Tim Anderson Is Tearing Apart AAA and Might Be The Sox Starting SS Sooner Than Later

When the White Sox drafted Tim Anderson 17^th overall in the 2013 draft, a lot of fans were left scratching their heads.  Being a point guard first, baseball player second in HS, he fit the bill of the toolsy, raw, athlete 1^st/baseball player 2nd draft pick that left the Sox snake bitten multiple times over the last decade plus.

I believe the saying goes, “history has a tendency to repeat itself.” Sox fans still have memories of (former Stanford QB) Joe Borchard striking out three times a game and (former OK St. QB) Josh Fields booting balls at 3B.  Oh, and don’t forget – they also drafted LSU defensive back Jared Mitchell a few picks before Mike Trout and Randall Grichuk in 2009.

Think about it; the White Sox took drafted a player 17^th overall and invested $2.16MM in him when they knew the following:

*He only played his junior and senior years of HS

*He only had about 300 junior college at bats

*He wasn’t guaranteed to stick at SS (this has a major impact on a player’s draft value)

*He wasn’t even a projected draft pick after his 1^st JUCO season

Because of all of this, most Sox fans, myself included, were conditioned to assume he would join the list of 1^st round busts in recent Sox history. As unfair and unjustified as it was, it was also unavoidable. But… Previous 1st round busts had nothing to do with whether or not Anderson would eventually be a successful player in The Show or not.

Now, just a few years later, a lot of Sox fans are begging the organization to call him up, so let’s dig a little deeper into Anderson as a player and organizational asset.

Fangraphs 20/80 grades:

Swing:

Anderson’s best asset as a player, in my opinion, is his hands.  They are big, powerful and lightning quick.  When I first saw Anderson swing a bat, his hands immediately reminded me of Alfonzo Soriano’s.

Now, he’ll never hit 40 home runs, but he possesses a similar power/speed combo in his wrists that results in having a similar swing plane to Zo’s.  Now, Soriano generated his power by combining a high leg kick/back hip drive through the baseball with said hands, and Anderson has a simple toe tap/ wrist snap through the zone which leads to one player hitting bombs and the other hitting gaps. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just a thing.  Anderson, because he’s so young in baseball years, doesn’t need any excess movement in his swing.  His swing needs to be simple, and simple it is.  Perhaps in due time he can start to incorporate more leg/hip drive to hit baseballs out of the park, but that’s down the road.  Right now, for Anderson, his swing is exactly what it needs to be.  His approach, however, has bounds of improvement to do.  He’s still learning how to hit, which brings us to the mental side of his game.

Approach:

This is where Anderson has struggled to an extent this far in his MiLB career.  I haven’t seen him play other than a handful of times in spring training and on YouTube, but by all accounts he has struggled with approach.  Now when I say “struggle”, take that with a grain of salt.  Anderson, as ‘raw’ as he is, has a career .303/.343/.428 slash line in MiLB.  Not too shabby for someone who has only been playing baseball for 5 years, and those numbers are in spite of his swing-happy mentality early in the count and against pitches outside the zone.  This is where his youthfullness as a player checks in.  He’s relied on his world class skill set to hit thus far, as opposed to combining said skill set with the ability to out think a pitcher.  Mentally, his ability to adapt to pitching as he has advanced through the system has been extraordinary.  With every stop he has made, from low A Kannapolis through Charlotte, he has started off with high K/ low BB rates, made adjustments and then done nothing but hit, hit, and hit.  In 2016, he started off with an April average/OBP line of .234/.234 with 23 Ks in 81 at bats. You read that correctly, he didn’t walk once in April.  May?  A different story.  So far this month in 24 games and 106 at bats, he’s slashed .387/.462 with 8 walks.  His walk rate is an acceptable, though still not great 8%, while his K rate has decreased from 28% in April to 17% in May.  These are all trends that are exactly what the organization wants to see out of a young, unpolished hitter seeing AAA pitching for the first time.

Timeframe:

Honestly? I have no idea when Anderson will be called up.  Sox fans are somewhat split in their opinion on what they’d like the organization to do right now.  Some are hell bent on calling him up and starting him in the 2 hole and at SS against KC this very moment; others are afraid that because he’s still labeled as “raw” that calling him up now could fuck him up the same way it fucked up Gordon Beckham.  You can’t quantify an amount of at bats that makes a player “ready” or not.  It differs from player to player.  A player is ready when he is mentally tough enough to learn from failure and adjust.  It can be 30, 300, or 1000 at bats.  That said, I think the earliest he will be called up is the super 2 deadline which is coming up in mid June.

Now, what is a super 2?  Fangraphs explains it here much better than I’m about to, cuz it’s kind of confusing.  Each player has to accumulate 3 full years of Major League service time before he is eligible for arbitration. Usually a player and team won’t go to arbitration, as they will meet in the middle of the player’s percieved value of himself and the team’s perceived value of the player.  That said, organizations often times will stow a player in the minor leagues at the start of a season, regardless of his ‘readiness’, in order to score one more year of paying the player jack shit before he’s a free agent.  This is what happened with the Cubs and Kris Bryant.  It’s a wise business decision for organizations, as the player will be making league minimum an extra year before he’s a free agent, where he could potentially be due tens of millions, but is a financial detriment to a player.  This will be a big talking point at the next CBA.

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But then there’s a super 2, which is designed to financially protect a player from an organization trying to stow them in the minor leagues for a few weeks in order to keep them short of the service time necessary to become a free agent. Players that have between 2-3 years of MLB service time can be dubbed a super 2, giving them an extra year of arbitration eligibility, where they’d potentially earn, say 10 million dollars opposed to ~500k or so.  It’s a give and take type deal.  If a team is trying to gain that extra year before a player’s a free agent, they could hypothetically call the player up just 15 or so days into the season, and the player would be fucked financially.  In order to sort of quell teams from doing this, players can be dubbed a Super 2 which would grant them an extra year of arbitration eligibility, which in theory should guarantee a player millions more than an extra year on a rookie deal. There is a deadline in mid-June that negates a player’s ability to be dubbed a Super 2, and when it passes the player will have a standard 3 years of arbitration eligibility, but when a team does this, they’re risking not having a ‘ready’ player in their lineup for months, opposed to just weeks.

This is what I believe the Sox are going to do with Anderson.  If they were to call him up now, he’d be declared a Super 2 and he would be eligible for arbitration 4 times opposed to three.  Once that deadline passes, Anderson will be paid pennies on the dollar compared to what he could potentially earn as a Super 2 in his 4^th year of arbitration.

I could be way off base here, and this is all conjecture, it’s just a gut feeling on what I think the Sox are gonna do with Anderson, while treading water with Rollins and Saladino in the time being.  I think it’s the right move.

Now, with all of that said – should Anderson be called up, there will be periods of great struggle.  He still has so much to learn as a baseball player.  His fielding has improved exponentially, as has his mental approach.  But once he gets the call to The Show, teams are gonna open up a playbook on how to attack him and there will be times when it won’t be pretty watching him.  He’ll have those 0-4 games with 3 K’s where he looks stupid.  He’ll boot the ball here and there.  But there will also be those games where he unzips his pants and pisses on an inside fastball to the left center gap.  Or makes a highlight reel play at SS.  Once he does develop, the sky is the limit.  Down the road, there’s a chance he turns into a .300/.340 short stop that plays + defense, steals 30 bases, an hits 15-17 home runs out of the 2 hole behind Eaton.  It’s still a bit away, but once he clicks, Tim Anderson is gonna be A LOT of fun to watch on the South Side.