The Lenyn Sosa in the Coal Mine

Sports teams lie. They just do. Interview after Interview, presser after presser, one-on-one with your favorite beat reporter after one-on-one with your favorite beat reporter, there’s a lot of LIES! These aren’t “cheating on your spouse lies” or “hiding illegal income from the IRS lies”, but they are lies nonetheless. Now those lies probably aren’t material to your viewing experience, they just leave you with FAKE Mike Clevinger promotions and FAKE changes to the White Sox booth. That just means that “your favorite inside source” is reading tea leaves, just like you! And that’s kinda fun! So let’s do that.

The Lenyn Sosa in the Coal Mine

For some stupid reason I can’t get Lenyn Sosa out of my head. I’m not really a Lenyn Sosa fan, nor was I a believer that he could turn his “swing at everything” profile into a productive MLB player. Much to my shock Lenyn Sosa was able to turn a 3.3% BB Rate & 23.3% K Rate approach into a .264 / .293 / .434 slash for a perfectly league average 100 wRC+ with 22 HR’s and 75 RBI in 544 Plate Appearances.

I think sometimes we (read ME) get too deep into stats and what should be the best types of players and not realize that not everyone fits that bill. Not all productive players are going to have 10% BB Rates and look like Billy Beane‘s version of Moneyball. Teams need to get production from all sorts. Lenyn Sosa isn’t the most aesthetic of sorts, but it kinda worked in 2025. I understand he’s ROUGH on defense and he might have the baseball IQ of a potato, but he can swing it, he can make contact with it and he can hit it hard. Important and needed by the baby White Sox.

This thought process further got me thinking. Is Lenyn sort of a sign of failure OR success of the White Sox hitting program? Most White Sox fans are chomping at the bit to trade Sosa away. They see him as a poor defender (check), a poor base runner (check) and a guy who swings at everything (check). But the White Sox kinda need the home runs, they need the power, they need the batting average!

The White Sox hitting program also needs to be able to turn guys that maybe don’t have the perfect plate approach into productive players. Especially those players who provide other things that are valuable to a healthy offense. You’d like your entire offense to be made of Juan Soto‘s, but low and behold there aren’t enough of those to go around. So we improvise. What does Lenyn Sosa do well?

What Does Lenyn Sosa Do Well?

From Chuck Garfien’s interview with Derek Shomon (which you can see HERE), Shomon says (paraphrasing) that Sosa has two super powers. He can make contact with just about anything and he can hit it hard from from line to line. I would say the charts above agree with that. He is an above average producer in Average Exit Velocity, Squared-Up %, Barrel %, Hard Hit % and Bat Speed (we’ll get back to this one momentarily). Sosa is elite at something called Launch Angle Sweet Spot % which you can read up about at the link.

Basically he does a bunch of things pretty well and he stinks at pitch selection. LOL. But what if the White Sox hitting program helped him take the next natural step, whatever that ends up being. I have proposed to Chorizy and MySoxSummer that the approach should be to continue to hone it’s ability to produce home run power. I made the off handed comment that they should just focus on making him the next Nelson Cruz. Not that it’s so easy to create a Nelson Cruz, the fucking guy hit 464 Home Runs, but the point stands that they shouldn’t care about his defense or base running and keep developing the engine that creates higher batting averages and higher home run totals and then figure out where he plays.

If this hitting program can turn Sosa into a legit power source going forward, it’s probably more important than turning the guy that controls the strike zone into a league average hitter. I’ll be watching what happens with Sosa in 2026 as an indicator for this team.

Let’s Circle Back to Something Lenyn Sosa Does Well That the White Sox Don’t Do Well

Average bat speed has become all the rage with the nerds ever since Baseball Savant began posting it up on the website. Anytime there is some brand new metric that the nerds think is important and it becomes public, I expect the White Sox to stink at it. Above is a cut out of the 2025 Season and drum roll please, the White Sox were dead last in it. (In general the good offenses have good average bat speed, but not always, the Cubs are very low and had a good offense, same with the Blue Jays and Dodgers, there’s more than one way to skin a cat).

Bat Speed is (in general) the thing that helps you produce power. Bat Speed tends to be a combination of natural athleticism and approach. Some of the lower bat speed players are your higher batting average players, think Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan. And you don’t necessarily need an above average bat speed to crank dong(ers). Taylor Ward had a 69.5 MPH Avg Bat Speed (league average is 71.7) and blasted 36 homers, so YMMV, but in general, higher is better on balance.

Below are the White Sox and you will see Lenyn Sosa would be on the side that is potentially helping raise this tide.

The White Sox crew has guys you might expect that are above average, Sosa, Michael A. Taylor (or as my guy Cee Jay used to affectionately call him Michael “K” Taylor, lol), Tim Elko, Colson Montgomery and Luis Robert Jr. Hey, wait a minute, who is that at #7 *RECORD SCRATCH*

Derek Hill?

Chris Getz Used To Have a Type, Does He Still Have a Type?

In August of 2024 I wrote a blog called “Does Chris Getz Have A Type?” A smattering of yous actually read it, don’t pretend now, I don’t give a fuck. The thesis of the article was that in the recent deadline trades that Getz was cobbling together a “Type”. That type was very strong hitters in Pitch Selection and Bat Control. In short, these guys were the anti-Lenyn Sosa. I saw this is a revolt against many of the hackers that dominated the White Sox farm system of the previous regime.

However, with Sosa’s moderate success in 2025 and Getz claiming Derek Hill in the final week of the 2025 regular season, maybe they are changing up. As noted above, Hill’s Avg Bat Speed with the Sox was 73.1 MPH, but that’s a super small sample size, his season long Avg Bat Speed including his time with the Marlins was 72.5 MPH, so still healthily above league average. Many of his at the plate characteristics aren’t a far putt from Sosa.

Contrary to Sosa, Hill is a very good defender, in fact a plus defender in center field. This is a fact that my friends at FutureSox were noting in their most recent live stream. They noted that Getz and crew are seemingly building a stronger defensive foundation with their pickups of Hill, Everson Pereira and Tanner Murray. I too have wanted the White Sox to give a bigger focus on defense and it appears that focus is here (at least on the edges). Hang on a second, Pereira is also considered a bit of a hacker, with big speed and power, I wonder what his Average Bat Speed Looks like???

74.1 MPH??? WOW!

More evidence that the initial 1.0 approach is changing. Is this a wholistic plan that’s just starting to come together as the parts become available to them? Is this the Ryan Fuller hitting lab leveraging it’s success in making Colson Montgomery the monster power hitter he was in the second half? Is this just a front office capable of pivoting when the need or opportunity arises? I don’t know. All I know is that what I thought in August of 2024 is no longer the dominant approach and for that I am grateful. Maybe one of your favorite inside sources will tell you what’s really going on…..or not.

-BeefLoaf