At the time, I wrote leaving Clarkin exposed was a logical move.  At this point, it’s hard to imagine he has the durability to start, let alone effectively, limiting him to relief, and it’s not clear he will be very good in the next year or two, if ever.  Now, just a few days later losing him on waivers, the White Sox claimed Clarkin back off waivers and the 40-man roster now stands at 39.

Regardless of what you think about Clarkin in a vacuum, this makes leaving Spencer Adams unprotected look even stranger.  Everything from public evaluations to pedigree to statistics to health to age to proximity to the majors…well, Adams seems to be better than Clarkin in just about every way.  I suppose Clarkin is left-handed?  And yet here we are.

Perhaps, for whatever reason, the White Sox have decided the most important thing in the universe is now having left-handed relievers.  Hahn cited it as an area of need while he was in the process of acquiring a number of southpaw relievers in the second half of the season.

But as I originally pointed out—Clarkin is now behind at least Jace Fry, Aaron Bummer (pictured above) and Caleb Frare, arguably Kodi Medeiros, and there may be more to like about Hunter Schryver than Clarkin now.  You can never have too many relievers and there are problems with all of those other guys, but I still cannot figure out why Clarkin gets a spot and Adams doesn’t.  There must be something here we don’t know about, because with the information we have this doesn’t really make sense.

Lead Image Credit: Ray Carlin-USA TODAY Sports

So far so good.

Two things caught White Sox fans’ eye on the heels of the announcement:

1) The press release said it left the White Sox’ 40-man roster at 38 rather than the 39 fans counted.  The mystery was subsequently solved, as it was announced Ian Clarkin was claimed by the Cubs on waivers.  Clarkin was one of the supplementary pieces acquired in the Blake Rutherford deal with the Yankees.  He’ll turn 24 before the 2019 season starts, and between injuries and ineffectiveness he has yet to conquer Double-A after six years in pro ball, most recently posting a K:BB ratio just a shade over 1.00 in Birmingham.  A well regarded prospect once upon a time, it was understandable the White Sox would want to see if they could get him healthy and back on track.  The Cubs will have to see if they can pull it off.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a solid lefty reliever one day, but even if you knew he could be that in a year or two, just among lefty relievers on the organizational depth chart Clarkin would come in behind Jace Fry, Aaron Bummer, Caleb Frare, and Medeiros at a minimum.

2) A notable omission from 40-man protection was Spencer Adams.  Some outlets believed the White Sox had a steal when they took Adams in the second round of the 2014 draft, and the highly athletic prep arm has climbed all the way to Triple-A, pounding the zone relentlessly along the way.  Even if the control (i.e. not walking people as opposed to command) has been very good, and that has yielded some solid ERAs along the way, he has yet to show he can miss bats consistently, and scouts said he looked stiffer in 2018.  Still, this author, at the very least, thought he would be added to the 40-man roster, given that some were very excited about him not too long ago, and his proximity to the majors.

That said, the Rule 5 draft is an easy source of fear.  It plays on all of our concerns about losing talent for the low price of a 40-man spot, particularly if a player lost in such a way were to go off and become something significant.  But, the White Sox have been good about this of late.  Some began making concerned noises when Jordan Guerrero and Jake Peter were exposed to Rule 5 last year only for neither of them to get taken.  There’s a good chance Adams makes it past Rule 5 and just returns to Charlotte next season, and hopefully he takes a step forward and reaches his potential as a back end starter with the White Sox, or polishes himself up into a nice trade chip. Or, if he does get taken, there’s reason to believe the White Sox have a basis to decide it’s a loss they are willing to stomach.

And, this leaves room for them to make other additions, or even claim someone they like even better in the Rule 5 draft themselves.

None of this is fatal to The Rebuild, of course.  Part of the plan, after all, was to stockpile a massive arsenal of prospects such that you don’t need everything to go perfectly to have a path to contention.  So, when 2018 stalled out, the natural conclusion was to shift the first year where the White Sox might want to try to contend from 2019 to 2020.  And maybe the next year the White Sox can make the playoffs actually is 2020, but that doesn’t mean the White Sox shouldn’t make major moves in free agency right now. To consider:

1.  The obvious contenders in the American League next year are the reigning World Series champion Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Houston Astros.  The A’s and Rays had a good number of positive performances which may be tough to repeat, but it’s fair to say they have a puncher’s chance as well.  The rest of the AL is either in full rebuild (Kansas City, Detroit, Texas, Baltimore,  Toronto) or in some sort of limbo after suffering a setback year (Angels, Twins).  You’ll notice I’m omitting the Cleveland Indians and Seattle Mariners from this discussion.  Over the past few days, these Win Now teams have been making a lot of noise about trimming payroll or even going into full rebuilds.

