A funny thing happened to the White Sox presumptive starting right fielder Jason Coats on Friday: he was designated for assignment. Coats will turn 27 at the start of Spring Training, his game has never been projected to translate well to the majors, and he does not figure to be anywhere near the next White Sox contender. But with the Sox roster beginning to be excavated, and with more open spaces on the way, there was a real sense that Coats had worked his way to the top of the heap of outfield candidates and earned a shot. He torched Triple-A to the tune of .330/.394/.519 in 2016, and despite debuting last year, barely got any chance to prove himself in 58 plate appearances.

Coats might not be worth an extended look, but such a dearth of opportunity pales in comparison to say, over 1500 plate appearances for Avisail Garcia. If that wasn’t telling enough, he was excised to make room for a waiver claim of Willy Garcia, a fallen 24-year-old Pirates prospect who is Coats’ opposite. He’s got the type of big tools found in waiver clam projects–big raw power, huge throwing arm–with no production to show for it (.245/.290/.388 in 790 Triple-A plate appearances) and little scouting optimism that he can cut down on the swing-and-miss in his game.

Dayan Viciedo already taught us that there are few things as tiresome as a corner outfielder with huge power who can’t barrel anything, and a huge throwing arm but poor foot speed. Coats is a solid bet to outperform Garcia in 2017 big league action, but a perfect world projection of Garcia is superior to Coats, and Coats’ likely advantage is meaningless if 2017 wins and losses don’t matter and he still doesn’t project to be a trade asset either way.

This is a very bloodless line of logic, but so is trading Chris Sale and Adam Eaton, and probably Jose Quintana, to try for a massive, and inexpensive, reboot with a top-flight farm system. The Sox have already been courting electric but volatile talents in their major trades–Moncada threatens a 30 percent strikeout rate, Kopech and Reynaldo Lopez have plenty of evaluators who believe they’re relievers–under the logic that risky prospects because less risky when you have dozens of them to try out, so why not apply the same logic to their major league fliers?

By that same logic, clearing out Coats should really be about a spot for the out-of-options Rymer Liriano, himself a formless collection of tools due to two years of development lost to injuries, but possessing far more of an actual plate approach and some actual success in Triple-A (.292/.383/.460 in 549 plate appearances in 2015).

A shade or two too bloodless for my liking is the reclamation projection signing of Everth Cabrera. The 30-year-old former All-Star spent 2016 playing in his native Nicaragua, but also spent some of it in Cuba going through three months of alcohol rehab per the publication El Nuevo Diario. He broke onto the scene in 2012 when he led the National League with 44 stolen bases (while being caught just four times), despite complicating his call-up by being arrested for misdemeanor domestic violence along with his wife. His offensive peak came when he hit .283/.355/.381 in 2013, which was hampered by him serving a 50-game suspension after he admitted taking PEDs after being implicated in the Biogenesis scandal.

If a theme was not already apparent, Cabrera’s exit from San Diego was precipitated by a 2014 arrest for driving under the influence of marijuana, and his rehab stint in Cuba was preceded by an arrest in Nicaragua for getting into a fight at a market. Before that took place, in March, a somewhat paunchy Cabrera gave an embittered interview to El Nuevo Diario where he called out MLB for trying to make an example out of him during the Biogenesis scandal despite his admission of guilt, the Players’ Union for abandoning him, the police for their aggression during his arrest, and even his wife for not being understanding enough of the difficulties of his career.

It’s not hard to find legitimacy in some of his complaints, but as a whole it comes off as a lot of defiance from someone without much of a leg to stand on. The most recent video interview with El Nuevo Diario found Cabrera newly svelte and recommitted, and the Sox are definitely signing that guy, rather than the spiraling and out of shape Cabrera from last March.

Cabrera hit just .227/.267/.285 and stole only 20 in 28 bases in 119 games over 2014 and 2015 in the majors, so uncovering the premium talent buried within probably takes far more than just a new training regimen. Carlos Sanchez, Leury Garcia, and certainly Tyler Saladino are all likely superior to Coats on the major league level, which is to say nothing of how much playing time Moncada will soon consume, but perhaps it’s the same idea. Cabrera, once a basestealing menace with plus on-base skills from the shortstop position, has had higher highs than any of them. If he’s a starter-level talent again, he proves more valuable than giving opportunity to glorified utility guys.

