Thus, the non-tendering of four players–Al Alburquerque, Jake Petricka, Zach Putnam, and Alen Hanson–weighs in as the update of the moment.  Taking each of these in turn, my thoughts are as follows:

• Alburquerque has been good in the past, but this caliber of pitcher is basically always floating around.  He was picked up for free and you don’t necessarily need to cling to those guys;
• Petricka threw 144 solid innings from 2013-2015 after the White Sox selected him in the second round of the 2010 draft.  2016 and 2017 were riddled with injuries and ineffectiveness. Even for someone with plus velocity, the Pitch To Contact profile can often leave you with a very thin margin for error, and Petricka may not be able to stay above that line anymore;
• Putnam is coming back from Tommy John surgery and may miss most of 2018, but unlike Petricka he has at least been extremely effective in between his stints on the disabled list; and
• In a universe where the White Sox aren’t protecting Jake Peter and have a crowded depth chart of utility players, Hanson got squeezed out.

Some, all, or none of these guys could return on minor league deals and even make the 25-man roster out of camp next year depending on what other moves the team makes over the course of the winter.  Hahn & Co. may have identified more than one target they like in the Rule V draft, which could suddenly make things quite crowded, and with these moves, the 40-man roster sits at 36. To my mind, Putnam was the only close call, and that depends on how his rehab is going, when he looks like he’d be able to pitch again, and whether or not they can work something else out such that he’s back in the organization at such time as he is healthy.  Or, it could be that Tommy John took enough out of him that he’s not the same pitcher anymore, which would be a shame, as he was a fairly unique guy.

And so the calm before the storm continues, but with Tyler Chatwood getting plucked up by the Cubs and the Winter Meetings rapidly approaching, some activity is due sooner or later.  And, even if you don’t see the move coming, as the Castillo acquisition shows, you never know when you might get surprised.

Jake Petricka earned a spot in the White Sox bullpen four seasons ago because of his keen ability to induce ground balls.

The 2010 second round pick hurled his mid-90s sinker down in the zone and batters helplessly pounded it into the dirt. In 2014 and 2015 his ground ball rate was 63.4 and 65.2 percent, respectively, and he looked the part of a valuable middle innings guy capable of carving out a lengthy major league career.

Since then, Petricka has thrown 33 2/3 innings total as he battled a myriad of injuries, the latest coming just last week as after a season in which he was disabled with elbow strains on two separate occasions, the White Sox announced the right-hander underwent a nerve transposition in his right elbow. The injury helps explain at least in part his 2017 struggles, but also casts doubt onto his future with the organization. Quite simply, Petricka has lost the command that once made him so effective.

After allowing just six home runs in the first 152 innings of his career, Petricka allowed six in 25 2/3 innings in 2017. His ground ball rate dropped to 47.2 percent and and his fly ball rate — still just 19.6 percent for his career — soared to 27 percent. While that as well as his career-high strikeout rate can be explained at least partially by today’s run-scoring environment, Petricka earned and has kept his roster spot based on his ability to keep the ball on the ground and in the ballpark. Lacking that, his effectiveness disappears. And it disappeared to the tune of a 7.01 ERA.

Petricka’s command has always been shaky, as his career 3.79 BB/9 indicates, and after a torn hip labrum wiped out basically all of 2016 and 2017 saw three separate DL trips, it’s possible we never see Good Petricka again. The White Sox surely must know that’s possible, and as an arbitration-eligible pitcher this winter, they might not be willing to pay to find out.

Petricka and Zach Putnam have always been lumped together in the eyes of White Sox fans. Surely I’m not the only one, right? After all, both surnames begin with the same letter and they’re fun to say together. Putnam and Petricka seem like the names of heavyset, mustachioed cop partners called on by the chief to work on a case that’s way above their abilities. You know those two old cops assigned to Daniels’ unit in Season 1 of The Wire? They could’ve been named Putnam and Petricka. OK, I’m getting off track. Sorry.

Putnam and Petricka also joined the organization around the same time. Petricka as a draft pick and Putnam after stints in Cleveland and on the North Side of town. Putnam was the other bright spot in the 2014 White Sox bullpen, bursting onto the scene to throw 54 2/3 innings with a minuscule 1.98 ERA.

