2025 Team Previews - Chicago White Sox
As part of my 2025 team previews series, I go through all fantasy-relevant players on the Chicago White ahead of the 2025 season.
Check out the intro and team links page here.
Here we go, girls and boys! These team previews might be the most fun thing I write all year, and we’re back for a third year doing them. Hit that link above for a full explanation of the team previews. I will host the links to all 30 teams as I go on that page, so it’s a good one to bookmark.
Intro
I write these in reverse order of last year’s standings, so we start with the South Siders. The White Sox won all of 41 games last year. They arguably generated only one positive value in the fantasy game (Garrett Crochet), although you could make a case for Luis Robert and his 14-homer, 23-steal season. Bottomline - there are not many names we need to worry about for 2025.
I mentioned this last year in the White Sox preview, but I tried to be a White Sox fan in 2021. I had just moved from Pittsburgh to northern Indiana, and the White Sox were coming off of a couple of strong seasons and had a very young and exciting roster. The whole Pirates thing wasn’t working for me, so with the new life I was starting with my family, I thought I could maybe become a fan of a new baseball team. It didn’t help that the Sox were immediately trash, and have bottomed out recently to levels I didn’t think possible, but I’m confident it was a lost cause from the beginning.
Our brains seem to lock stuff in from those early years. Most of the things I remember from being a young kid were either very exciting or very scary moments. You lock in long term memories much more effectively when there are inordinate emotions going along with it. That doesn’t directly apply to me being a slave to Pirates fandom, but it must be similar neurologically.
That said, we are all capable of mental feats we don’t originally think possible. It is possible to beat depression, to overcome long odds, and it is possible to stop giving things to a sports team that won’t give you anything back. You can do it.
I highly encourage all White Sox fans right now to become bandwagon fans. Seventeen-year-old me would be appalled at this, but seventeen-year-old me was stupid. Stop watching those August and September Pirate games, young Jon - go read a freaking book or lift some weights.
What I am saying is that you can dump the White Sox temporarily. Wait until they are good again, and then come back. They will take you back, I promise. Fairweather is the best weather. The bandwagon is the best wagon.
The Roster
I will be utilizing the great Roster Resource pages via FanGraphs for this series. They are extremely useful, so I will give them the shoutout they deserve.
If you are spending any amount of money on fantasy baseball resources, I recommend giving it to ME - but I also recommend becoming a paid member at FanGraphs. They deserve our support, and it’s a friendlier experience without the ads.
Here’s what the White Sox lineup is projected to be as of right now:
That is as of November 14th, so it’s extremely unlikely that is how things end up in late March. That said, it’s unlikely to change that much. They certainly won’t be overly active in free agency. Maybe you see them shed one of those veterans in search of young talent, but my money would be on the bigger names sticking there, at least until the 2025 trade deadline.
The best 2024 OPS of the bunch was below .700 - a remarkable statistic. There is just one player here who is sure to be drafted in your leagues, and that’s Luis Robert, but I’ll talk about more than just him.
The pitching rotation:
It sounds like Crochet is very likely to be traded this off-season. Regardless of that, he will be an SP1 or SP2 pick in your league. Drew Thorpe might still be worth watching early on. But that will about do it from this rotation. I don’t see any way they add anybody relevant this offseason.
The bullpen:
You can be sure that the White Sox will win more games this year, but that does not mean they’ll get into the territory where they have a useful closer for fantasy purposes. If somebody does step up in that role and becomes a dominant closer, that would be something to look toward in deeper leagues - but at the beginning of the season, I would say it’s best to ignore this bullpen.
Hitters
First, I want to give you an idea of how much a bad lineup can hurt us for fantasy purposes. Arizona led the league in runs with 886 last season. The league average was 711. The White Sox came in at 507. That 507 was 71% below average.
Let’s say we take a league-average player who scored 90 runs in 2024 and put them on the White Sox. That would carve off 26 runs. A way we can look at run-scoring efficiency is to take a team’s total bases and divide it by how many runs they scored. So it’s TB/R.
It took the Diamondbacks 3.48 total bases to score a run (I included walks and HBP in the total base calculation), which was 10% above the league average. It took the White Sox 4.47 total bases to generate a run, which was 16% more than average. For further comparison, the Athletics were the worst in the league in 2023 at 4.36 total bases (13% more than average).