As with every rumor, particularly dramatic ones like these, it is safe to assume they are nothing more than just rumors until you see actions to match the talk.  Still, the Mariners were already an old team that has yet to actually crack the playoffs, and it’s hard to see a path to getting significantly better from here.  They wildly outperformed their run differential to post 89 wins (with a 77-win pythag) on the back of extreme good fortune in 1-run games, largely thanks to a truly herculean effort from Edwin Diaz fronting what looks like career years from a whole lot of no name relievers.  Nelson Cruz is a free agent. Robinson Cano has been gently declining as he is now closer to 40 than 30. And, while Jean Segura, James Paxton, and Mitch Haniger are very nice players still in their 20s, the latter two are brittle, and collectively aren’t enough to drag a lackluster surrounding cast to the promised land.  They have a creative front office, but this team as currently composed may very well be out of gas, and accordingly they have announced almost everyone on the roster is for sale.

Cleveland also features a stars-and-scrubs construction at the tail end of a contention window.  Unlike Seattle, their stars are a whole lot more impactful — Jose Ramirez, Francisco Lindor, Corey Kluber, and even Trevor Bauer rate at or near the absolute tops of their positions in all of baseball — and also unlike Seattle they have been rattling off division titles, albeit in a much weaker division.  But Cleveland is now mewling lamely about payroll, even apparently complaining about having to pay the absolute bargain Kluber his Cy Young Award bonuses.  There’s even some fire to go with this smoke.  They refused to make a qualifying offer to Michael Brantley, their only good outfielder in 2018.  And, even if they don’t sell guys like Kluber or Carlos Carrasco as reported they are willing to do, the team is going to take on some water next year.  Edwin Encarnacion is finally looking like age is getting the best of him, and mainstays Cody Allen and Andrew Miller are likely going elsewhere in free agency.

All that said, Cleveland underperformed their run differential last year and they’re clearly still the best team in the division by a long shot.  But, if they actually follow through and trade pieces like Kluber and Carrasco, they crash back that much closer to the AL Central pack.

Yes, you still have to bid against NL teams for free agents, but the American League, particularly in the AL Central specifically, at this moment, may be wide open.

2. This free agent class is different.  Some of the shine is off it as Clayton Kershaw and Charlie Blackmon wound up extending and other free agents — like Miller, for instance — aren’t quite as shiny as they looked even six months ago. But, Manny Machado and Bryce Harper are both still there.  It is my position the White Sox should sign both by outbidding everyone else, or, failing that, push all of their chips in on Harper specifically.

With the caveat that any super rich team can come out of nowhere and sign someone — the Diamondbacks aren’t even one of the powerhouses and they swooped in with the high bid on Zack Greinke, for instance — not only are these two free agents huge outliers in both talent and age, the market for Harper in particular is less sanguine than it might have been under normal circumstances.  Part of that is him having one of his “down” years (.249/.393/.496) in his walk year, but part of that is weird circumstances that have cropped up.  Yeah, you can always make room for Harper, but the Yankees’ corner outfielders are Aaron Judge and they unexpectedly were able to add Giancarlo Stanton thanks to Project Wolverine.  Similarly, I had long thought the Nationals were being underrated as a candidate for Harper’s services, but then Juan Soto basically turned into Bryce Harper II in front of our eyes, and if a Nationals organization who has lost most free agent wars they’ve been in as they desperately try to get everyone to take deferred salary wants to play it safe, they can lose Harper and still potentially roll out with three All-Star outfielders anyway.  The Cubs were long considered a candidate for Harper’s services but now they are murmuring about trimming payroll too!

