Kevan Smith didn’t blow the roof off the place by any means. But the offensive threshold for catchers isn’t high, and a .283/.309/.388 line is perfectly acceptable for a backup catcher type. The metrics didn’t love his defense, as his -6.6 FRAA ranked 29th out of 35 catchers who saw at least as much playing time as Smith (Omar Narvaez, for the record, checked in at 30th), but he got nothing but positive reviews from pitchers on how he called the game from behind the plate. Smith is still a long shot to be a contributor to a contending team, of course. He’ll be 30 in June, and for however good I made him sound in the previous few sentences, all of that added up to what was essentially a replacement level catcher. But for a rebuilding team plagued by the Curse of Non-Tendering Tyler Flowers, the White Sox couldn’t have asked for much better given the expectations coming in.

The reason, of course, that Smith got as much playing time as he did is because the veteran backstop the White Sox brought in on a cheap, minor league deal played all of 13 games. Geovany Soto’s bat has been, for the better part of his career, a plus as far as catchers go. The White Sox let him go after an unimpressive but not terrible 2015 season, and he came back this year to presumably split time behind the plate with Narvaez. But after battling knee injuries during his year in Los Angeles, he underwent arthroscopic elbow surgery after suffering an injury in April and was never seen again.

Soto is the type of inexpensive veteran who makes sense as roster filler for a rebuilding team, particularly one bereft of impact catchers at or near the major league level. Whether he’s able to continue to be something close to that is up in the air, but by the start of next season he’ll be a 35-year-old catcher with a long list of injuries in his past, so his swan song may have already been sung.

My full time job revolves around designing sports sections for daily newspapers (yes, those still exist), and a lot of the papers I design are in cities with minor league baseball teams. One of my favorite things to do while designing these papers is look through that day’s minor league box score for some random major league retread still hanging around at Triple-A.

Chris Volstad was the epitome of that for the White Sox the last few years. You’d look at the Charlotte Knights roster and go “WTF is Volstad doing here?!” It became particularly funny in 2017 when Volstad was joined in the rotation by guys actually worth being excited about. Imagine going to a Knights game, where you’d have the chance to see Lucas Giolito or Reynaldo Lopez, or at least guys like Carson Fulmer or Tyler Danish. But nope. You bought a ticket on a day when Volstad was pitching. I live 10 minutes from the home stadium of the Round Rock Express, the Texas Rangers’ Triple-A affiliate, and I did that once on a day Kyle Lohse was pitching. Minor league baseball is fun regardless of who is playing, and at Triple-A you’re not exactly at a game chock full of prospects (I went to an Express game this year that featured the likes of Will Middlebrooks, Pete Kozma, and Jared Hoying), but it’s a lot less fun when you’re watching an aging hurler holding onto his career by a thread. In fact, it’s kind of sad. Dammit, now I’m sad.

Anyway, that’s the end of my story. Volstad threw 19 2/3 innings for the 2017 White Sox.

Check out Michael Ynoa’s first Baseball Prospectus Annual comment from back in 2009:

It’s hard to get a PECOTA projection when you’ve yet to pitch a pro inning, and even more difficult when you’ve barely pitched a competitive inning at all. But Inoa is deserving of far more than just a comment at the tail end of the chapter. The talk of scouting circles all spring, the Domican wunderkind signed for $4.25 million, more than doubling the previous high-water mark for a Latin American pitcher. Many who saw him called him the best 16-year-old arm they’ve ever seen; he already touches 94 mph, has a very good breaking ball, and with a long, loose six-foot-seven frame, his potential is almost immeasurable. Obviously he’s very young, and there are countless things that could go wrong between where Inoa is now and potential stardom, but his talent is borderline historic, and deserves mention.

All of the countless things that could have gone wrong for Ynoa went wrong, and eight years later he’s coming off a season where he walked 22 batters in 29 innings, got hurt, was DFA’d, and subsequently spent the remainder of the season in the minors. When the White Sox acquired Ynoa in the infamous Jeff Samardzija trade, there was at least a “Hmmm” factor, given his once lofty prospect status. He’s now 26, remains injury prone, and has yet to demonstrate the ability to throw the ball over the plate on a consistent basis. The optimism, it is waning.