Or it’s just a minor league deal; besides the ones that indicate a lack of emphasis on personal conduct, there are not supposed to be bad ones.

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It’s not exactly a developmental position. The only qualified DHs under the age of 30 last season were Khris Davis and Corey Dickerson (Davis is 29), and is mostly occupied by aging players whose elite bats have kept them in the game past the death of their defensive utility. The Sox don’t figure to have any of those types unless they force that status upon Jose Abreu against his will, so they will probably be filling it the other commonly seen way: a rotating cast of players with some power potential and no consistent defensive home.

While reviewing a still in-development effort by Baseball Prospectus to project playing time for the 2017 season that I probably shouldn’t be discussing yet, I couldn’t help but notice that Sox DH was…a hodgepodge, to put it politely. They basically listed every position player on the 40-man who is not already a regular at another position, and they were not wrong to do so.

Avisail Garcia saw the most time there in 2016 of anyone returning, which, gives him some vague theoretical leg up. Melky Cabrera is still on the team, can hit, and is a declining defender who would figure to take some days off playing the field if he sticks around for a while, Rymer Liriano and Jason Coats are corner outfield types who will be looking to squeeze into whatever gap they can fit in, and Matt Davidson is on the 40-man roster, and thus in the mix. And this is alongside the possibilities of guys like Abreu, Todd Frazier and Brett Lawrie swinging over for some occasional PAs, just because they’re currently around.

Garcia is likely the worst defender of the three corner outfielders, but his power drought only ended when he got into the field more in the second half. He only slugged .366 as a DH in 2016, compared to .435 as a right fielder. It’s hard to work up a great reason to project success for Davidson, as he got nearly 2000 plate appearances in Triple-A alone before a mild, still strikeout prone (26.4 percent in 2016) turnaround earned him a short-lived call-up last season, but how is anyone too stalled to give a shot when Garcia is still in the mix?

Liriano is the freshest face in this regard, since the last significant playing time he received saw him hit .292/.383/.460 with San Diego’s Triple-A affiliate in 2015. He seems like a longshot to perform well enough in Spring to win a job, given that he will have a full year of injury rust to knock off, but really is just a mystery box since he was a raw prospect who showed promise but has now missed two years of development. But everyone has a specific advantage over Coats, who is otherwise projected by many to lead the field in playing time. Coats was only added to the 40-man roster last Summer, and can easily be stashed in the minors without risk of being claimed off waivers, whereas Liriano and Davidson cannot.

Coats has never suffered through a long stall in production at any stage of the minors, and has certainly earned a shot on a rebuilding club, but lacks the standout tools to project him as a consistent regular. If not wanting to lose a guy on waivers was enough to give Jerry Sands an Opening Day slot last year, it could definitely keep Coats in Charlotte for the start of April.

A sentiment we’re at risk of losing when discussing the turgid mechanics of figuring out playing time, is that unless Melky just becomes a full-time DH, none of these guys figure to fill the position particularly well. Davidson was supposed to have plenty of power, but also strike out a ton and hit for a low average that would make his offense an asset only if he could stick at third base. Liriano was always revered as a toolshed, and his throwing arm and athleticism were supposed to help prop up the unrefined elements of his game at the plate, and Garcia was looked upon similarly but with more reverence for his speed and hit tool, and all three have seen hopes of fulfilling those past expectations dim drastically.

So all three are options to slot at DH for the sake of giving them at-bats and a chance to prove themselves, but are not necessarily great fits that would preclude the Sox from finding a veteran bat and hoping they hit well enough to be flipped for prospects. Mets writers have been very keen to suggest the White Sox relieve New York of their inability to trade Jay Bruce, but that could be a very expensive and thankless favor.

But maybe the Sox should be in the business of doing expensive favors with little chance of paying off; they have all of $69 million in pre-arbitration obligations for 2017 and figure to shed Frazier’s expensive third year of arbitration at some point, not to mention David Robertson and possibly Cabrera’s contract. If the budget-conscious Mets are willing to sweeten the pot with a prospect to have Bruce taken off their hands, it becomes a worthwhile maneuver. The Sox could similarly do well to inquire just how disenchanted the Cardinals are with Matt Adams, and see if the 28-year-old could reclaim any of his promise on the South Side. The Cardinals have a lot of infield options and no true first base bat, and would probably be interested in shedding some of them for Abreu, while we’re at it. And that’s before we glance at a slow-playing free agent market that still has Chris Carter, Pedro Alvarez and Mike Napoli hanging around.