Machado will likely have more suitors, as the ability to cover shortstop and third makes him suitable for more teams than the corner-limited Harper, but some of the same payroll factors — Boston is probably tapped out although watch them sign both these guys anyway — or weird cheapness might drag his salary back into the realm of reality.

And all of this brings us back to the White Sox.

I will never bet on this team to spend until I see it. Historically, that’s just not what they do. To be fair, full teardown rebuilds, outbidding the field for guys like Luis Robert, or drafting highly touted Scott Boras clients like Carlos Rodon weren’t moves in the organization’s history either. But for all that you can talk about how stockpiling a million prospects helps you replenish your major league roster internally with depth — true! — the whole point of homegrown players is they’re cheap.  You’re paying Yoan Moncada $550,000 a year to be a league average second baseman* instead of $10 million or whatever for Asdrubal Cabrera. If you repeat that all over the roster, as the White Sox intend to do, it would seem, then that should free up a ton of money to supplement the roster elsewhere.

*Yes obviously he should be a better player than this, but for now bear with me.

To that end, the White Sox currently have an estimated $54.5 million in payroll commitments for 2019 right now and $5.75 million in commitments for 2020.  They could sign both Machado and Harper to $35 million a year deals and their opening day payroll would still have ranked 18th in the majors last year.  They could give them each $40 million a year and still be right about where their payroll was in 2011. You can non-tender Avisail Garcia and save another ~$8.5 million if you need to to get it done.  And, because of their age and skill sets, you don’t need to get good right away to get good value on their contracts.  They’re likely to still be very good in 2020, or 2022, or 2024. And yeah, their contracts will ultimately be riddled with opt outs, and injuries and underperformance can happen, and EVERYONE wants to sign these guys, but the stars are aligning and fate is reaching out its hand.

The White Sox have the ability to back up the Brinks truck to both of their homes as much as anybody, and given just how much payroll room they have, should be able to outbid anyone. Whether they have the will to do so is another question, but they have the ability to do so.

If the overwhelming majority of teams in the majors are in some version of a rebuild that means the market inefficiency is to go for it.  You’ve already acquired virtually all of prospects you’re going to acquire by selling pieces from the major league roster.  These are the guys you’re going to try to win with. The next free agent class does not offer anything near this type of opportunity.  You can sign these contracts and still have room to do more to shore up the fringes of the roster, which, by the way, should be supplemented by the future of the team you have already committed to. Ironically, for this franchise, the White Sox are currently choked to the gills with 1-2 WARP players and don’t seem to have a star anywhere on the roster (yet) and have a pipeline of potential stars but also potential spare parts. You can plop two 26-year-olds onto the roster who have posted multiple 5-7 WARP seasons and, in Harper, a guy who posted an 11.2 WARP season in 2015.

Even moderate internal improvement from potential stars like Anderson and Moncada (and throw in Jimenez etc. while we’re at it) and modest other moves on the periphery and that would immediately put the team’s win expectation in the low-to-mid 80s with room for more.  The division is already there for the taking and may be getting even more up-for-grabs, and the White Sox are uniquely positioned to exploit this unique opportunity.  If they don’t get one of these two guys, you are that much more reliant on what’s in house turning into gold or having to trade good pieces away to get something back. Why bother when you can use the freely available resources you have in surplus to just add two MVP candidates just entering their primes to your core?

I don’t claim to be some sort of savant for suggesting “pay the most money to the best free agents” but you could not draw up a better situation for the White Sox given their current situation.

Hell. Trade for James Paxton while you’re at it.

Lead Image Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Minaya still throws hard and strikes out a good amount of batters.  Compared to 2017, he cut his home runs and his already too high walk rate climbed even higher to 14 percent, which is almost 3 points higher than the qualified leader in the majors on that statistic.  With the bat missing and velocity there is always the temptation to keep trying in the hopes he figures things out, but improving his 5.71 DRA to 5.05 from 2017 to 2018 may tell more of the story here.  The odds are Minaya is simply a mediocrity who has shown us about the best that he can do, and it’s not like the White Sox haven’t given him opportunities, appropriate to a team in the situation the White Sox are in.