It’s almost certain that things will improve in this regard for Chicago. Even if the lineup is the same, there will still be some natural regression toward the mean - it’s hard to be as bad as the White Sox were in 2024. But even so, you’re talking about at least a 10% reduction in runs and RBI per total base. That hurts, and it’s a real reason to drop these guys down the fantasy ranks.
Luis Robert Jr.
Age: 27
Pos: OF
Robert has a 38-homer, 20-steal season under his belt, and he’s still just 27 years old. That makes him very relevant for our purposes. That was 2023. He performed worse almost across the board in 2024.
He once again failed to play a full season, and all of the skill indicators besides steals and stolen base attempt rate moved in the wrong direction.
K%: 29% → 33%
Brl%: 15% → 10%
Cont%: 67% → 64%
It may be proper to attribute some of that decline to injury. He went on the IL on April 6th with a right hip flexor injury and did not return until June 4th. So that’s two months out with a hip injury - pretty significant. I’ve never played baseball at a level higher than recreational, but I would imagine it would be pretty tough to swing a baseball bat with a bad hip.
There’s something interesting in his maximum exit velocity:
I’m not sure what that means, and I don’t think it’s something we should get hung up on (especially because that 2023 season was the 38-homer one), but there’s some kind of significant change there. I imagine that Robert just consciously decided to stop swinging out of his shoes like he was at times as a younger player.
Robert has skills. He has big upside with the power and speed (he was still in the 88th percentile in sprint speed in 2024). The team context chops off a good bit of that upside; there won’t be many runs and RBI to go around. I cannot truly say that Robert has even a top-20 hitter upside for 2025. The good news is that he won’t go anywhere near the top 20 hitter picks.
The three big issues I see are:
Team Context
Injury History
Lack of Career Consistency
That’s enough for me to be out on him, but that isn’t to say that I would pass on him if he’s still hanging around in the 12th round.
I am doing my ranks one player at a time, so Robert is #1 for now.
My gut feeling is that he’ll end up around outfielder #15-#20. I don’t want him as my OF1, but in a five-outfielder league, you could do worse for an OF2. If you do find yourself in a draft room where he falls several rounds past ADP, I would be jumping at that opportunity. The ceiling is great, and outfielders are generally pretty replaceable if he does get hurt.
Projection:
The first run of my projections is done, but there are still tweaks and improvements to come. By the time the season begins, these projections will all have changed slightly. It is still very useful to see them as we build out the ranks, and my projection system graded out very well compared to the other systems in 2024.
I tried to build in the injury history by giving him a conservative projection of 490 PAs. Keep that in mind because if he stays healthy, he will almost surely exceed this projection.
The dollar figure auction value you see is based on a 12-team league with a $260 budget where 350 players are drafted. Those are only useful if you compare them to other players, the dollar value by itself does not tell you much.
490 PA, 80 R, 20 HR, 68 RBI, 18 SB, .235/.298/.425, $9.12 roto value
Andrew Vaughn
Age: 26
Pos: 1B
It was a big deal when Andrew Vaughn made the White Sox team out of Spring Training in 2021. He was one of the game’s top hitting prospects, and the White Sox were a very good team at the time. Vaughn has always handled himself well enough in the Majors. There are few questions about whether or not he’s a big-league player, but you’d have to consider his career .254/.311/.416 line a disappointment, given the original hype.
Like many of his teammates, Vaughn had his worst season in 2024.
The home run production has been consistent in the 17-21 range, but there are no steals, and the best batting average he’s mustered has still been just “fine” for fantasy purposes.
There’s still room for growth and improvement at age 26. I’d expect Vaughn to perform better in 2025 after the team turns the page on that record-breaking 2024 season, but we generally know who Vaughn is.
The good news is that he this the ball pretty hard:
Remember that the 90th-percentile EV mark we’re looking for is above 105. We’d like much higher than that, of course, but if you’re getting to 105 - that means you have the power to consistently rack up 20+ homers in the Majors.
One improvement he made last year was that he lifted the ball more. You can see the launch angle histogram there. It looks pretty nice.
