Q: What do two top pitching prospects, an almost-ML-ready outfielder and quality starting pitcher get you?

A: Leadership, veteran presence at the top of the order and a combined .215 average out of two guys who were supposed to be the difference between last year’s walking disaster and this year’s theoretical juggernaut. Go Sox!

Anyway, through the magic of somewhat oversimplified comparison, let’s take a look at two different teams through 29 games:

Team A: Won 14, lost 15. Scored 114 runs while allowing 123. 0-4 in one-run games. A scrappy outfielder leads the team with a non-spectacular batting average. The big guns are all batting under .275.

Team B: Won 14, lost 15. Scored 139 despite allowing 116. 1-3 in one-rune games. A scrappy outfielder leads the team with a non-spectacular batting average. The big guns are all batting under .275.

If you guessed that A was the 2007 Sox and B is this year’s edition, you guessed correctly (bonus points if you also correctly substituted Darrin Erstad for Carlos Quentin). A lot of people are probably going to cry foul on this, pointing to things like the high OBPs of Quentin (.421), Paul Konerko (.362) and Nick Swisher (.354) as proof of this team’s bats’ life and general awesomeness, but that’s a flawed testament to any White Sox offensive might for two key reasons.

First of all, while it’s always nice to see the guys getting free passes, walks are entirely useless if no one’s hitting. You can sit on pitches until the cows come home, but a walk will almost never drive someone in and will only slightly more frequently translate into a run as long as the rest of the team is hitting .235 and slugging .408.

The second is simply that Paul Konerko, as one of of those aforementioned big guns, is supposed to draw walks. He’s supposed to take bad pitches and he’s supposed to intimidate opposing pitchers, although if the breaking-ball-away method the rest of the league is killing Jim Thome and Jermaine Dye with turns out to be contagious, you wonder if anyone on this team will be able to intimidate anyone anymore. Likewise, when the guys around him are hitting .214 and .260, you have to at least entertain the idea that pitchers are going to have little to no reservations about taking their chances.

It’s true the season’s not even a quarter of the way through, and it’s also true that neither Cleveland nor Detroit really have a bulletproof team – especially that Detroit bullpen – but pinning any hopes to improvement-by-default is not only hopelessly desperate for this early on, but also relies upon the flawed assumption that two other teams’ unreliable bullpens will somehow be more of a liability than the unreliable bullpen we’re all rooting for, especially while the Good Guys’ unreliable bullpen has only a .235-hitting offense in front of it.

But this year will SURELY be DIFFERENT, you see. This time, we’ve got veteran presence on our side. And leadership. And the uncanny ability to lose despite scoring more than we’re allowing on a daily basis. Luminous times abound, friends: we are truly entering a new era of White Sox baseball.