The next year he became Putnam: The K God, using his splitter upwards of 50-60 percent of the time to generate whiffs before all the cool kids started doing it. Maybe he wasn’t the fireballing reliever you’d expect to anchor the back-end of your bullpen for the next 5-7 years, but one could envision a future where Putnam was coming in and eviscerating three hitters with that splitter in the middle innings for the White Sox for a long time to come.

But it turned out Putnam and Petricka really are tied at the hip, and just as injuries have wiped away Petricka’s last two seasons and put his future as a major leaguer in doubt, the same can be said of Putnam. After a bone fragment in his elbow cost him the second half of 2016, he went down after just 8 2/3 innings in 2017, eventually having Tommy John surgery in June. His status for 2018 is perilous as he is also arbitration eligible again this winter.

Putnam was always a personal favorite after the White Sox picked him up off the scrap heap and turned him into an effective and fun-to-watch middle reliever. Tommy John surgery puts the future of any pitcher in doubt, but for someone whose peak was so fleeting and out-of-nowhere as Putnam’s, the odds seem stacked fairly high against him pitching for the White Sox again.

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While people are welcome to digest baseball however they please — it is, after all, entertainment — there was nothing wrong with how Renteria managed*, and there was absolutely nothing surprising about the game’s outcome.  The White Sox have traded away David Robertson, Tommy Kahnle, Dan Jennings, and Anthony Swarzak.  They’ve lost Zach Putnam, Nate Jones, and Michael Ynoa to the disabled list.  They even traded away Tyler Clippard!

*As easy as it is to roll one’s eyes at a manager aggressively playing matchups, particularly in a lost season, Aaron Bummer is potentially a long-term bullpen piece and he’s going to need to learn how to come in to face elite lefties like that.

In other words, 100 percent of the current bullpen is comprised of backups.  Other than Petricka, these were options 9-16 heading into the season.  So while the White Sox entered the year with a surprisingly excellent relief corps — a group much better than a number of teams that currently have vice-like grips on playoff spots — it has been razed in exchange for minor league talent.

It’s impressive that Rick Hahn & Co. got as much as they did for what they had, packaging Robertson and Kahnle together with Todd Frazier — a rental bat whose value was increasingly in question given the returns for similar players at this deadline — to get a Top 100 prospect in Blake Rutherford.  Even Jennings and Swarzak got flipped for potential future contributors.

But games like Wednesday are the cost of those trades.  Jennings and Clippard are hardly Andrew Miller and Craig Kimbrel, but on most nights they can get you three outs before surrendering two runs.  They’re competent major leaguers.  The relievers left in the current White Sox bullpen are either hoping to be as good as Jennings and Clippard some day or are stop gaps to get through the rest of the year. Factor in the Dodgers lineup and you’re going to get games like Wednesday, and there are going to be lots of games like Wednesday between now and the end of the year.

The triumph, rather, was that Carlos Rodon has now rattled off four straight quality starts while pitching against Cleveland, Boston, Houston, and the Dodgers — the last two opponents featuring the two best TAv’s in all of baseball.  Across those outings, he has thrown 29.67 innings with 28 strikeouts while only allowing 26 hits, 7 runs, and 6 walks.  On the down side, he did pop up two bunts, so perhaps it makes more sense to just let him swing away during his rare interleague road games.

The triumph was that Nicky Delmonico continued his blistering major league debut with two more home runs, raising his line to .396/.463/.625 in his first 54 plate appearances.  The triumph was that Leury Garcia continued his breakout 2017 season with a leadoff home run off Yu Darvish in a 2-for-5 night.

But the games aren’t all going to be the Astros series, where they bludgeoned their opponents, or held them down long enough for Yoan Moncada to perform superlative heroics.  Sometimes Juan Minaya and Jake Petricka and Gregory Infante are going to get shelled, and that’s kind of what they signed up for.

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1. Lucas Giolito had his second strong start out of his last three, striking out 11 over 6 innings while only allowing 5 hits 1 run and 2 walks.  The White Sox have been very clear that Giolito is a work in progress as they try to overhaul his mechanics. His fastball is no longer the 80-grade offering it was when he was in the discussion for Best Prospect In Baseball, but he could be a good mid-rotation starter as soon as next year, and that’s a really valuable thing.  The process is more important than the results at this stage with Giolito…but uh, feel free to explain to me why 11Ks is a bad thing.