Andrew Vaughn GB% / Average LA By Year:
2021: 44% / 9.6°
2022: 48% / 7.3°
2023: 44% / 11.2°
2024: 39% / 16.6°
It’s surprising to me that a 39% GB% and a 105.2 90th-percentile EV only turned in 19 homers. His HR/Brl was low at 42%, and that is due to his extremely low pull rate. Only 22% of his barrels were pulled, which was fifth-lowest among players with at least 30 barrels. League-wide, the average is around 40%.
The rosiest projection I could see is something like 75 runs, 25 homers, and 90 RBI with a .275 batting average. That’s a 90th percentile outcome, I’d say, but that would be more than useful for a fantasy league. The downside is probably what we saw in 2024 (55 runs, 19 homers, 70 RBI, .247 AVG).
If you’re in a league that drafts 300 players or so, you don’t need to worry about Vaughn. I will say that in leagues where 400-500+ players are drafted, Vaughn is a pretty decent late-round bat. He drove in 70 runs on one of the worst offenses of all time - that’s a pretty decent RBI floor for a guy who is still in his prime years.
Rank
Projection:
630 PA, 73 R, 23 HR, 80 RBI, 3 SB, .247/.306/.423, $6.99 roto value
Andrew Benintendi
Age: 30
Pos: OF
One of the quietest breakouts of the 2024 season was Benintendi and his 20 homers.
That would seem to have been a conscious decision after he managed just ten homers in his previous two seasons. What’s very interesting is that he still slugged under .400, and he matched his .397 SLG from his five-homer 2022 season.
You see there that the K% came up four points to 18% (still a very good number), and that’s expected when you’re trying to add power. You’re swinging harder and in a more upper-cut fashion, and a higher whiff rate is a natural byproduct of that. Let’s look at other stat changes from 2023 to 2024:
Brl%: 2.9% → 6.3%
Cont%: 81% → 79%
GB%: 40% → 38%
Avg LA: 14.4° → 16.0°
EV 90: 99.1 → 100.8
Pull%: 31% → 45%
That pull rate increase was the biggest positive change in the league by far.
Looking at his season trend, we see that he did a ton of his damage very late. A dozen of those 20 homers came in the final two months, and he slugged well above .500 in that time:
March - July: .203/.255/.317, 8 HR
Aug - Sept: .275/.346/.538, 12 HR
His .538 SLG after August 1st ranked 18th-best in the league.
So we’re looking at two versions of Benintendi. The guy from 2022 through July of 2024 who was one of the worst hitters in the league and probably not even deserving of a spot in a starting lineup, and then a very good hitter for two months at the end of this most recent season.
2022-July 2024: 1,473 PA, .687 OPS
Aug-Sep 2024: 187 PA, .893 OPS
I think it would be foolish to put much stock into those final two months. But it is not as though anybody is going to. There’s no way this guy gets drafted in anything close to a standard league.
The thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that he stole just three bags all year; that part of his game is long gone (29 total steals from 2021-2023).
Benintendi is an OF4 or OF5 option in a 15-team league. He’ll make $17 million in 2025, so the playing time will be there as long as he’s healthy. That can very well turn into a 60-run, 15-homer, 60-RBI season. The volume alone plays in certain league setups, so keep that in mind.
Rank
Projection
578 PA, 67 R, 12 HR, 58 RBI, 9 SB, .256/.320/.384, <$1 roto value
Miguel Vargas
Age: 25
Pos: 3B/OF
Vargas came to the White Sox in the Michael Kopech trade. That made a lot of people feel pretty bad for the guy, going from the best team in the league to the worst. It did result in him getting some playing time, so we have some more data on Vargas as we head into 2025.
Let’s go chronologically. Vargas tore up AAA from 2022-2023:
810 PA, .300/.406/.505, .911 OPS, 16.4% K%, 14.4% BB%, 28 HR, 24 SB
The Dodgers were able to find him a little bit of playing time in the Majors from 2022-2024, but he did not do much with it:
433 PA, .201/.294/.364, .658 OPS, 20.8% K%, 11.1% BB%, 11 HR, 5 SB
After the trade to the White Sox:
153 PA, .098/.209/.167, .376 OPS, 26.1% K%, 10.5% BB%, 2 HR, 2 SB
The strikeouts and walks aren’t a huge issue. The problem is the quality of contact. His career .282 xwOBA is a huge problem. He simply doesn’t hit the ball hard enough to put up useful MLB numbers at the plate. At the age of 24 (he’ll be 25 at the beginning of next season), he’s not completely out of time for future development, but it’s not like this is a 19-year-old kid still rounding into physical form.
