{"id":49254,"date":"2025-04-18T15:09:49","date_gmt":"2025-04-18T15:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportnews.azontree.com\/?p=49254"},"modified":"2025-04-18T15:09:49","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T15:09:49","slug":"by-meidroth-i-care-not-a-man-can-swing-but-once","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sportnews.azontree.com\/?p=49254","title":{"rendered":"By Meidroth, I Care Not; A Man Can Swing but Once"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"By
Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not going to be their year after all. But I don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to be as miserable as it was in 2024, and Chase Meidroth is one reason why. <\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t go very far, but in that time I learned a valuable lesson: Bad is not as miserable to watch as boring.<\/p>\n

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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

Even as I remain pessimistic about Chicago\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Even based on only three starts\u2019 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\u2019ve seen pitchers like him before and I know what they turn into.<\/p>\n

Meidroth is a different animal. There\u2019s nobody like him in the league.<\/p>\n

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 \u201clooks a bit like if Cary Elwes\u2019 character in The Princess Bride<\/em> just got home from his first semester in a frat.\u201d I read that line, immediately texted Eric: \u201cThe Dread Pirate Brian Roberts,\u201d and took the rest of the afternoon off, I was so proud of myself.)<\/p>\n

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\u2019t tell the whole story \u2014 I\u2019ll get to that shortly \u2014 but it tells enough of the story that you\u2019re probably starting to think I was full of crap when I said Meidroth was unique.<\/p>\n

We know this guy, the small and\/or stocky singles hitter who ends up at second base because he can\u2019t really defend any other position, and isn\u2019t even especially great there. He doesn\u2019t run well, he doesn\u2019t hit for power, he just hits a bunch of singles and never strikes out.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Santiago Espinal, a poor man\u2019s Brendan Donovan, a clean-shaven man\u2019s Luis Guillorme.<\/p>\n

Any White Sox fans who got this far are probably thinking, \u201cI\u2019d say, \u2018We have Nick Madrigal at home,\u2019 but we traded him and aren\u2019t exactly worse off for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s stats from last year\u2019s minor league season. See if you can spot the difference.<\/p>\n

\n

Fate of the Slappybois<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Name<\/th>\nBB%<\/th>\nK%<\/th>\nwRC+<\/th>\nGB\/FB<\/th>\nO-Swing%<\/th>\nZ-Swing%<\/th>\nO-Contact%<\/th>\nZ-Contact%<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
Nick Madrigal<\/td>\n4.6%<\/td>\n9.0%<\/td>\n88<\/td>\n2.77<\/td>\n29.8%<\/td>\n59.7%<\/td>\n81.8%<\/td>\n96.2%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Luis Arraez<\/td>\n6.8%<\/td>\n6.7%<\/td>\n119<\/td>\n1.40<\/td>\n27.7%<\/td>\n63.0%<\/td>\n88.4%<\/td>\n95.2%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Santiago Espinal<\/td>\n7.1%<\/td>\n13.8%<\/td>\n90<\/td>\n1.19<\/td>\n25.4%<\/td>\n65.5%<\/td>\n69.5%<\/td>\n91.2%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Jean Segura<\/td>\n5.4%<\/td>\n13.9%<\/td>\n96<\/td>\n2.10<\/td>\n32.5%<\/td>\n63.5%<\/td>\n72.1%<\/td>\n91.1%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Chase Meidroth*<\/td>\n18.8%<\/td>\n12.7%<\/td>\n132<\/td>\n1.95<\/td>\n18.3%<\/td>\n43.2%<\/td>\n79.6%<\/td>\n93.6%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2025 MLB Avg.<\/td>\n9.1%<\/td>\n22.6%<\/td>\n100<\/td>\n1.10<\/td>\n28.4%<\/td>\n64.6%<\/td>\n55.6%<\/td>\n84.8%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

*2024 in Triple-A<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As you can see, most of these guys are free swingers. They can hit everything, so they do hit everything. Not Meidroth. I don\u2019t know if his parents named him \u201cChase\u201d as a \u201cBoy Named Sue\u201d-style challenge, but he doesn\u2019t. Chase, that is. His career is one long rebuke of nominative determinism.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

It beggars belief. We\u2019ve seen plenty of hitters in the Arraez genus who don\u2019t swing that often: Steven Kwan, Sal Frelick\u2026 Geraldo Perdomo is probably a bit of a stretch, but he\u2019s in the neighborhood. But nobody swings as infrequently as Meidroth. Last year, Ceddanne Rafaela and Ezequiel Tovar swung more frequently at pitches outside<\/em> the strike zone than Meidroth swung at pitches within it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m fascinated to see how well Meidroth\u2019s approach translates to the majors. He\u2019s never hit double-digit homers in a minor league season, and I don\u2019t think he\u2019s 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\u2026 let\u2019s call it a 12% walk rate, he\u2019ll 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\u2019t field his position well or hit for power.<\/p>\n

The fact that Kwan can do this doesn\u2019t exactly prove that Meidroth can, but it ought to give Meidroth\u2019s backers hope.<\/p>\n

If it all falls apart for Meidroth, it\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

Last season, 42.7% of the pitches Meidroth saw were in the shadow attack zone \u2014 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\u2019s very good.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re talking about a small target for pitchers to hit \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

To illustrate this point, I\u2019ve invented a stat I\u2019m going to call Discernment Rate. Don\u2019t bother remembering the name; I\u2019m probably never going to use it again. It\u2019s swing rate on shadow zone strikes minus swing rate on shadow zone balls. Meidroth\u2019s discernment rate in Triple-A last year is 9.3% \u2014 37.7% minus 28.4%.<\/p>\n

That would\u2019ve 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%.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 almost twice as aggressive, in Arraez\u2019s case.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s probably an adjustment Meidroth will have to make in the big leagues. Because right now, this is the kind of take I\u2019m worried about.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll 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\u2019ll just have to be good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t know if his parents named him \u201cChase\u201d as a \u201cBoy Named Sue\u201d-style challenge, but he doesn\u2019t. His career is one long rebuke of nominative determinism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":49255,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mlb"],"yoast_head":"\nBy Meidroth, I Care Not; A Man Can Swing but Once - NEWS USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sportnews.azontree.com\/?p=49254\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"By Meidroth, I Care Not; A Man Can Swing but Once - NEWS USA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I don\u2019t know if his parents named him \u201cChase\u201d as a \u201cBoy Named Sue\u201d-style challenge, but he doesn\u2019t. 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