You can never have too many relievers, and I’d be surprised if he weren’t pitching for the major league team at some point next year.  That said, the relievers part of the rebuild are likely the first to arrive.  Nate Jones, Jace Fy, Ian Hamilton, and Ryan Burr are all ahead of him in the pecking order and one has to imagine some combination of Aaron Bummer, Caleb Frare, and maybe even Jose Ruiz would be ahead of him as well.  Throw in Zack Burdi, Carson Fulmer, and whoever the annual relief pickups are, and Minaya is going to have a lot more competition for a bullpen he washed out of early in 2018 as it is.

Pitchers get hurt. Minaya has been durable. Modern bullpens are huge. And Minaya could pop up throwing 99 for Oakland in three years, too.  But hopefully phasing out Minaya for younger, better options could similarly be representative of the White Sox actually moving meaningfully toward the next phase, wherein they are actually trying to win at the major league level and succeeding at it.

Instead he was bad, got hurt, was bad, got hurt, and also set a career high in home runs in only 385 PAs.  The power propped up his overall line of .236/.281/.438, and is consistent with the maddening tease that is Avisail Garcia. After all, this is the most power he has ever shown in a game, essentially hitting at a 30+ home run pace, but of course, he couldn’t stay on the field and was fairly terrible otherwise.  Even when he was on the field, he was still playing at less than 100 percent with a variety of knee and hamstring ailments visibly bothering him.  Indeed, he would undergo right knee surgery as soon as the season finished.

The optimistic take here is that when fully healthy, he has now shown he can get to his power and use his contact skills, leaving one to dream on a .280/.350/.550, classic star corner outfielder season. That’s certainly possible. The pessimistic angle says the White Sox have had him for five years now and he’s been both healthy and good in all of one of those years.  It seems crazy you may have given this guy 2,500 plate appearances, even helping to tank the tail end of your last contention cycle by leaving him with a full time job instead of upgrading, and you still might have no idea what you have. Since he flopped in 2018, his trade value is likely minimal, and you may genuinely be left to question whether you want to keep him instead of, say, Daniel Palka.

I’ve seen enough Avisail Garcia for one lifetime, but the same fear remains should you let him go, that he winds up with the Cardinals or Giants or Reds or Blue Jays, or any number of franchises who scoops up failed prospects and unlocks their potential. The safest prediction seems to be he will be tantalizing, occasionally good, and brittle in 2019 before hitting free agency and then posting three straight .300/.400/.500 seasons in St. Louis while the White Sox watch A.J. Pollock age horribly. On the other hand, the White Sox could extend him so he can keep playing 75-100 games a year with a 95 OPS+. Or maybe all of their hopes will be realized, and hey, 2017 did happen!

Lead Photo Credit: Patrick Gorski-USA TODAY Sports

• Ian Hamilton is the most exciting of this group.  Acquired 10 rounds later than Burdi in the 2016 draft, Hamilton’s progress has gone virtually as well one could possibly imagine.  He boasts a fastball touching triple-digits and pairs it with a vicious low-90s slider.  In the two years since he was drafted, Hamilton has used that arsenal to emphatically suplex minor league hitters into the dumpster.  2018 saw him throw 51 2/3 innings across Double-A and Triple-A wherein he posted an ERA of 1.74 with 52 strikeouts against only 8 walks and one home run.  It took major league batters to finally challenge him, as he did give up two homers in Chicago in only eight innings, and his strikeout rate was middling in that brief audition.  Hamilton had mentioned his slider occasionally not behaving the way he wanted it to, but there’ are plenty of reasons to pencil him into the high-leverage portion of the 2019 bullpen right out of the gate and to expect him to thrive.  One negative corollary here is that an 11th round pick basically did what you wanted your first rounder to do.  Second, it shows that even when a relief prospect hits his 80th or 90th percentile outcome (at least so far), it doesn’t really change the organization’s overall outlook.  That said, finding stud relievers after even the second round is a huge bonus, and as we can see in Milwaukee, if the starting pitching is even OK, you can get a lot done with a plus bullpen.
• Ryan Burr must be named alongside Hamilton, but his timetable has basically matched his flashier 18th century counterpart.  Like Hamilton, Burr was acquired relatively cheaply in a trade for international free agent pool money sent off to Arizona.  He doesn’t throw as hard as Hamilton, and his results were not nearly as shiny at pretty much any level.  He also changed his pitching style to work more up in the zone at the White Sox’s request, and had an adjustment period before breezing through Charlotte to make his debut at the end of the 2018 season.  Renteria used him sparingly once he arrived on the South Side, and he certainly had a rocky time of it in his first look at the majors.  He may not be the closer/elite-eighth inning fireman type Hamilton and/or Burdi look like they should be, but the White Sox got him essentially for free and can just plop him into the heart of what is looking like a really strong home-grown bullpen.
• Caleb Frare is one of an increasingly large fraternity of pitchers: relief prospects the Yankees found out of nowhere who they have to get rid of because they have too many to protect on their 40-man.  The Yankees got Frare out of Custer County High School in Montana in the 11th round of the 2012 draft. Throwing in the mid-90s from the left side with a nice slider, Frare also got a brief look at the majors in September.  While he slots in behind Jace Fry as the best lefty in the bullpen, Frare should also break camp with the major league team barring another Jake Peter-for-Joakim Soria-and-Luis Avilan style trade over the winter.  Between Jace Fry, Frare, and Aaron Bummer, the White Sox now have three lefties who look like credible assets and … well are you noticing the trend here? Frare was acquired for IFA money the White Sox couldn’t use and he may be part of a really strong bullpen as soon as 2019.