Just because the big league club is set to become a clearinghouse for reclamation projects doesn’t mean they need to be inherently overmatched ones, and the realm of hitters with some chance of success who are too risky for contenders to take a chance on does not end at the Sox 40-man roster, and they would be wise to leverage their ability to survive a flop.

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SIGN AN OUTFIELDER!

This line of thought was logical. It was commonly known that the White Sox would go into 2016 with Adam Eaton and Melky Cabrera at two of the three outfield positions, but the third was presumably up for grabs after a season’s worth of tape watching Avisail Garcia embarrass himself out there.

What’s more, the free agent market included a plethora of outfield options. Even once you got past the big money guys — Yoenis Cespedes, Justin Upton, Jason Heyward, Alex Gordon — there were other options, all of whom would have been major upgrades over Garcia.

As you know by now, the White Sox went cheap. The only free agent outfielder they signed was Austin Jackson, who they inked to a one-year, $5 million deal well after the cold, dark winter, when Spring Training was already in full swing.

Signing Jackson is a fine idea in some respects. He’s the type of player good teams acquire as depth. It’s when you’re relying on him as an everyday player with no backup plan that you run into trouble, and that’s exactly what the White Sox did.

Jackson hit .254/.318/.343 in 203 plate appearances with the White Sox in 2016 before a torn meniscus in early June–that was supposed to keep him out for six weeks–ended his season.

During his two months of action, Jackson did provide something the White Sox had been missing: A huge defensive upgrade. Installing Jackson in center field and moving Eaton to right gave the White Sox plus defense at two outfield positions, whereas the former Cabrera-Eaton-Garcia outfield gave them one average defender sandwiched between a pair that patrolled the outfield like they were running through an obstacle course in quicksand.

Let’s be clear: The loss of Jackson didn’t sink the White Sox. Nick Schaefer pointed out last month how teams like the Indians and Mets were able to survive despite key losses throughout the season, so it would be preposterous to assume an injury to a glove-only center fielder would sink a team’s chances at contention. But with the Sox lack of depth, it certainly didn’t help.

When Jackson went down, his spot in the lineup and outfield was filled by a number of guys, none of whom were able to provide anything more than replacement-level work.

J.B. Shuck, the most familiar of the bunch after performing commendably in part-time duty in 2015, was considerably below average in every aspect in 2016, hitting .205/.248/.299 in 241 plate appearances and fumbling around defensively in center field. He was the only one of Jackson’s non-September call-up replacements the Sox even attempted to play in center, and was worth -1.4 WARP.

Jerry Sands was around for a while, too, hitting to the tune of .236/.276/.291 in 58 plate appearances. He had three walks and 24 strikeouts and was borderline worse in the field than Garcia, which is difficult to imagine.

The last of the replacement options was Jason Coats, who burst onto the radar with a hot start to the minor league season in Triple-A Charlotte. The former 29th round pick, who was never thought of by most as any sort of legitimate prospect, finally made his debut at the age of 26 and hit .200/.298/.340 in 58 plate appearances.

Nobody expected the likes of Shuck, Sands or Coats to hit like Eaton or field like Jackson. Each is the epitome of “replacement-level player.” But the White Sox inability to plug holes with system depth has been apparent for a while now, and the revolving door in the outfield in 2016 was yet another example of that.

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That’s a huge issue in its own right, but there’s no need to beat a dead horse. What I would like to bring to light is the White Sox inability as an organization to move on from the toxic assets that plague their team. Whether it’s their players, their coaches, or their front office staff, they White Sox refuse to shake up their organization and move in a new direction until it’s too late. The White Sox are a living and breathing embodiment of the disposition effect.

The disposition effect comes from the field of behavioral economics. Essentially the disposition effect refers to the backwards behavior that is observed when investors have some assets increase in value and other assets that fall in value. Investors are much less willing to sell assets that have gone down in value but they are more likely to sell assets that have increased in value.

