend a considerable portion of the payroll they’re trying to cut waiting to find out how well Robert responds?
3. Even if they can afford it, is it the best option, overall? Or should they trade him for something that could make their 2027-30 seasons more promising, even if it means deepening the darkness of their 2025-26 campaigns?

The answer to the last question probably depends largely on how much the suitors are willing to pay for Robert. In the middle of the race, no one was going to shell out money to sign him and try to turn it around at full speed in a title race. If Titanic couldn’t avoid that iceberg, it’s fair to assume Robert couldn’t have turned around his disastrous season quickly enough to help a contender. Now, however, a team that acquires him would have an entire winter season and spring training to retrain their potential new star. In terms of raw talent, he still outperforms almost every other player available this winter. More than almost any other player in the game, his value depends on how much that talent can be polished to remove a year’s worth of tarnish.

Buyers will be looking to get him for very little, and the White Sox should have no interest in that. Robert is too good to leave lying on the sidewalk like a bulky, broken appliance or piece of furniture. However, due to his contract and the baggage of a brutal campaign, he also won’t sell at the price his elite potential would tend to dictate. Somewhere between those extremes, hopefully, there is a meeting point between supply and demand. Robert deserves a bailout from the team that nearly sank his career with mismanagement in 2024. It’s a question of whether the right towboat arrives at the wreck in time.