2. Jake Petricka is back throwing rehab starts for Charlotte, throwing twice over the weekend.  The results haven’t been pretty, but unless you think his health is still compromised or this most recent injury permanently diminished his skill set, these appearances should probably be viewed as one would approach Spring Training.  Petricka isn’t a guy who had such a huge margin for error, so any permanent regression could be problematic. However, given his track record, he represents an upgrade over, say, Gregory Infante.

3. Given Jose Quintana‘s struggles, a popular conversation has been whether the White Sox erred in retaining his services into the 2017 season. This topic will be the subject of its own piece, but the only concrete offer that was made public was that the Astros declined the White Sox offer of Quintana for Francis Martes, Kyle Tucker, and Joe Musgrove.  For what it’s worth, Martes is getting annihilated at Triple-A thus far. It is the PCL, which is an extreme hitter’s environment, but he’s walking almost a batter per inning while also surrendering a billion hits.  Tucker dominated High-A and is adjusting to Double-A.  Joe Musgrove has been bad.

4. For a second round pick in an until-recently threadbare system, Chris Beck has certainly flown under the radar.  And while his velocity jumped when he shifted to the bullpen–which is a common phenomenon, but not a certainty–he got tattooed in his first extended look in the majors last year.  Undeterred, he’s posting respectable numbers in 2017 with a DRA of 3.45 and a cFIP of 96.

If Beck can maintain this level, he would represent a solid middle reliever. If he finds any further improvement as he continues to adjust to the deployment of his Reliever Stuff rather than his Starter Stuff, there may be a little more in there.  Either outcome would be a very welcome one for any second round pick.  Generating depth like this from within is certainly not flashy, but it’s really nice not having to spend resources in trades or free agency to fill out the back of your bullpen.

5. Kevan Smith has struggled with the bat out of the gate. Catching prospects are weird as a general rule and their development can meander all over the place, sometimes leading nowhere, or…well, look at Tyler Flowers.  Either way, so far Baseball Prospectus’ defensive metrics rate Smith as an average defender behind the plate.  If you can defend the catcher position, you can hit really badly and still have a major league career.  It’s an even more impressive result given that he was always considered a huge liability behind the plate, and you can see his steady improvement year-by-year as he worked with the White Sox’ player development staff. Factor in Smith’s physicality and decent minor league track record, it’s not impossible that he scratches out enough offense to contribute value off of the bench.

Omar Narvaez and Smith hardly combine to form Buster Posey, but as with Beck above, if you can generate serviceable options for the margins of your roster cheaply, it gives you a ton of flexibility elsewhere and continues to help avoid the death anchors / black holes that torpedoed the last White Sox would-be contention cycle.

Lead photo credit: Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports

That said, hearing the Yankees are dropping out because they don’t want to give up “three elite prospects,” calls back old memories of the Sox and their stringent high demands stagnating trade progress (though a quick look at their prospect list shows its benefits, of course). Speculation that the Braves could still be in provides a reminder of the transience of these things, but so far they have traded one of the greatest talents to ever hit the trade market, victimized a desperate Nationals team looking for a consolation prize, and appear to have a good demand for the third super cost-controlled All-Star talent in its prime.

Moves for the guys who are not providing useful value if they are not contributing to a winning White Sox team such as Todd Frazier and Melky Cabrera, however, have lacked any real momentum. Nothing has percolated on David Robertson for a while, not that there’s the same rush, and why there isn’t a feeding frenzy for Nate Jones continues to be baffling. The Los Angeles Dodgers, the win-now team most in need of a real second baseman, just had their trade talks for Brian Dozier fall through, which at least provides a theoretical opening for Brett Lawrie, if not one that has his name attached in any meaningful way. It’s more important to max out the returns for their super pieces, but confusing they still have all these players who obviously should be traded.

Just the return on a Quintana trade alone will likely be enough to vault the Sox to having the best farm system in the game, so nitpicking about whether they are approaching moving the smaller bits of their roster aggressively feels a bit silly. But when we’re talking about what kind of homegrown core is needed to build a World Series winner on presumably a $120 million budget three years from now, no prospect buildup is enough.