Given how shaky the position player group has looked and how downright terrifying the starting pitching situation is, it really isn’t hard to see that 2018 saw the tip of a potential flood of really strong relievers who may be an organizational strength over the coming years. This trio rates highly among them.

*They absolutely should have.

• Matt Davidson: Working in Davidson’s favor, he has Top 100 Prospect pedigree, even if that is now several years in the rear view mirror, which jives with his pretty, powerful swing.  He also used 2018 to nearly triple his walk rate while shaving five points off his K%.  The result is a 110 OPS+ on the year to date, with an OBP up nearly 70 points (!!) from wildly below league average to slightly above.  The drawbacks here are a lack of athleticism and positional flexibility on the weak side of a platoon, as he can barely manage playing third base once a week and does not have the footspeed to cover for an outfield spot.  The hope is, given his improvement from 2017 to 2018, there’s more in there.  A Matt Davidson with this walk rate who hits .250-.260 instead of .220-.230 moves further from “decent bat for the position and bench contributor” to a solid regular.  The most intriguing X Factor here is the ability he has flashed as a pitcher in extremely limited samples.  Modern roster construction where teams carry 13 or 14 pitchers leaves almost no room on the bench for position players.  If Davidson can throw 10-20 innings a year, even in the lowest of leverage scenarios, it might separate him from his competition or allow the team to carry one less pitcher.  My gut says he sticks around for 2019, but we have not yet seen the acquisitions and departures of the winter.
• Daniel Palka:  Beloved by StatCast and certain enthusiastic portions of the fanbase, Palka’s power has always been loud and obvious.  For much of the year, however, it was the only thing he could do at a major league level.  Palka turns 27 in October and although the White Sox have given him run in the outfield, he’s arguably worse there than Davidson is at third.  To his credit, September has been his best month in terms of getting on base yet, as he has hit .246/.317/.667  (with eight more home runs, pushing him into the team lead with 27).  Palka is also left-handed, and one wishes teams would start contracting their bullpens to start platooning their opponents to death with bats like this on the bench.   Even so, like 2017 Davidson, it’s hard to carry a bat-only guy who can’t get his OBP above .300, as Palka sits at .289 on the year.  He has an option year left in 2019, so as long as there is 40-man space, they don’t have to make a final decision on him just yet.  Depending on who is healthy / here / gone next spring, I expect Palka to start the year in Charlotte or to fill in if someone is hurt in the hopes he makes a Davidsonian walk rate jump and becomes a more well-rounded weapon at the plate, because he is basically DH-only at this point.
• Nicky Delmonico:  Here’s where things get a little more grim.  Delmonico started the year with the inside track on the left field job after an excellent, albeit brief, audition in 2017.  However, the power he showed last year already looked like an outlier before it vanished this year in limited action bookending a huge chunk of the season lost to injury.  He’s 26 and has flashed major league production before, but there’s only so many of these guys you can keep around, and frankly, I’m not sure there’s enough power in here to carry the glove.  It doesn’t help that his signature strengths–zone control and contact–absolutely imploded, as his BB% dropped from 13.9 to 9.0 and his K% spiked from 18.7 to 25.2.  Like Palka, I anticipate the White Sox will exercise his option, but one has to imagine Palka has jumped over him in the organizational pecking order.
• Avisail Garcia:  Look, all I’m saying is he has 2,475 major league PAs and only 518 of them were good.  Those 518 came in 2017 and they were amazing, as he went to the All Star Game and nearly won a batting title.  My concern is how volatile the profile is, particularly taken in tandem with his truly impressive cascade of injuries.  And, when he’s going well, he’s shoring up his batting average and on-base skills with a remarkable number of infield hits.  The guy gets down the line really, really well for anyone, let alone someone his size–but he’s been managing a lot of lower body injuries this year, and one wonders if gains in eye and power will make up for the loss in speed as he ages further into his late 20s.  He’s under contract for one more year in 2019 and barring the signing of say, Bryce Harper, he’s almost certainly the starting right fielder next year.  I’m just so certain he winds up on the Cardinals and hits .300/.400/.500 for three years sooner rather than later.  Conversely, if the White Sox extend him, he will continue to randomly hit .350 for a couple months between long stretches of basically being a non-contributor.

