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Hitting .154

Season starts 3 weeks from today if you can believe it. Let's pass some time speculating on projections for prominent White Sox. For pitchers we'll do innings, fWAR and ERA. Position players we'll do fWAR, OPS and HR. We'll start with one of the most surprising players in recent memory: Lucas Giolito. Coming off a season in which he literally went from the worst starter in MLB to one of the 10 best. 2019: 176.2IP, 5.1 fWAR, ERA 3.41 ZIPS: 176IP, 5.2 fWAR, ERA 3.20 Going UNDER on fWAR and OVER on ERA and innings. My best guess is 195IP, 4.8fWAR and ERA 3.70. I'm expecting some regression in K/9 and HR rate. Still thinking he's going to have a very nice year and is a great 2nd starter or if you squint is a decent number 1. Tomorrow will be Yoan Moncada! Another tough one coming off a breakout.

Yea but Dan, have you seen Hahn in FA? Great stuff from Dan Z nonetheless. Pay attention to when he talks about projecting Moncada and others as he's the man behind ZIPS. Much more at the link.

One of the few bright spots of our season at the Major League level has been Tim Anderson. Coming off what was a rough 2017 for him in many ways, he has made huge strides defensively, increased his walk rate, decreased his strikeout rate, become more of a stolen base threat, more of a menace on the bases, more of a home run threat, and still has a very low BABIP (.276, was .328 last year) which suggests better looking offensive numbers by the end of the season. Defensively, he still botches a routine play here and there, but he also makes rangey, flashy plays and has gotten better as the season has progressed. It's been fun to watch him grow and I'm confident we have our shortstop of the future. That said, looking at where he was at the end of last season, it would probably have been considered a surprise to learn that he has likely been our most valuable player through 75 games. While he still has room for improvement, it is clear that he has begun to iron out irritating mistakes and has become a more complete hitter offensively. I'm sure more improvements will come. Watching him improve has given me more faith in improvements from Moncada, and even in the rebuild as a whole. Yoan is similar to Anderson in the sense that he's young, uber talented, and sometimes frustrating to watch. But seeing Anderson slowly but surely put his main concerns to rest with time has made me feel a lot better about Moncada doing the same, perhaps to an even greater extent.

I assume we are just trying to be careful.

Moncada currently has a 0.7 WAR edge on Abreu. Rest of season projections on FG have them essentially as equal players going forward. What do you guys think?