A great deal of investors fail to understand that the future performance of an asset is unrelated to its purchase price. In turn, they believe that an asset that has gone down in value will eventually come back up, and that an asset that has increased in value may come back down, when in reality, the complete opposite is often true. An asset that has gone down in value has likely decreased in value for a concrete reason, and vice versa. Some new information about the company/product/service/etc. has come to light and as a result, the market has shifted to adjust to this new information. The asset has been revealed to be inferior to what prior estimates believed and it’s unlikely the asset ever returns to its original purchase price.

While baseball players and coaches are undoubtedly not stocks and bonds, the same general principle should be applied. For example, Avisail Garcia was a decently-touted prospect who had the raw power that could possibly translate to 30 home runs in a major league season. There was a chance he’d be a valuable player! However, as he played more and more in the major leagues, new information was revealed about him. He was horrible defensively and he had an ugly swing path that led to far too many ground balls for him to ever realize that raw power. After nearly 1100 plate appearances (which is really too many already) Garcia had made it clear that he was a toxic asset that would likely poison the White Sox chances at a playoff berth should they continue to play him. The White Sox chose to ignore the new information and rely on years-old prospect shine, and, utterly predictably, Garcia once again has ended up as a replacement-level player that dampened the White Sox chances to end their playoff drought.*

If giving Garcia so many chances to prove himself while completely failing was an isolated incident, maybe you could give the White Sox organization the benefit of the doubt. However, this is much more of a systemic issue that continues to torpedo the team. Just looking back the past five or six years, the White Sox continue to fall into the familiar trap. The most glaring example of this was the Ozzie Guillen saga that plagued the team in 2010 and 2011. The White Sox’ relationship had turned extremely toxic with Ozzie starting in the Winter of 2009 when he told Jim Thome there wouldn’t be playing time for him in 2010.

Ozzie wanted a rotating DH so he vetoed Kenny Williams’ decision to retain Thome in favor of Mark Kotsay (Side note: ugh that’s a painful memory). The feud worsened throughout the year, eventually culminating in Ozzie going off the rails after being directly questioned about Thome and Ozzie’s son Oney going on Twitter rants calling Kenny Williams a pig. The team, which was now more of a sideshow than a team, would finish 2010 with 88 wins and this was enough to prompt the White Sox to retain Ozzie throughout the entire 2011 season. Predictably, the results were disastrous. The team went “all-in” pushing their payroll to its highest point ever and, the White Sox proceeded to finish under .500 and well out of playoff contention.

Now, again rather predictably, the White Sox have held on to Robin Ventura well past his usefulness as a manager. The White Sox have long known about Ventura’s shortcomings, or incompetence, as an in-game tactician, which have hampered the White Sox ever since he took over in 2012, but they always cited the familiar refrain that he was a stabilizing presence in the clubhouse. That’s been, quite clearly I might add, disproven this season with the Spring Training Drake LaRoche debacle and then the Christopher Scissorhands incident more recently where face-of-the-franchise pitcher Chris Sale directly called out Robin Ventura for not being an advocate for the players. Robin’s in-game decisions have always stacked the deck against the White Sox, but if he can’t even control the clubhouse why is he even here?

Obviously, this trend doesn’t only apply to beloved former players-turned-managers. The White Sox have a strong history of giving playing time to washed-up veterans and failed prospects. I’ve already talked about Garcia. Dayan Viciedo was given 1800 plate appearances to prove that he was as useless as a push-lawnmower on a 20-acre farm. Jimmy Rollins’ corpse was given two months earlier this year to prove he was completed cooked. He’s now a TV studio analyst. Matt Albers, who has failed to hold hitters to an OPS below .884 in any month since April, has been trotted out in high-leverage situations. With the season lost, the White Sox continue to play Dioner Navarro and his putrid pitch framing and ~.600 OPS instead of moving on to other players. And the only thing that prevented the White Sox from desperately trying to squeeze value out of a 36-year-old Adam LaRoche was the fact that he retired before the year started.

The White Sox are stuck in a rut. They’re too obsessed with recouping value from their bad investments that they fail to realize when they’re making the situation completely worse. The front office’s refusal to replace Garcia or even Robin Ventura himself before the year and subsequently, with the season already lost, Robin continuing to play Navarro over young catcher Omar Navarez, or bringing in Albers to Wednesday’s loss instead of a younger pitcher, who also happens to be the team’s top prospect, with the game on the line epitomizes the problem. The organization knows they have the equivalent of Enron stock all over the place, but they continue to willfully delude themselves into thinking these players will rebound or turn into better versions of themselves. No one, especially the organization, benefits from this.

