2026 White Sox Lineup Simulation Challenge

HAPPY 2026 OPENING DAY! It feels strange to say that a 102 loss season felt like a step in the right direction for the Chicago White Sox, but that’s what happens when you lose 121 games the year prior. The thing that was most exciting for me was seeing strong performances out of young guys like Shane Smith, Colson Montgomery, and Mike Vasil. I don’t know about y’all, but I am really looking forward to watching these guys and other prospects show us what they’ve got in the big leagues, even though it is a massive bummer that Vasil's recent Tommy John surgery means we have to wait until next year to see him pitch again.

Getting back on task, this year’s Opening Day roster isn't exactly a powerhouse. But with some of the non-roster invitees to Spring Training and prospects included in the player pool for lineups, I figured you all would get creative with your submissions for this year’s contest. Once again, you did not disappoint!

Before getting to the results and awards, I want to thank you for sharing, re-tweeting, blackmailing your friends, and most importantly: submitting lineups! I also cannot forget to thank our wonderful sponsor, More Than Dawgs. More Than Dawgs is a locally owned hot dog stand located at the southeast corner of 3400 S. Shields during game days and most evenings during the summer. The More Than Dawgs crew were very generous and are providing $100 of gift cards to this year’s top performers! Be sure to check them out during the summer and do note that they also can cater parties! Lastly, I want to thank Grace, of 643 Studios, for the awesome flyer that she designed for the contest. If you’re in need of graphic design work, you should definitely reach out to her. 

As a reminder, if you’re unfamiliar with the concept, be sure to check out my post for the first iteration of the challenge and the post from last year. As a quick refresher, I run each lineup for 10k games and log the average runs scored per game. This ensures that the exercise gets to the core of the lineup’s ability and isn’t ranked on a very high or very low simulation result. Additionally, the numbers used to feed the simulation program came from ZiPS projections via Fangraph’s website, so I’d be remiss to not thank Dan Szymborski for making them publicly available.

This is the seventh year of the White Sox Lineup Simulation Challenge and while we didn’t break our previous record, we beat the submission count from last year! 105 lineups were submitted, of which 103 of them were unique! Of the repeated lineup, it was submitted 3 times. Similar to past years, the competition was strong and the margin was very tight! You can quickly and easily access the results in the linked google sheets file below. Continue reading to see the awards!

Lineup Spots: Most Common Players

Results

Click Here For Google Sheets File

Credit to @mega_graffixx on Fiverr

The Awards Section

The “Golden Hot Dog” Award

A huge congratulations to newcomer, @DuvalAndrew904 for winning this year’s contest! Their lineup was a bit outside the box, which is what makes this contest fun! Making use of Sam Antonacci and Lamonte Wade Jr were smart moves given their strong OBP projections. With that said, I have to rip on White Sox Twitter… Y’all lost to a self described Jacksonville Jaguars analytics account. I could not be more disappointed in you all. SHAME! For your penance, please spend some time researching how to properly construct lineups. Additionally, go check out Andrew’s account where you’ll certainly learn something useful for when you watch the Bears next season. 

The “Bold Strategy Cotton, It Actually Worked” Award

I was originally going to name this the “Saved By The Bell Award” because you submitted your lineup with 17 minutes to spare, but given your lineup and where it placed, I had to change my tune. Congratulations to Steven Pappas for claiming this award! Your lineup had Chase Meidroth slotted into the 4th spot, which is just flat out wrong, but you made up for it by cleverly putting Murakami, Vargas, and Teel in the first three spots and not really having any clear holes with your other selections. Though, I think swapping Quero out for Pereira and shuffling things around would have fared better. But what do I know?! I will say that this lineup is crazy but we love crazy here with the contest. Thanks for submitting and I hope that you attempt to top this next year.

The “Co-Chief Marketing Officers” Award

I’m convinced that Elon’s algorithm hates my account because everything I post tends to have 100 impressions, so I am very appreciative of Sam Reeves and BeefLoaf’s efforts to retweet just about every announcement that I posted for this year’s contest. It’s too bad that your performances did not match your effort (top tier effort, middle tier performance)! Thanks for helping me spread the word and I’ll be looking forward to any and all ideas for next time around at the upcoming board meeting. 

The “Groundhog Day” Award

Another year, another top of the table finish for @richwp01 and Jake Grinz. I know that I gave y’all praise last year but your consistency continues to impress! @richwp01 has never finished lower than 13th and has been in the top five the last two years. Jake Grinz, who by the way may be an Out of the Park Baseball character…it’s yet to be confirmed that he does exist in real life, has finished top five each of the last three years! Congratulations, guys! 

The “Goulden Goose” Award

This year’s worst scoring lineup was submitted by none other than Lucas Gould! Fortunately for you, your last name plays well off the normal name for the award, the “Golden Goose”. At first glance, your lineup doesn’t seem bad. But having Benintendi bat second and Sosa bat fifth nuked its performance relative to the others submitted. We will chalk it up to law school senioritis and I hope that you’re able to put more time in next year (disregard how hard you’ll be working at the day job). Thanks again and congratulations on the award (as well as other big life events happening this year)!