Lead Photo Credit: Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports

What are we doing in the meantime, though? Am I supposed to pretend this is not a deadened wasteland of information and relevant topics to discuss? What is there left to strip mine for content? Yoan Moncada should be good someday or he’ll strike out a little too much. The 2017 team will have a lot of prospect debut days, will give chances to some fun project players, but will probably lose a bunch. There’s not a ton to explore on these topics until men start picking up bats and gloves again, but then again I don’t want to rule out writing topics for later this week, either.

1. Alex Avila went back to the Detroit Tigers over the weekend on nearly the exact same deal he signed with the White Sox for. This is neither surprising nor an outrage, since the Sox are not contending at all, and figure to give Omar Narvaez, also a lefty hitter himself, plenty of playing time. Avila still got on base plenty in 2016 (.359 OBP) and is smart as a whip, but he tweaked his hamstring multiple times and barely cracked 200 plate appearances while his framing numbers remained sour. Such a bag of positives and negatives from a soon-to-be 30-year-old sounds like an ideal major league backup. Surely the holidays are stalling the deluge of apology comments for all those “Even his own dad wouldn’t sign him!” jokes from last year.

Avila aside, the prospect of leaving the catching workload to a pair of rookies–Narvaez and Kevan Smith, currently topping the depth chart–is a little disconcerting for pitching development. The other side of this is that it’s hard to find a realistic free agent catcher target without warts even worse than Avila’s. There are light-hitting catchers, and catchers who cannot even maintain the pretense of trying to hit like Josh Thole and Ryan Hanigan. Hank Conger has nice framing numbers but also hit horribly in 2016 and has thrown out under 20 percent of basestealers for his career. Nick Hundley is fine but someone better should want him. I am either going to be surprised by who the Sox are able to land or surprised that who they add is still playing.

2. I am one of two humans concerned about where Chris Volstad‘s innings are coming from in the Charlotte Knights rotation. The recently re-signed, massive 30-year-old righty logged a shade under 180 innings (in a Triple-A season!), but the days of filling the Knights rotation with journeymen warriors are temporarily over. The Knights could start the year with Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez and Carson Fulmer in their rotation, while Tyler Danish, Jordan Guerrero, Brandon Brennan and Spencer Adams all reached Double-A (and beyond) last season. And what about David Holmberg??!

Volstad will lead the Knights in innings again in 2017, is what I’m saying.

3. The esteemed Scott Merkin wrote up Alec Hansen and the organizational enthusiasm behind him after his merciless decimation of Rookie Ball in 2016. He struck out 81 and walked 20 for a 1.32 ERA in 54.2 innings across three levels (Rookie Ball through Low-A), just as a reminder.

Pretty much any prospect who is publicly seen vivisecting his opposition–even low level opposition–is going to generate enthusiasm, but a plus-armed giant (six-feet, seven inches) who played major conference college ball ripping through that level is not particularly notable aside from how lost we perceived Hansen to be when he joined the organization. Reports of his progress with Sox coaching is very encouraging, but if there’s anyone who should benefit from a slowed-down timetable brought on by the Sox rebuild, it’s Hansen. If he is still being groomed to start, he should be given all the time in a world to develop a changeup and reduce the effort of his delivery..

4. The White Sox signed 28-year-old Jorge Rondon to a minor league deal over the weekend. He throws very, very hard and has allowed 48 of the 105 major league hitters he’s faced to reach base. He’s throwing more strikes recently than he was during his seven-year run in the Cardinals minor league system, and had a 2.67 ERA in 57.1 innings as a reliever for the Pirates’ Triple-A affiliate last season, but has never been particularly overwhelming. Searching through old BP writeups on him was the first time I’ve ever seen “fifth-inning guy” as a description for a relief prospect.

5. A lot of the attention for this Carlos Rodon Instagram video of him playing catch with his fiancee will be directed toward him missing so badly with a two-seamer that he has to apologize, but Jake Peavy always said Spring Training was about finding fastball command, so Rodon is ahead of the game. The real star of this video are the crisp throws of Rodon’s fiancee. The Sox have been shuffling through personal catcher options for Rodon since non-tendering Tyler Flowers, and in a rebuild, certainly should consider someone he’s comfortable with that has a carrying tool like that throwing arm. It’s truly the offseason if I’m writing this much about this video.

Lead Image Credit: Caylor Arnold // USA Today Sports Images