Rank
Projection
501 PA, 48 R, 13 HR, 48 RBI, 13 HR, 9 SB, .206/.303/.344, <$1 roto value
Pitchers
The same team context business applies to pitchers but in a less severe manner. The only category your league likely has that relates to a pitcher’s teammates would be wins. The expectation for the White Sox will be something like 55 wins, about 20 less than the league average, so wins will be tougher to come by.
Garrett Crochet
Age: 25
The lone true bright spot on the 2024 White Sox was Crochet. He was phenomenal in his first year as a starter:
32 GS, 146 IP, 6 W, 3.58 ERA, 1.07 WHIP, 35.1% K%, 5.5% BB%, 1.1 HR/9
That is a 29.6% K-BB%, which led all starting pitchers. There’s not a single mediocre number to be found with the guy:
SwStr%: 17.6% (#1 in league)
Strike%: 53.2% (#1)
Ball%: 32.3% (#15)
WHIP+: 1.71 (#25)
OPS Allowed: .642 (#28)
Read about what WHIP+ is here.
He did give up a home run rate that was around league average, but his 45% GB% suggests that isn’t going to be an issue moving forward.
What we need to figure out with Crochet is:
Can he do it again?
How will he be used?
What team will he play for?
Crochet was a reliever prior to this season, and he threw just 25 innings in all of 2023. When the All-Star Break hit, the White Sox had a choice on their hands. He had thrown 107 sparkling innings, but the team was already well out of contention. What they chose to do was to keep him on the regular schedule but limit him to a max of four innings the rest of the way. His final dozen starts:
38.2 IP (3.2 IP/GS), 5.12 ERA, 1.40 WHIP, 34.9% K%, 5.9% BB%, 1.9 HR/9
The K-BB% was still elite, but you can see that he gave up a bunch of homers (eight, to be precise) and did not strand many runners. Those things bloated the ERA substantially.
He’s set up for 160-170 innings in 2025, provided that he can stay healthy. He’s not the best bet in the world in terms of staying healthy, but I don’t like to be a guy trying to predict that stuff. His arm held up for a full seven months in 2024, so I don’t want to assume he can’t add a little more work to it in 2025 and be fine.
Checking on the pitch mix:
It’s all very good. The four-seamer is great, and he locates it extremely well. He backs that up with a cutter, which was awesome at getting whiffs and ground balls. He also has three other non-fastball options to use when he gets ahead with those fastballs. He also has that deception that most tall left-handed pitchers have; he’s very tough to hit.
Overall, I’m pretty optimistic about the guy. A 29.6% K-BB% over 146 innings isn’t something you can luck into, and I imagine the price will be pretty affordable with his second-half ERA and team context.
He will also get a bump upward in the ranking if a trade does happen; the win context can only improve.
I’ll rank Crochet aggressively. I can’t tell you what that means yet because he’s the first man on the list, but I imagine he remains in the top 15 as we go through all of this.
Projection:
31 GS, 161 IP, 7 W, 3.81 ERA, 1.24 WHIP, 196 SO, 55 BB, 28.8% K%, 8.0% BB%
Drew Thorpe
Age: 24
First things first: Thorpe had elbow surgery in September but expects to be ready in time for Spring Training.
This is a guy who was traded twice last offseason before finally ending up on the White Sox. He was once again awesome in the minor leagues and got a mid-season call-up to the Majors.
Thorpe has some of the best minor league stats you’ll find. From 2023-2024:
34 GS, 199.1 IP, 2.17 ERA, 0.95 WHIP, 31.3% K%, 7.2% BB%, 0.72 HR/9
That got him a call-up to the Majors in June. Here’s what it looked like:
9 GS, 44.1 IP, 5.48 ERA, 1.26 WHIP, 13.2% K%, 11.1% BB%, 2.1% K-BB%
The SIERA landed at 5.85, so he was even a bit lucky with that bad ERA. He was very bad. Here’s where he lined up on the Ball% vs. Strike% plot:
It’s only nine starts, and it was his first go at Major League hitters. There are plenty of Hall of Fame pitchers who did not start well. The reason I’m very much down on Thorpe is the fastball.
