The White Sox made Chris Sale the 13th overall pick in MLB Draft on June 7, 2010. He debuted less than two months later, over the next six years he had developed into one of the best pitchers on the planet. He’ll enter the 2017 season on the heels of his fourth straight Top 5 finish in Cy Young voting and sixth straight Top 6.
His contract, which will pay him $12 million in 2017 and culminate in 2018 and 2019 with team options at $12.5 million and $13.5 million, respectively, makes him one of the most valuable in baseball. He’ll be 28 years old the next time he throws a pitch in a regular season game.
The White Sox’ ability to build a core as good as the one we saw at the conclusion of the 2016 season is something close to miraculous. For a team that has long struggled to develop above-average position players while simultaneously being notoriously frugal when it comes to spending in free agency — the Sox are one of only four teams in the entire league that has never shelled out a free agent contract of $100 million or more — the Sox paired Sale with Jose Quintana, who turned into a front-end starter after being acquired as a minor league free agent for basically nothing. They also acquired Jose Abreu, one of the better slugging first basemen in the league, in a rare splurge of spending, and got an All-Star-caliber outfielder, Adam Eaton, in exchange for a useful but replaceable starter in Hector Santiago.
Throw in former No. 3 overall pick Carlos Rodon and his gobs of potential, and Todd Frazier and his 40-home run power, and the White Sox had, despite all of their flaws, built a pretty solid foundation on which to contend.
So how the hell did we get here?
The White Sox officially began their rebuild on Tuesday when they shipped Sale to Boston in exchange for four prospects. One of them, 21-year-old Yoan Moncada, is among the top prospects in baseball. Maybe a future perennial All-Star and MVP candidate. Another, Michael Kopech, is a flame-throwing 20-year-old with top-end talent but a lot of question marks. These two, along with lesser-heralded prospects Luis Alexander Basabe and Victor Diaz, may end up a very good haul for the Sox when all is said and done, but the fact that after years of half-assed attempts to build a supporting cast around such a strong foundation, they’ve finally decided to cut their losses, is nothing short of embarrassing.
The White Sox are in this position because they couldn’t supplement a solid, cost-controlled core with enough talent to become a playoff contender. They’re in this position because they refused to tap into the free agent market for complementary pieces. They didn’t need stars, they had those already! All they’ve needed was competence. They couldn’t find it, and wouldn’t spend to get it, and jettisoning Sale is just the first step in what is sure to be a brutal, mind-numbing teardown.
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i would say the white sox are in this position because they don’t know how to draft and develop players. we’ve had one of the worst minor league systems for the past 20 years. that’s what’s embarrassing.
free agency spending has been a secondary issue. while i get your gist that complementary players could have made *some* difference, the biggest backlash has been about the white sox not signing the big names. i don’t necessarily think that’s a good idea. would you want greinke and his $200M contract? how about gordon and his $18M per year deal for the next 3 years?
free agency is designed to plug holes. if you draft and develop players properly, then there should be a heck of a lot less holes to plug.
A small core with no farm system has no way to improve short of signing top free agents. The Sox would have to expand payroll to 180-200 million to compete with the farm system Cleveland has. Signing the top free agents only prevents the farm system rebuild because of the forfeited draft picks. The Sox arguably have the worst farm system in the division and the results have echoed that.
Kenny Williams won a World Series by selling the farm for short-term players. Not necessarily a bad idea, but it can only work for a short period of time; then the system has to be rebuilt. Kenny never did that. In his time as GM the Sox have only drafted TWO consistent MLB starting players – Sale & Gio Gonzalez, please don’t try to sell me on Beckham and Semien. Rodon and Anderson may pan out, but I suspect Rodon won’t be around after 2018.
The only bad thing about this rebuild so far is that what little core they have is getting traded while the dreck that needs to be moved to open up playing time for the young players being acquired is still here. Melky, Frazier, Lawrie, Avisail, Abreu, Robertson ALL need to go.
The one good thing about the rebuild so far is that it signifies Kenny Williams’ s.o.p. is finished.
there’s nothing bad about the rebuild at all. give it a few weeks. we just got another huge haul for eaton. i suspect frazier, abreu and robertson will soon have new homes as well, with the latter 2 fetching some pretty good prospects. the sox should be able to get a decent prospect for frazier, but nothing extraordinary for a player with only 1 more year of team control.
as for melky, lawrie and garcia, they could fetch something small at the trade deadline, but i would be surprised to see them moved before then unless some other team has some bad scouting reports they are looking at.
They haven’t emphasized the farm system in years. Jerry and Kenny have a Jimmy Crack Corn attitude toward it. Just look at Jerry’s comments yesterday about the trade and it tells you all you need to know about how he values the farm system. He doesn’t.
This idea they’ve been selling that they could NEVER do a tear down and rebuild is complete garbage. Much of the fan base has bought it. When all you can hope for is people to show up to the park when your #1 starter pitches, you probably need to move that guy and get better. I’m glad they did and I hope the exodus continues in the weeks ahead.
They’re in this position because they refused to tap into the free agent market for complementary pieces.
And this is just flat out wrong. They absolutely DID follow your advice. They tried plugging offensive holes and they sacrificed defensive holes for it. The tried plugging bullpen holes and created holes in the farm system for it. Etc. Etc.
They signed Dunn, Cabrera, Robertson – and forfeited high draft picks in the process which is why the farm system sucks. Then they traded away depth pieces to get Samardzija, Frazier and Lawrie. The result was below-expectations performances for all acquired veterans and a useless farm system. They broke the bank to sign Abreu, and he’s a god-awful first baseman. The defense is SO bad that it actually REDUCED Sale’s value, and probably Quintana’s and Rodon’s as well.
The farm system has been bad because their Latin America program was literally run by a con man for decades and they got zero out of the draft for just as long.
Losing a 2nd and 3rd rounder for Melky and Robertson hurt but, they were hardly system defining, and neither Melky nor Robertson has been the problem. I’d hardly call a $68 million contract “breaking the bank” re Abreu, and he’s definitely a good player regardless of your opinion on his first base defense.
The pieces traded for Lawrie are not really relevant.
And the fact that the free agents they chose were chosen poorly does NOT negate the premise that free agents would have helped. Fowler would have helped a ton, rather than Austin Jackson, for example.
The 2016 White Sox were sunk by CF, C, DH, and 5th starter. They signed Adam LaRoche and Austin Jackson instead of Fowler or Cespedes. There’s bad evals in here, but doesn’t mean the idea was a bad one. Just poorly and tentatively executed.