In sum, injuries and mixed performances have not shed as much clarity as you might like on this pecking order, although I would give Davidson and Palka decent odds of being deployed creatively as significant complementary contributors down the line if they continue to shore up their weaknesses.  As has been the case for most of his career, how the organization chooses to handle Avisail depends on his performance and their own willingness to keep betting on his underlying talent, which in turn, will have big consequences for the fate of the team as a whole.

Lead Image Credit:  Jay Biggerstaff-USA TODAY Sports

Still, if you go to pretty much any leaderboard, particularly on the position player side, and sort from the top, you’re going to find it dominated by first round picks.  Mike Trout, Alex Bregman, Matt Chapman, Francisco Lindor, Manny Machado, Christian Yelich, and so on.

And, as we know in baseball, there can be quite a bit of lag time between adding an amateur talent and their arrival in the majors.  Jorge Alfaro just played his first full year in the majors and he was on seven BP 101 lists—I didn’t realize Baseball-Reference had a “Show All” expand tab for prospect list appearances, but here we are.

This all brings me to the White Sox.  Given they’re in a rebuild, their first round picks are the best way to add star talent at minimal cost, and if they’re planning on competing in 2020-2022, ideally they’d be getting big contributions from their 2015-2017 first round picks.  When you throw in that the White Sox went college with all three of those selections—Carson Fulmer, Zack Collins, and Jake Burger—you’d hope their arrivals would sync up rather nicely with that window.*

Granted, these selections weren’t at the very top of the draft, coming eighth, tenth, and eleventh overall, so the degree of difficulty is higher than say, the barrage of Top 5 picks Dayton Moore has used to poor results for years, but right now these picks aren’t looking great.  Let’s look at each of them in turn:

• Carson Fulmer: The pros and cons were clear. Fulmer’s stuff is electric and he performed well against the toughest amateur competition, pitching for Vanderbilt in the SEC while getting good marks for his makeup.  But, he did not boast ideal size, delivery, command, or a clear third pitch. The theory might have been the White Sox have succeeded with unconventional deliveries and it was a way to maybe get an impact performer out of a comparatively low draft pick.  The negatives have definitely won out to date.  After getting absolutely obliterated in multiple tries as a starter at Triple-A and the majors, he has now been converted to a reliever.  There’s still a chance he’s an impact reliever, and today’s game makes them more valuable than they’ve been in the past, but a star this is not.

You can criticize almost any team by using hindsight and look at the guys who went after and cherrypick to say, “Aha! They should have picked [Player X] instead!” Still, it is kind of amusing they didn’t even take the best high risk, high reward starting pitcher from Vanderbilt in this draft available to them.