The best thing the team could have done is try to shake things up just to see if that works. Everyone should know by now that Navarro and Albers are awful players and Robin is a poor manager. These individuals represent no value to the organization’s future. Why not try to learn something new about someone else? When the White Sox fell flat early in the year, they could have replaced Robin to see if that would spark the team. Or maybe they could have given Jason Coats regular at-bats over Garcia to see if Coats would be any kind of an asset moving forward. These things would likely not have mattered in the grand scheme of things, but there’s a greater chance that these maneuvers would have produced better results than the status quo, which was virtually guaranteed to fail.

Sometimes little moves like that really work out and help an organization. Look no further than the 2015 White Sox team which gave playing time to Trayce Thompson down the stretch. Or maybe look outside the organization to a team like Houston who gave non-prospect Dallas Keuchel a chance to be a major league starter a few years back when the team was awful. Sometimes these long shot players pan out– look at Colombian baseball deity Jose Quintana! But the important thing is that teams would never know about these players unless they gave them a chance. They didn’t block these players behind veterans that were lost causes.

Instead, we have the White Sox, who’ve continued to try the same thing over and over, clinging to bad investments like their lives depended on them and hoping for a bounce back that’s never coming. They’ve seen the benefits of exploring new young players, yet don’t pursue this when it would benefit them most. It’s almost a perfect fit to the colloquial definition of insanity! I don’t know how much worse it needs to get for things to change, but eight consecutive seasons of missing the playoffs and four-straight losing seasons is well beyond what I would deem acceptable. I hope the White Sox can cut bait from their current approach to their future, instead of hoping that rebounds, too.

*Please don’t think I’m pinning the failure of the 2016 season all on Avisail Garcia. He’s simply one black hole of many that the front office refused to address.

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Hopefully he’s been very entertaining, because Anderson’s season is the only year by any White Sox player 25 or younger that hasn’t been drenched in failure or unfortunate injury. Carlos Rodon has scuffled, Carson Fulmer did the same early on in Double-A, made an adjustment back to more violent mechanics and started to rack up strikeouts, but has been mostly unusable upon being called up. If we want to expand the range to 26, Erik Johnson drummed himself out of the organization, but Brett Lawrie provided some encouragement by hitting exactly to his career averages before hitting the disabled listed with a hamstring strain.

Of course, continuing the theme of injury, the Sox have now seen four players hurt during their major league debuts: Kevan Smith tweaking his back in pre-game stretches, Jason Coats colliding with J.B. Shuck in the outfield, Matt Davidson breaking his foot on the basepaths, and now Charlie Tilson stepping awkwardly and crumpling over in pain after pursuing a sinking drive to the right-center gap.

Tilson is the first loss of anyone with anything resembling true prospect shine, but is the exception that proves the rule. Like Avisail Garcia in 2014, what all these players wind up having stripped from them is the rare chance to show their worth in major league games, during a stretch where the White Sox do not have to be particularly concerned with the losses they might pile up if these rookies fail. That in Tilson, Davidson and Smith’s case, they all went down before the Sox could even get the slightest glimpse of what they were capable of, is all the more confounding.

Garcia hurt the Sox because they went into 2015–a year where for which they made a number of short-term moves for the purpose of contending–with more aspirations for his ability than cold reality, and couldn’t very well offer Garcia a real shot and stash a plus-hitting corner outfielder on the bench just in case he failed.

No one involved in the rookie carnage this year was expected to play that large of a role, but having some organizational depth come to the majors and hold their own is how you get Tyler Saladino as an affordable, capable utility man, instead of spending $6 million on Emilio Bonifacio and Gordon Beckham. When the biggest free agent acquisition for the 2016 team was Austin Jackson, being able to discern whether Tilson can effectively duplicate his production is not such a small consideration.

The White Sox could still pull a full teardown, and trade both Jose Quintana and Chris Sale after the season, since those deals were never beholden to the trade deadline. But since they are unlikely to do so until proven otherwise, they can be assumed to be steaming toward some sort of plan to compete in 2017. With spending to augment the team likely to be an even more difficult path than when they bypassed last season, now that a weak free agency class will usher in higher prices for less impactful talent, the lack of progress and frequent injuries from their developing talent is truly vexing. That’s where a lot of the help needs to come from, and while there’s still plenty of time and hope, it’d be better if their first foot forward would stop buckling underneath them.