The common reason to fret about this is the new wave obsession with maximum tanking during a rebuild, and gunning for the No. 1 pick with the cynical force of a thousand suns. My reason for focusing on it probably reads as trivial as quibbling over the expected value of the second pick vs. the first pick: clarity of purpose. Clearing the house quickly eliminates the weirdness of entering the year full of vets who expected to play for a contender, shows the Sox are committed to an extreme, scorched Earth approach that will maximize their efforts, and allows them to use 2017 as an opportunity to try out projects rather than to carry out trade auditions.

But I don’t even waste time writing that paragraph if I’m not a little bored with a quiet January. The market still has left the Sox behind in many real ways. Frazier has not been left out of any run on third baseman, there’s a very real glut of first baseman and designated hitters to suppress Jose Abreu‘s market. Only relievers seem like territory the Sox could be pushing into, and there’s no end in demand for that ever.

To that end, avoiding arbitration with Dan Jennings and Jake Petricka is the actual transactional news of the week. Both could be traded for some sort of lotto ticket if they prove themselves capable in 2017, and both seem like the type of projects who fit within the typical constraints of a rebuild. They’ll also be more interesting to watch than they will have significant effect on building the new core, which is a good preview on how watching the activities of the big league club will be going forward.

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Let it never be said again that the Sox won’t eat money to part with a struggling player after they paid Matt Albers $250K to buy him out rather than pick up his $3 million option for 2017. They rostered him all season when he was toast after the month of April, but enough is enough.

J.B. Shuck puts the ball in play, was a great pinch hitter, has good speed, runs hard and is a very nice guy. But he also is a below-average defensive centerfielder and hit .205/.248/.299 while starting 59 games, so while it would nice to keep him in the organization–and they might still after outrighting him to Triple-A Charlotte–it would be a lot nicer to avoid depending on him in the organization in the same way. Shuck is sort of the ultimate fourth outfielder type, and nothing is more fourth outfielder than becoming reviled after exigent circumstances make you a third outfielder.

The Sox also released Daniel Webb, who underwent Tommy John surgery this past year, and never found his footing or a speck of command after being excitedly pressed into major duty in 2014. Webb had upper level velocity and three pitches that could miss bats, but struggling in learning on the major league job never suited him, nor did the wilderness of struggling in long relief after he lost Robin Ventura’s trust. You can only watch him miss him a spot with his fastball by multiple feet so many times and maintain patience in his development, but this is sad.

This is all basic housekeeping stuff; purging players who couldn’t possibly have a real role on the 2017 roster no matter what direction the team went. Activating Jake Petricka from the 60-day disabled list might have been the most substantive long-term move the Sox made on Thursday, and he will need to return to his peak to become seventh inning reliever.

The most substantial thing that really happened for the Sox Thursday was probably the Tigers trading Cameron Maybin in a blatant salary dump. Maybin was a godsend to the Tigers when he returned mid-season from injury and collected a .383 OBP in center field, and yet they traded him to the Angels rather than pay out his $9 million option in 2017, and now have a choice between Anthony Gose and Jacoby Jones in center.

There was plenty of chatter that the Tigers were finally going to turn around and reel in spending after spending the better part of a decade charging at full-speed to try to win a World Series with their Justin Verlander/Miguel Cabrera core, but seeing them purge major league production for salary relief is still jarring.

Refusing to be aggressive because the division is too tough is foolish, but being aggressive because the division is weak can still be good.

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However, sometimes excuses really are pathetic.

Hawk’s asinine gripes about the schedule aside, when it became clear that the 2016 season was irretrievably tipping from surprise success to familiar and foreseeable failure, other excuses cropped up. “Well, Austin Jackson got hurt, and what were they supposed to do without Zach Putnam and Jake Petricka?” or something along those lines.

And sure, J.B. Shuck is a downgrade from Jackson, and the replacement-level guys who slotted in to middle relief in the wake of Putnam and Petricka were generally very bad. But even I–the biggest Zach Putnam fan in the world, who got in on the ground floor–would never argue that these losses are anywhere close to those of several playoff teams.