• Zack Collins: Another “zig when everyone else is zagging” pick—very few evaluators gave Collins a chance at sticking behind the plate defensively, and there were a lot of questions about his contact skills. The White Sox figured they’d coached up rough catcher defense before, and if he could stay back there they had a chance at an All Star given his power and patience.  At the ten spot, Collins’ ideal ceiling certainly had appeal.  However, as we sit here today and like Fulmer, although hope is not lost, the negatives are outweighing the positives, as he has stalled out in Birmingham, making marginal improvements on his defense while still posting batting averages in the .230s against minor league arms.  The walks are there, and the power is still pretty good, but it’s hard to say this year was a good one for his stock.  He turns 24 before Opening Day next year, and one would hope someone with his power, eye, and advance college competition would be able to muster better contact against Double-A pitchers in his third pro season.  Catchers are weird, and he’s certainly focusing very hard on his defense, but the probability he is a second division or bench quality 1B bat is frighteningly high.
• Jake Burger: Our prospect team liked Burger quite a bit—even if they thought he was a future 1B instead of a 3B. He just had a ton of batspeed and power and if you have enough of those two things you can contribute even if you have a whole lot of other problems.  Still, everything was going to have to break perfectly for him to play 3B, and as soon as you are moving a prospect to 1B they have to be absolutely elite bats in order to be stars.  Unfortunately, any chance Burger could string together some 3B seasons in the majors before moving across the diamond were blown up in dramatic fashion, as he tore his Achilles tendon not once but twice.  There’s still time for him to get back on track, but it’s a dramatic injury and it’s unclear how much power and batspeed will remain when he returns to the field.  And, as we’ve seen in recent years, the value of 1B/DH-only bats is lower than it has been in a long time.

Ultimately, despite the pedigree and obvious major league tools these three picks possessed, they all bore a significant amount of risk, and it’s looking like the White Sox may have rolled snake eyes on all of them.  If they continue to fail in the way they have to date, they can’t say these failures were unforeseeable, like, say, Gordon Beckham forgetting how to hit. And, the cumulative effect may be that once again the White Sox have a contender with holes where they wouldn’t be if they’d had better results with their first round picks.  Maybe they can just paper over it by blitzing studs they grab at the top of the draft like Nick Madrigal and whatever Top 5 player they grab next year to the majors, but they’re tying one hand behind their back if they get minimal contributions from three selections in the Top 11 overall.

The story of these three prospects is hardly over. This time next year we could be talking about Fulmer as a relief ace, Collins as the catcher of the future, and Jake Burger as a pure cleanup hitter, but if you think of each prospect as a range of possible outcomes with various probabilities assigned to those outcomes, the negative outcomes are currently gobbling up a whole lot more of the pie chart.

*The White Sox had a compensatory pick and got an extra first rounder to select Zack Burdi in 2016.  I don’t believe it changes the above analysis.  As a pure reliever, Burdi was always going to be a member of the supporting cast rather than a sizable piece of the “Core.”  The White Sox are better at it than most, but Ian Hamilton, Ryan Burr, Caleb Frare, and even potentially Tyler Johnson and others down in the minors look like late inning relievers and they did not cost the 26th overall pick.

Lead Image Credit: Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports

September has been a bucket of cold water, to say the least, instead of a month where the loaded farm system started bubbling over with talent to excite for next year. Debates swirled around the White Sox’ decision to leave Eloy Jimenez in Triple-A, the Tigers blew them out twice, tagged out with Mike Trout, and then the Angels proceeded to sweep them.  They’re now on a seven-game losing streak, with two losses against the Royals of all teams.  We also learned Kopech tore his UCL and will be out for all of the 2019 season as he recovers from Tommy John surgery.

As commonplace as UCL surgeries have become in this sport, it bears emphasizing it is no guarantee.  Even someone like Zack Wheeler who, in 2018, finally looked the part of what evaluators hoped he could be once upon a time took years of setbacks before he got there—and that’s still a better outcome than some.  Some guys never get their stuff back.  Some guys never pitch again.

On the positive side, I suppose, Kopech got hurt in September and there is no ambiguity about trying to get him to return midseason. By all accounts he has a tremendous work ethic and will have as much time as he needs to rehab.  This series of events, however, feels like the epitome of 2018 White Sox.  An elite prospect with a devastating injury, and his replacement is Rob Scahill—a major league veteran acquired off waivers who is just here to soak up innings, rather than to be a meaningful part of the future.