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Jason Coats was also optioned, while Avisail Garcia remains. More on that later.

Morneau, 35, has put up the numbers I would expect from a 35-year-old Alex Avila during his very short rehab/late Spring Training stint: .174/.321/.261 in a mere eight games of action. He speculated earlier that he might need as few as 30 plate appearances to get ready, he got 28.

Perhaps during some junctures of my time writing on the Sox, I have earned a reputation for being critical, or at least skeptical of every single thing they do. Perhaps. But, I am strangely unconcerned with any of this.

Unsurprisingly, much of Morneau’s first game action in several months found him without his feet fully underneath facing guys in mid-season form. He might similarly struggle in his first week or so with the big club, but he’s a professional bat who has hit .276/.334/.433 since 2011, when his post-concussion issues emerged, and that’s including his awful first season back. He’s not a franchise-saver, or even an offense-revitalizer, but he’s an upgrade over the completely untenable Avisail situation, and if he’s physically ready to play, then it’s time for him to play.

In entirely different circumstances, top prospect — if Tim Anderson is no longer a prospect (he is) — Carson Fulmer is coming up to help a bullpen that has been using Michael Ynoa, Chris Beck, and the worst stretch of Matt Albers‘ career with regularity. Fulmer’s promotion despite a very rocky season in Double-A overall is being supported with a lot of pointing at his 54 strikeouts over 17 walks (and just one home run allowed) over his last 41 innings; a stretch that encompassed seven starts.

His Futures Game appearance showed Fulmer showing off some of the rougher mechanics of his college days and without the usual ‘stand tall’ focus typical of Sox pitchers, and it’s an open question to how much of that was intentionally allowed, or was done in anticipation of major league bullpen work, or was simply Fulmer not being comfortable with the adjustments. He made mention to reporters of feeling that his delivery had been slowed down too much, but there’s also a question of whether Fulmer’s current delivery allows for a long, healthy career.

All of which is besides the point of him getting called up. The Sox need someone who can miss bats in their bullpen, and there’s not really any worry about Fulmer’s development being stunted or bad habits being allowed to fester under Don Cooper, not that working out of the bullpen to transition to the majors is a particularly worrisome path in general.

There’s danger in looking at these moves as major. Fulmer has a not-insignificant chance of being very wild early on and needing a while before he settles in comfortably to bullpen work, but could just as easily remove the immediate need for Zach Putnam‘s return. These are not additions on the level of Carlos Gonzalez, Jay Bruce or even Charlie Blackmon, and don’t do a ton to mitigate concern that the Sox don’t have the horses to undo significant gaps between them and seemingly superior clubs like the Indians, Blue Jays, Red Sox, or even the Astros. But these are moves that do make the team immediately better on their own, so they don’t necessarily need to be weighed down by larger existential concerns.

Coats being sent down makes sense, as he didn’t show anything in very scant playing time, and if the Sox aren’t going to place any confidence in giving him a real shot, he can go ahead and resume mashing in Charlotte.

On the other hand, Garcia, virtually unplayable on defense and in the depths of his worst offensive stretch of an already underwhelming career, is not a very useful bench option. He’s been so bad this year that his one pliable skill — solid numbers against lefties — has been dragged below-average for his career because he’s hit .175/.275/.267 against them this year. Single-year platoon splits are mostly noise, but Garcia struggling at the plate is usually a constant. He’s not someone who can come in and do anything specifically well. He’s basically the fourth outfielder behind J.B. Shuck with Austin Jackson‘s return becoming indefinite, but his only appeal is to play him consistently and hope he can realize his larger potential, and if the Sox have given up on that, they should give up on him in general. But then again, any hope for 2016 has to be rooted in the idea that the Sox are not done.

There’s also no word yet on how the Sox are handling Sunday’s spot starter situation if Fulmer is exclusively in the bullpen. Anthony Ranaudo has been “successful,” but also struck out only 46 in 71.2 innings in Charlotte, and just pitched Thursday. The rest of the current Charlotte Knights pitching staff is even more disheartening than 2016 Anthony Ranaudo.

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