For example, the Indians can’t exactly paper over mistakes with money.  Cleveland is an interesting comparison for the White Sox in that sense, as well as the fact that they projected to have problems scoring runs, and that the main strength of the team was a cost-controlled stable of quality starting pitchers.

Cleveland has already won 90 games. They did this despite only getting 43 horrible PAs from Michael Brantley, instead of the .319/.382/.494 line over 635 PAs per year they did the two years before. What’s more, they won’t get more than 150 innings out of either Carlos Carrasco or Danny Salazar. Yan Gomes had an OPS of .529 for ~250 PAs in between injuries.

The Mets are another offensively-challenged squad with financial limitations and a roster built around potent starting pitching.  As of this drafting, they have a pretty good grip on the first Wild Card slot in the National League. Matt Harvey, Steven Matz, Jake deGrom, David Wright, Neil Walker…all of them lost for significant chunks of the season to injury.

These teams illustrate the failings of the White Sox more so than, say, the Dodgers, who can burn through hundreds of millions of dollars of brittle pitchers without blinking. And while the Mets are in the National League and get to play a lot more games against the worst teams in the majors, they and Cleveland lost a lot more really, really great players to injury than the White Sox did and succeeded anyway, despite being situated very similarly.

There are myriad reasons for that. The Mets spent in the offseason to retain an elite bat and brought in potential stopgaps like Kelly Johnson, James Loney, and (ugh) Jose Reyes when problems arose. They also opted for one of the best defensive catchers in the majors as the primary backup, especially with regard to framing, in the form of Rene Rivera.

Cleveland succeeded by actually hitting with the cheap free agents they signed, such as Mike Napoli, Rajai Davis, and even, to an extent, Marlon Byrd. They added Abraham Almonte for the modest price of an aging lefty specialist. And, they got Tyler Naquin with their 2012 first round pick instead of Courtney Hawkins.

There are a lot of reasons why the White Sox failed in 2016.  Looking at how other organizations solved the same problems with similar resources helps put in perspective that although these problems are significant, they are not insurmountable with competence and creativity.

And keep that in mind if the organization tries to deflect blame for their mistakes on the losses of some pretty fungible players.

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Kenny Williams speaking to assembled media on a golf course is not exactly the forum for a public bloodletting on the state and fate of the White Sox, or even the ideal place for an adjustment on their general policy to err on the side of opaqueness. But in trying to dampen concern about division in the front office, affirm the Sox have a clarity of vision and are cognizant of what needs to be addressed for their team to succeed, he did not accomplish much. Williams speaks to the media rarely enough to assume there’s a purpose to the moments he chooses, but then again he just blamed the fall of the 2016 White Sox on “bullpen injuries,” which is revealing in its own way.

Simply, if the Good Ship White Sox couldn’t take losing Zach Putnam and Jake Petricka–as high as I am on both (the latter still has potential!)–than it wasn’t fit for sea in the first place.

To some degree, and to echo Nick Schaefer, having any discussion about the Sox that isn’t squared around the problems the franchise has had with filling out a viable offense feels like willful misdirection. Using the broad, zoomed out measure of runs per game–which I think Williams would appreciate as a frank assessment of getting the job done or not–the Sox have been near the bottom of the league, or at least solidly below the American League average for four years in a row.

They got .317/.383/.581 from Jose Abreu in 2014 and still only scored 4.07 runs per game, and that looks like the high point of a four-year span. The last above-average campaign came when the Sox got the last good years from the bats of Alex Rios, A.J. Pierzynski, Paul Konerko and Kevin Youkilis in 2012, after they had been bad at scoring again in 2011.

In subsequent years, they have traded away Carlos Quentin to give playing time to Dayan Viciedo; a rawly powerful force whom they could never refine to become a threat to major league pitching, centered a rebuild around the acquisition of Avisail Garcia, and just this year miscast Todd Frazier–a good, but not great hitter–as a lineup centerpiece while bypassing an offense-rich free agency crop.