As for the rest of 2018, there are still a few things for which to hope.  Yoan Moncada and Tim Anderson could close strong, Ian Hamilton and Ryan Burr are relief prospects only, but interesting prospects nonetheless.  Matt Davidson continues to claw his way from speculative non-major leaguer to intriguing bench piece, and Yolmer Sanchez is certainly fun if nothing else.

2018 was always going to need an absurd amount of positive development luck for the team to start looking like something.  Something like Eloy Jimenez or Michael Kopech going nuclear and basically doing some watered-down version of what Juan Soto did in Washington D.C.  Kopech was starting to look like the White Sox’ first glimpse of its hoarded talent breaking out, only to do what so many pitching prospects do and blow out his elbow.

The benefit of hoarding prospects—pitching prospects in particular—is you try to overcome the hateful, inexorable forces of nature with volume.  Dylan Cease, of all people, was healthier than any other prospect in the White Sox’ pre-season Top 7 as Eloy, Alec Hansen, Luis Robert, Dane Dunning, and now Kopech all missed time with a variety of injuries.  And, it hasn’t been all bad this year.  The aforementioned Hamilton and Burr forced their way to the majors, Cease had his excellent season, arguably the best player in the draft slid to the White Sox at pick number four, and a number players in the 11-30 range of the system took steps forward: Luis Alexander Basabe, Luis Gonzalez, Bernardo Flores, Micker Adolfo, Laz Rivera, etc.

The consolation prize for the major league post-prospects/rookies/young players scuffling so much and the miserable September is your draft position improves.  For a while the White Sox looked to be playing their way out of a Top 5 draft pick.  But perhaps this crystallizes and makes real what had been a hypothetical argument and a position I’ve staked out for a long time: I’d rather the major league team play well and lose draft position than the alternative.  If Michael Kopech had stayed healthy and pitched well in September, that would have meant more for the team than him blowing out his elbow and moving up two or three draft slots.

Regardless, it hasn’t been easy being a White Sox fan since George W. Bush left office.  2018 didn’t really change that.  Worse, it’s harder to evaluate the players we have on hand–there’s this sort of indistinguishable morass of mediocre corner players, uber talented middle infielders failing to break out in earnest, and #2-4 starter types all pitching like #4s or #5s.  Instead of going on a huge streak anchored by Eloy Jimenez and Michael Kopech and Yoan Moncada and inspiring the confidence to sign free agents and see if you can contend in 2019, my initial forecast is an offseason with a whole lot of the same–minor league free agents, one-year stop gaps, maybe a fringe trade or two, and hoping the internal talent takes the jump in 2019 one might have hoped for in 2018.

But as I warned before the rebuild began, rebuilds don’t guarantee you anything.

Lead Photo Credit: Ray Carlin-USA TODAY Sports

But if we step back, we can see progress in Lopez’ season, which indicates he may be a mid-rotation starter as soon as next year after all.  After all, most observers agreed Lopez was ready as a shutdown reliever even before he was traded to Chicago.  Among the many things his doubters expressed was whether he could hold up to a starter’s workload and hold his velocity in the process.  We’re now in his second full year as a starting pitcher, and he can certainly hold his velocity.  He averages somewhere between 95-97 mph on his four seam fastball whether it’s the 1st inning or the 9th or anywhere in between. He averaged somewhere between 95-97 mph on his four seam fastball in every month of the season, whether it was April or September.  He’s on pace to throw about 180 innings, which, in the modern game, is about as much as you can hope for any starter, as the numbers who clear the 200 inning mark dwindles year after year.  Qualitatively, as the season has progressed, we’ve seen him progress in his command of his offspeed pitches, and explicitly state that he has been learning that he can trust those pitches.

The pessimistic argument is that Lopez has had good games before, but the odds are against him stringing together enough of them to be a worthwhile use of a rotation spot.  Perhaps ultimately that will be his fate, but watching a young starter with premium stuff dominate was refreshing even if y’know…the White Sox got shut out and the season has mostly been watching prospects struggle, fail, get hurt, or all of the above.

With Lopez profile of premium stuff and low command, the realistic hope was that he would become a #3 starter rather than delete all of his weaknesses and become an ace.  He didn’t get all the way there this year, but he got closer, and that’s not nothing.

Lead Image Credit:  Rick Scuteri-USA TODAY Sports