The Chicago White Sox, coming out of the worst season in modern major league history, started 2025 with a bang: an 8-1 win over the Angels on Opening Day. They lost the next two games, then pounded the Twins into smithereens on the last day of March. Since then, the Sox have dropped 12 games out of 14 and once again settled like silt on the bottom of the American League standings table.

It’s not going to be their year after all. But I don’t think it’s going to be as miserable as it was in 2024, and Chase Meidroth is one reason why.

Very few teams in professional sports history have been as abjectly terrible as the White Sox, and many years ago, when I was young and callow, I had the misfortune of writing regularly about one of them: the Process-era Philadelphia 76ers. The parallels between these White Sox and those Sixers don’t go very far, but in that time I learned a valuable lesson: Bad is not as miserable to watch as boring.

Believe it or not, I actually have largely positive memories of those horrendous Sixers; even as they went months on end without winning, they cycled through an interesting cadre of unfancied young players and remember-this-guy veterans who might otherwise have been too weird to stick on an NBA roster. I’m sure much of that affection came from a combination of postgraduate boredom and mid-2010s compounding irony, but we had some fun with Tony Wroten and Jerami Grant and Henry Sims, and so on.

Even as I remain pessimistic about Chicago’s team-building process (such as it is) in general, there are individual green shoots and leaves poking out through the morass. Shane Smith is one example; Meidroth is another.

Even based on only three starts’ worth of data, I feel pretty confident declaring Smith to be a valuable big league contributor. A reliever at worst, a no. 3 or no. 4 starter at best, maybe somewhere in between. Because I’ve seen pitchers like him before and I know what they turn into.

Meidroth is a different animal. There’s nobody like him in the league.

Just yesterday, Eric Longenhagen and James Fegan posted our White Sox prospect list, with Smith seventh and Meidroth eighth out of 40 ranked names, with a 45 FV grade on both. (Eric specifically wrote that Meidroth “looks a bit like if Cary Elwes’ character in The Princess Bride just got home from his first semester in a frat.” I read that line, immediately texted Eric: “The Dread Pirate Brian Roberts,” and took the rest of the afternoon off, I was so proud of myself.)

Meidroth is listed at 5-foot-10, 190 pounds. Eric and James put 40s on his run and field tools, and a 45 on his arm. In parts of four seasons in the minor leagues, Meidroth has played 527 2/3 innings at second base, 809 2/3 innings at third base, and 599 innings at short. Calling him a highly contact-oriented groundball hitter doesn’t tell the whole story — I’ll get to that shortly — but it tells enough of the story that you’re probably starting to think I was full of crap when I said Meidroth was unique.

We know this guy, the small and/or stocky singles hitter who ends up at second base because he can’t really defend any other position, and isn’t even especially great there. He doesn’t run well, he doesn’t hit for power, he just hits a bunch of singles and never strikes out.

This is, to a greater or lesser extent, Luis Arraez. A slower Whit Merrifield. Jean Segura with a hole in his glove. A rich man’s Santiago Espinal, a poor man’s Brendan Donovan, a clean-shaven man’s Luis Guillorme.

Any White Sox fans who got this far are probably thinking, “I’d say, ‘We have Nick Madrigal at home,’ but we traded him and aren’t exactly worse off for it.”

There is a key distinction. Here are the career stats for a few of the potential comps for Meidroth I mentioned above, compared to the White Sox infielder’s stats from last year’s minor league season. See if you can spot the difference.

As you can see, most of these guys are free swingers. They can hit everything, so they do hit everything. Not Meidroth. I don’t know if his parents named him “Chase” as a “Boy Named Sue”-style challenge, but he doesn’t. Chase, that is. His career is one long rebuke of nominative determinism.

Last season, Meidroth had the third-lowest chase rate in Triple-A. He swung at 30.7% of the pitches he saw, regardless of location. That was the lowest swing rate in Triple-A, and would’ve been the lowest in the majors (ahead of Juan Soto, good guess) by 6.2 percentage points. Meidroth was 17% more selective than Soto last year; the difference between Meidroth and Soto was the same as Soto and Tyler Stephenson, who had the 24th-lowest overall swing rate in the majors.

It beggars belief. We’ve seen plenty of hitters in the Arraez genus who don’t swing that often: Steven Kwan, Sal Frelick… Geraldo Perdomo is probably a bit of a stretch, but he’s in the neighborhood. But nobody swings as infrequently as Meidroth. Last year, Ceddanne Rafaela and Ezequiel Tovar swung more frequently at pitches outside the strike zone than Meidroth swung at pitches within it.

I’m fascinated to see how well Meidroth’s approach translates to the majors. He’s never hit double-digit homers in a minor league season, and I don’t think he’s going to put up high-teens walk rates in the big leagues no matter what he does, but if he can hit in the high .200s with… let’s call it a 12% walk rate, he’ll be in the top 10 in the league in OBP, and at that point he can be an above-average regular even if he doesn’t field his position well or hit for power.

The fact that Kwan can do this doesn’t exactly prove that Meidroth can, but it ought to give Meidroth’s backers hope.

If it all falls apart for Meidroth, it’ll be because major league pitchers have better command than their Triple-A counterparts. How Meidroth deals with this will determine whether he gets labeled as discerning or passive.

Last season, 42.7% of the pitches Meidroth saw were in the shadow attack zone — around the edge of the strike zone. That was the 42nd-highest percentage out of the 309 Triple-A hitters who saw 1,000 pitches or more, and within that zone Meidroth posted a .374 OBP, which was 16th out of 309. That’s very good.

But Meidroth swung at just 33.5% of pitches within the shadow zone, the lowest mark of any Triple-A hitter with a representative sample. Separating that even further into pitches inside the zone versus out of the zone, Meidroth swung at 28.4% of balls in the shadow zone, compared to 37.7% of strikes.

We’re talking about a small target for pitchers to hit — a little more than three inches wide at the sides of the strike zone, and four inches tall at the top and bottom. But if a pitcher can hit it, two out of three times Meidroth is going to give him a free called strike.

To illustrate this point, I’ve invented a stat I’m going to call Discernment Rate. Don’t bother remembering the name; I’m probably never going to use it again. It’s swing rate on shadow zone strikes minus swing rate on shadow zone balls. Meidroth’s discernment rate in Triple-A last year is 9.3% — 37.7% minus 28.4%.

That would’ve been in the fourth percentile among major league hitters since the start of the 2024 regular season. Kwan, if we want to keep using him as a comp, had a discernment rate of 18.0%.

It is possible for a hitter like Meidroth to hold his own while treating all edge case pitches more or less the same. Arraez has a lower discernment rate, and Frelick is not that much higher at 10.4%. But both of those hitters are much more aggressive at the edge of the zone than Meidroth — almost twice as aggressive, in Arraez’s case.

And that’s probably an adjustment Meidroth will have to make in the big leagues. Because right now, this is the kind of take I’m worried about.

It’s the first pitch of the at-bat, but if word gets out that Meidroth is going to take 93 at the letters for strike one, every pitcher in the league is going to oblige him.

We’ll see how he does. Every hitter has to learn some new tricks on first contact with big league opposition; Meidroth is no exception. Unfortunately, the higher level of competition might force the White Sox rookie to become less weird. In which case, he’ll just have to be good.