The pitch averaged just 91.0 miles per hour. Hitters swung and missed at just 3% of them. And you can add on to that the horrible command of the pitch (40% Ball!), and you’re looking at a guy that just isn’t going to cut it in the Majors. That isn’t to say he can’t improve the pitch. He almost surely can’t get the pitch above 93mph, but there’s a lot of room for improvement in the command.
People love to talk about his changeup, and for good reason - it’s a good pitch. But a changeup is only as good as the pitches it… changes up. It’s extremely rare to find a starting pitcher who has an extended period of success without at least a decent fastball.
Thorpe will be cheap, but in my opinion, he’s not worthy of a roster spot in any fantasy league.
Projection:
19 GS, 107 IP, 6 W, 4.36 ERA, 1.39 WHIP, 94 SO, 43 BB, 20% K%, 9.1% BB%
Sean Burke
Age: 25
The White Sox are going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for innings next year, especially if Crochet does get moved. Sean Burke is projected to join the rotation, and he is a guy that could be of some streaming interest. Last year, in AAA:
16 GS, 64 IP, 4.62 ERA, 1.29 WHIP, 31% K%, 13% BB%, 1.7 HR/9
If we look at the advanced data, we see a very nice 15.7% SwStr% with a 49% Strike% in AAA.
That earned him a call-up to the Majors in September. He made one relief appearance and three starts.
It’s just 19 innings, but a 29% K% and a 9% BB% is impressive. Let’s check the pitch mix:
The fastball velocity isn’t anything to get overly excited about, but it’s in the acceptable range, and the pitch worked extremely well in this sample. The slider was also great on 88 offerings with that 22% SwStr% and 48% Strike%.
These numbers are all pretty exciting. The Stuff+ landed at 106, so that’s a good sign as well. It’s far too small of a sample to believe in, but Burke is a sneaky name to watch early on.
Projection
23 GS, 142 IP, 4 W, 3.94 ERA, 1.28 WHIP, 152 SO, 51 BB, 25% K%, 8.5% BB%
Prospects
Noah Schultz
Age: 21
Schultz is the White Sox top prospect currently. He’s a 6’9’’ left-handed pitcher. Seeing that was enough for me to know I had to write the guy up. There are two natural advantages that pitchers can have. They can be:
Tall
Left Handed
Being tall helps you release the ball closer to the hitter, getting rid of valuable milliseconds of reaction time for the hitter. I don’t fully understand why being left-handed is an advantage, but it is. So we have a guy that is going to be throwing from an arm slot and release point that hitters have rarely seen, if ever.
Here’s what the kid did in 2024:
23 GS, 88.1 IP, 2.24 ERA, 0.98 WHIP, 32.1% K%, 6.7% BB%, 0.31 HR/9
Going back to 2023, he has a 33% K% and 6.5% BB% with a 2.03 ERA and a 0.95 WHIP in the minors. He made 16 of 23 starts last year in AA, so he’s not too far from the big leagues.
The workload and organizational context might keep him away from the Majors in 2025. He was capped at four innings all year; that is as far as they allowed him to go. So he pitched all year on a normal(ish) schedule but still did not reach 100 innings. That’s a sign that the White Sox might be really easing his way up to the Majors. We could be looking at 100-120 innings in 2025, and he will certainly start in the minors.
He’s not someone you’re going to draft in a redraft league next year, but for a dynasty or keeper league situation, it’s a very enticing profile. The fastball is in the mid-90s, but as a 6’9’’ left-hander, that pitch plays in the upper-90s.
I don’t find any hitting prospects worth a write-up, so that does it for these Chicago White Sox. This whole post was free for all to read, but moving forward, the bulk of these posts will be behind the paywall. So subscribe today to get the full write-ups for the rest of the 29 teams.
I can't believe I read a ChiSox fantasy preview on 11/25 close enough to have both a very minor error to point out (Benintendi is 30 yrs old, not 26) , and to ask a question- you're not impressed at all with the catching prospect Edgar Quero? I just happened to read something on BA gushing over him. Thanks for these, I'll be taking the ride along with you as I build my rankings.