It took three games, but the White Sox finally notched their first Cactus League win on Monday. What’s more, it was a 10-1 rout of the Seattle Mariners with some of the uplifting moments that had been exclusively reserved for the other team.

Sure, the White Sox scored all of their 10 runs off pitchers who aren’t in the Mariners’ immediate plans, but their lineup featured an equal amount of walks and strikeouts, and they played errorless ball in the field, while the Mariners balked in a run due to pitch-clock pressures.

It's not a pitch clock violation. It's a balk caused by trying to avoid one. pic.twitter.com/mDUq51AH4H

Andrew Vaughn had a couple of line-drive singles, and went from first to third on one of Yasmani Grandal’s. Elvis Andrus tripled off the left-center wall and made a diving catch at second, looking more natural than he feels out there. Jake Burger smashed his second homer of the spring, and this one didn’t hurt anybody. Romy González aced his first outfield test with a nice running catch in the left-field corner, which helped Sean Burke close out two perfect innings in his spring debut.

All that action, and it only took two hours and 23 minutes.

There’s a lot to like, especially when Andrus is lifting the ball to the pull field and making great plays on the other half of the diamond, because those are the elements that made him such a strangely exciting use of $3 million in late February.

But if you’re looking for things that might be predictive, it’s three games into a long spring schedule, so the options are more limited.

As I mentioned in my write-up of Saturday’s game, I am paying attention to the kinds of hits and hitters that stand out more than they should thanks to shifts and the lack thereof, and while it’s only three games, I want to talk about two hitters so we all can watch them a little more closely over the coming weeks. They won’t be playing in the World Baseball Classic, so we should be seeing them plenty.

Grandal singled in both of his plate appearances on Monday, and both showed how much more room he has to operate on the right side.

His second-inning single probably gets snagged by the second baseman in shallow right field, but with a traditional alignment, it found plenty of room in front of the right fielder.

The second single probably would’ve landed safely even in 2021, just not nearly as comfortably.

These are the singles that I figured we’d see more of when word leaked of MLB’s crackdown on shifts last September, and while Connor McKnight mentioned on the broadcast that teams could theoretically put the left fielder behind the second baseman to replicate the same stacked right side, a St. Louis radio host relayed word from Cardinals manager Oli Marmol that the league doesn’t consider that strategy within the spirit of the rule.

Marmol says MLB has made it clear they don't want teams to do this. "Don't make us put in another rule to make sure the LF isn't playing in front of the RF. We're doing this for a reason, so don't get cute. And if you do, we'll write it in so you can't."https://t.co/3TrTukuOHv

This is all good for Grandal, at least to a point. If all he’s hitting are singles, everybody still has to watch him try to run.

One of the reasons why Gavin Sheets has seen plenty of action despite serious shortcomings in his game is that he’s been watchable in the clutch.

The Bill James Handbook 2023 says Sheets converted 32 percent of his RBI opportunities last year, and while that’s nowhere close to the top of the league leaderboard, he finished a couple tenths ahead of José Abreu (31.8 percent). Were everybody as capable as Sheets, the White Sox offense might’ve stood a chance. Instead, they had Grandal (21 percent), Adam Engel (20.5), Leury García (20.5) and Josh Harrison (19.9) overcrowding the bottom 30 … out of more than 350 hitters.

Sheets often made it look pretty simple, too. Unlike Grandal, Sheets has the inside-out club in his bag, which often allowed him to thwart shifts with ease. He’s notched nearly a couple dozen hits against shifted infielders on the left side over the last two years.

Some of those hits are resounding singles, but a whole bunch of others could be considered unremarkable grounders that would be hoovered up by a typical infield alignment on the left side. Here are 10 from 2022 alone.

That might not seem significant, but he’s only accrued about a full season’s worth of plate appearances during his MLB career, so the absence of a cluster of hits changes the outlook considerably. Remove a dozen singles from Sheets’ record, and instead of .244/.304/.439, you’re looking at .222/.284/.417, which is not what you want from a guy who doesn’t have a position.

So when Major League Baseball announced a shift ban, I immediately thought of how it should give Grandal a better shot at bouncing back when he needs all the help he can get. Once I started thinking about the rest of the lineup, I wanted to see what Sheets looks like against more traditional alignments. He’s great at taking what the defense gives him, but what if the defense has less to offer him going forward?

In his favor, he socked a solo homer to right field in the Cactus League opener Saturday.

OH SHEET(S)! Gavin owns the first White Sox home run of Spring Training. pic.twitter.com/MlgL216Y9J

In the other column are a pair of grounders with that inside-out swing that might’ve been singles in another life, but instead turned into routine outs. Here’s one from his final plate appearance on Saturday …

… and here’s another one on Monday.

We can’t take these two grounders and say Sheets is screwed. We have all of five plate appearances to work with so far, and the other three don’t have this problem (a lineout to right and a groundout to first are the others). These GIFs are just a way to illustrate that his damage will have to take a different shape. On the bright side, he beat the throw to first base to avoid the double play and give his Cactus League RBI percentage a good start.