My Own Attempt at a Lineup

Since I am casting so much judgement on each and every one of your lineups, I figured that it would only be fair to share my own as well as my reasoning for the ordering of said players. I kept myself constrained to who made the Opening Day roster and to land on the specific ordering, I also made use of the ZiPS projections for the players. Spoiler alert - I took an analytical approach, with some deviations here and there, to building my lineup.

I slotted Chase Meidroth into the leadoff spot because of his high OBP. Among the guys who made the Opening Day roster, his projected ZiPS OBP ranks second. If Kyle Teel were healthy, you could argue for having him lead off and sliding Meidroth down to the ninth spot, which plays nicely for setting the table when the lineup turns over. Leaning purely on ZiPS, there is also a case for batting Munetaka Murakami first since he has the highest projected OBP on the team. However, I think his bat is far more impactful elsewhere.

I went with Murakami for the two-hole because his projected OPS is the highest on the roster. That second spot is exactly where you want your best overall offensive threat. Why? Borrowing from Aaron Gleeman at Baseball Prospectus: “The idea behind the shifting identity of no. 2 hitters is a simple one: You want your best hitters batting most often, and moving from 3-4-5 to no. 2 can equal an extra 30-50 plate appearances per season (and fewer plate appearances with two outs). The reason that no. 2 is often the choice instead of no. 1 is that batting second allows for more runners on base. It’s kind of a best-of-both-worlds solution relative to the leadoff and cleanup spots, adding more plate appearances but also leaving some RBI chances.” Ahh, I can’t pass up the opportunity to plug previous research.

Next, for the three, four, and five spots, I am tabbing Miguel Vargas, Austin Hays, and Colson Montgomery. Vargas’s projected .725 OPS should arguably slot him fifth, but as you can see, I have Montgomery there instead. I went with Montgomery in the five-hole because of his higher projected slugging. The thinking here is that Vargas’s projected .325 OBP sets the table nicely for Hays and Montgomery. Hays boasts the highest projected slugging of that trio and the second highest on the team behind Murakami, making him a clear fit for cleanup. Now, if I were sticking to a purely analytical approach using ZiPS, we would probably slot Montgomery (.702 projected OPS) seventh, right behind Everson Pereira (.711) and Andrew Benintendi (.707). I strayed from the projections there because I believe Montgomery will outperform both Benintendi and Pereira this year, and his slugging profile is just too promising to bury that low in the order.

Moving to the bottom third of the lineup, I have Benintendi batting sixth, Pereira seventh, Luisangel Acuna eighth, and Edgar Quero ninth. I put Benintendi above Pereira because, given their similar projected OPS, I’ll lean on the veteran until Pereira forces me to reevaluate. Quero takes the ninth spot because his projected .318 OBP offers a solid chance of flipping the lineup over to Meidroth, Murakami, and Vargas with a runner on base. Acuna slides into the eighth spot simply because it is the only one left.

Comparing my lineup to the one Will Venable is actually running out for today’s Opening Day matchup with the Milwaukee Brewers, you’ll see we disagree on a couple spots. It is worth noting that our exercise and the reality of setting a lineup for a specific matchup, like today against RHP Jacob Misiorowski, are fundamentally different. The lineup simulator is agnostic to platoon splits since that data is already baked into the overall projection. But if you pull up FanGraphs and check each player’s splits from last year, you’ll see some major differences in how these batters handle lefties versus righties.

I initially replied to a few tweets saying I wouldn’t bat Colson Montgomery second, but I think I understand Venable's logic now. Montgomery is coming off a fantastic rookie campaign where he posted a .311 OBP and a .529 SLG. ZiPS has him regressing a bit, and so does my buddy Derek Grifka with his MLB Deserve-To-Win-O-Meter. Another big reason for batting him second is that he absolutely smoked right-handed pitching last year to the tune of an .887 OPS.

I also don’t love Andrew Benintendi batting fourth. His 2025 splits against right-handed pitching don’t exactly scream cleanup hitter, and neither do his 2026 ZiPS projections. I’d much rather see Munetaka Murakami in the cleanup spot, with Benintendi bumped down to fifth or sixth (speaking of, don’t look at Austin Hays’ splits against righties in 2025), but oh well. Perhaps Venable is just trying to keep some pressure off Murakami in his MLB debut. Either way, it would be nice to have split level projections. Since we don’t, we are left using our own hybrid approach of historical splits and season level projections to critique the lineup. Overall, my initial criticisms have waned a bit, but I hope the lineup construction gets a little harder to poke holes in once players' actual performances start to take shape.

Prizes

This year, prizes will go to the top five performing lineups who indicated that they would accept a gift card! I will be in contact about how I can get the gift cards to you.

1. @lukesmailes4: $30

2. @kevinsnewhandle: $25

3. Reimundo Acosta: $20

4. Roscoe Segall: $15

5. Steven Pappas: $10

To wrap things up, I want to once again thank everyone for participating. This year was a great success and I hope to see you back next year! Go Sox!