So yes, bullpen depth and health is a priority when the offense is a permanent failing to the point of requiring perfection from every other unit on the team. But eight years without a playoff appearance, without any sort of hard rebuild that mitigates how damning every additional season of drought should be, strongly suggests this isn’t a disability that can be overcome with the Sox natural advantages in pitching health and development alone. Eight years would suggest the current leadership is fundamentally incapable of developing and building a playoff-caliber offense, and that is a concern grave enough I would think it would be worth addressing at every opportunity.

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The highlight, of course, was the Yankees adding Aroldis Chapman to a bullpen that already featured Dellin Betances and Andrew Miller, but there were plenty of other arms on the move.

Craig Kimbrel went from San Diego to Boston, and Carson Smith joined him from Seattle. Oakland spent money on Ryan Madson, the Tigers acquired Francisco Rodriguez, the Orioles kept Darren O’Day, Washington brought in a host of guys headed by Shawn Kelley, Houston traded for Ken Giles, you get the idea.

The White Sox mostly stood pat when it came to their bullpen, with the lone exception coming in the form of a minor trade that brought Tommy Kahnle from Colorado. And there’s a good chance Kahnle doesn’t break camp with the 25-man roster.

The reason why is understandable. The White Sox made their big splash during the previous offseason, inking former Yankees closer David Robertson to a four-year, $46M contract that also cost them a draft pick.

Robertson was part of an overhauled White Sox bullpen in 2015. He joined Zach Duke, Dan Jennings and Matt Albers as bullpen pieces who were expected to help the team improve on a dreadful 2014 season in which the bullpen walked everyone under the sun, ranking dead last in the league in BB/9 at 4.06, 25th in the league in K/9 at 7.91, and 26th in the league in ERA at 4.03. By just about every statistical measure, the White Sox had a horrible bullpen in 2014, which played a big part in their 73-89 finish.

And while the 2015 White Sox were only slightly improved, finishing 76-86, the bullpen did get better, jumping to 16th in ERA and 13th in K/9 (they were still 21st in BB/9).

The point of this post isn’t to dwell on 2015 and what went wrong and didn’t go wrong, however. It’s to look at what we can expect in 2016 out of essentially the exact same bullpen we saw a year ago.

Bullpens are unpredictable, and outside of a handful of truly elite arms, it’s difficult to project exactly what a team will get out of their bullpen on a yearly basis. But when you look at the performance of the White Sox bullpen in 2015, coupled with the track records of the same group of guys who will be relied upon in 2016, there’s reason to believe the unit will be a strength.

Robertson, the team’s closer, had virtually identical stats in 2015 as he did in years past with New York, with one exception: His 3.41 ERA was his highest since 2010. In fact, his BB/9 actually dropped to a career-low and the only number that saw any significant loss was his ground ball percentage, which went from 47 percent to 38 percent. And even with that, he allowed as many home runs (seven) as he did in 2014. So despite the ERA rise, he remains a productive pitcher at 31 with no signs of slowing down.

Duke, on the other hand, was a bit of a letdown. After a career year in Milwaukee that saw him post a 2.45 ERA in 58.7 IP, his ERA rose almost a full run and he actually pitched much worse than that, posting a career-high BB/9 and allowing as many home runs (nine), as he had in the previous two years combined. It was probably unfair to expect Duke to perform like he did in 2014, in hindsight. After all, this is a pitcher with a 4.41 ERA and 5.14 DRA in more than 1,200 career innings (granted a majority of them came early in his career when he was starting). But even with his perceived struggles in 2015, he wasn’t a net negative to the team, just maybe not the high-leverage reliever they had hoped for.

Which is OK, because when it comes to the bullpen, the White Sox have strength in numbers. While Albers, Jennings, Zach Putnam and Jake Petricka all have their faults as relievers, in those four, Duke and Robertson, the White Sox have six relievers who should be, over the course of 162 games, a net positive. Group them alongside Nate Jones, a one-time future closer who missed almost the entire 2014-15 seasons and could wind up being the best of the bunch, and Robin Ventura has options. They might not be the flamethrowers of the Yankees or Royals, but if Ventura can manage to their strengths (yes, that’s a big IF, but hey, he’s actually above-average in that department, per DMAR), instead of attempting the more traditional “seventh inning guy, eighth inning guy, closer” strategy that can get you in trouble if you DON’T have those lights-out relievers, the White Sox bullpen could be better than people expect.