Writing about the White Sox for a 16th season, first here, then at South Side Sox, and now here again. Let’s talk curling.

I wonder if Sheets will now play to his strength and become more of a dead-pull hitter. Could those dozen singles to the left side turn into a single, 2 doubles, and a pair of homers to the right side?

I always felt he was taking what was being offered. Now he’ll take something else.

That’s the question, and the hope. The fear is that those easy singles masked his inability to turn around MLB-caliber pitching, or gave him an easy escape route out of unfavorable counts.

I hadn’t thought about escaping unfavorable counts. I do believe he can catch up to fastballs.

I agree, I’ve seen nothing to suggest he can’t turn a fastball. I don’t go too much into the anti-shift theory, it wasn’t like they couldn’t not shift him before. As you say, he may look to pull the ball more often. Now if he could lay off those sliders from the lefties….

The scouting criticism of him has long been that he doesn’t pull and/or lift the ball nearly enough. I don’t see that changing overnight. The oppo grounders were always a consolation prize at best, he should never be trying for those.

Sheets has such odd home/away splits. He’s been an all-star hitter at home and an unrosterable hitter in away games so far. The sample size isn’t super high (about 300 PAs for each home and away), so it will normalize some, but they are just so extreme right now. I don’t get it, because it’s not like he’s just hitting home runs that barely clear the RF fence or something else that would be advantageous at GRF. Look at this, the ISO splits are crazy: .320 at home vs. .079 away.

Can we petition the league for a 27th roster spot for a player who is only allowed to play in home games vs. RHPs?

I’m not convinced on Sheets. We need more information to see how the ban affects Sheets. Maybe he loses some soft bouncers to the left side, but surely he gains at least a few soft bouncers up the middle or to the pull side. You can’t just “remove a dozen singles from Sheets” because he might gain a dozen with the ban. It’d surprise me if the data were that clear, otherwise: why are teams shifting against Sheets?

To that point, so far in his career, Sheets’ average is higher with no shift (.281) than with shift (.272). The sample size is too small to draw conclusions about this, but I’m just not convinced I should be concerned that the shift will adversely affect Sheets. As a rule, I assume it’s a good thing for a player’s offensive game if smart defenses can’t play you exactly how they want.

the issue with sheets is that he doesn’t hit enough balls that make defensive positioning irrelevant

Okay? Is this a response to something I’ve said? My comment is no defense of Sheets. I’m just not convinced that the shift ban will adversely affect him.

i’m saying i agree, in that the shift ban won’t matter for sheets, bc he doesn’t pull or lift the ball enough

Yeah, it shouldn’t help or hurt him, but a guy coming off a season with a 98 OPS+ probably could use all the help he can get. The bottom line is he needs to do the same thing Eloy does: hit the ball in the air.

Gavin Lux out for the year with a torn ACL. Maybe they can take Leury off our hands.

So he can suddenly post an .800 OPS and display renewed defense all over the field? No thanks!

Yes thanks. Let him do all of that with the Dodgers as long as he is gone.

“We have a player available who can play SS and batted third last year.”

They picked up Miguel Rojas over the winter. They may be willing to punt on offense and prioritize defense at the position. My first thought upon reading about Lux was whether we could get them to overpay for Andrus in the form of some starting pitching depth. Second thought goes back to my OPP: Trade Timmy for more and better starting pitching depth.

The ultimate answer is the Dodgers will probably ride it out, and if they don’t, the Sox won’t be involved.

Yeah, I doubt the Dodgers consider Andrus a significant enough upgrade over Rojas to give up anything of value. The Sox are fortunate Andrus didn’t wait for a spring training injury like Lux’s before signing though.

I always thought the Dodgers were doing a little bit of a light reset this year. They let some guys go and pretty much stayed out of the FA market to let the luxury tax reset to make a huge run at somebody like Ohtani. So something like this wont shake them too much.

I think LA could get a big surprise next winter when Ohtani gets 14 years, $700 million from batshit crazy Seidler! Cohen and Seidler may be more likely to get that crazy than LA. Neither seems to know the word “restraint”.

Really thin FA market next winter after him, esp with Machado now gone. Very weak class of players compared to the last two winters. It’s pretty much Ohtani or bust for LA, Padres, Mets, Yankees. I can’t see less than 50M annually with that kind of bidding war and how much money those guys are making, and Ohtani being the best player alive. Verlander got 43M per from Cohen. 500M total might be conservative for Ohtani. Just nuts.

I’d prefer an owner who not only didn’t know the word, “restraint,” but didn’t consider it a core philosophy.

The Dodgers have what good teams have, depth. They’ll roll with Amaya and watch him end up being ROY. That does then end up opening a spot for Michael Busch(who’ll be runner up :-)). Again, depth.

Pretty sure there are rules about when you can trade someone who just signed a new contract over the offseason. Like not until June, unless you have the player’s permission.

“Elvis, do you want to be the second baseman for the Sox or the shortstop for the Dodgers?”

“Let me think on it. I’ll get back to you.”

That said, I don’t think they’d regard him as enough of an upgrade over what they have to make it a consideration.