Like millions across the country, minor league players are facing a housing crisis. The practice of using host families to house prospects was put on hold due to the pandemic, leaving players responsible for obtaining their own housing. Things have not gone well. While stories have come to light bit-by-bit, team-by-team, a piece last month by Brittany Ghiroli of The Athletic is one of the more comprehensive looks at the minor league housing crisis to date.

Ghiroli’s story details a number of ways in which minor league players get squeezed by housing, all of which is best summed up by this quote from catcher Caleb Joseph: “Finding a place to put your head at night is the hardest, most stressful thing to do as a minor leaguer.” Joseph would know, as he slept in his team’s clubhouse one year to save on housing.

The comments by Joseph, who spent 2014-2020 in the majors, also underscore that while the situation with host families is specific to this season, housing has long been an issue for minor leaguers. But in light of Ghiroli’s piece and the amount of reporting on this issue recently, I was interested in putting some numbers to the stories players have shared, particularly since housing costs can vary greatly from market to market and minor league teams are scattered across the country. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been an odd year for the Chicago White Sox thus far. The club is leading baseball in pitching WAR behind the dominating trio of… Carlos Rodon, Dylan Cease, and Michael Kopech. Major injuries have and will keep Luis Robert and Eloy Jimenez out of the lineup for much of the season, and their most productive bat to date is a 28-year-old who did not have a major league hit entering the season. But potentially weirder than all that is the way in which Chicago has amassed one of the best offenses in the early portion of the season: the ground ball!

Entering May 28, the White Sox were second in MLB with a 114 wRC+, fourth at 5 runs per game, and second in wOBA at .330. This offensive success is not unprecedented, as last year’s Sox featured a high-power offense as well.

What does stand out is the lack of power from this year’s team. Chicago has the sixth-fewest homers and a league-leading 48.9% ground ball rate (league average is 43.5%). If that rate were to stand for the remainder of the season, it would be the seventh-highest ground ball rate since FanGraphs batted ball data started being collected in 2002. The White Sox also have a 8.9% average launch angle that would be the sixth lowest in the Statcast era. Chicago’s grounder-centric offensive success stands in stark contrast to the other nine clubs that round out the 10 teams with the highest grounder rates since 2002. Read the rest of this entry »