Eloy Jimenez and Zack Collins have been promoted from High-A Winston-Salem to Double-A Birmingham. While there are only a few weeks left in the minor league season, players are human beings and when you excel in superlative fashion at your job a promotion is in order.  There’s also reason to believe that they have mastered the level and are ready to be promoted.  Jimenez has hit .345/.410/.682 in 122 PAs since arriving in Winston-Salem.  As Rafael Devers and Yoan Moncada have demonstrated, elite hitting prospects can move really quickly, and Jimenez will therefore start next year in Double-A, and if these trends continue this time next year he could be a candidate for a September call up.

It speaks to the expectations for Collins’ bat that as a 22-year-old catcher in his first full pro season his .808 OPS is viewed as a disappointment.  If you are of the opinion that he will not remain as a catcher, then it is a troubling offensive output for an advanced college bat in the low minors.  However, he has devoted a lot of his time and energy to developing on the defensive side of the ball and catchers tend to take a long time to figure things out, if they ever do at all.  It’s an arbitrary endpoint, but dating back to a doubleheader on July 30, Collins has hit .342/.490/.658 and walked more than he has struck out.  There’s no specific reason to believe he’d be overmatched at Birmingham or that he’s being moved too quickly, although per James Fegan over at The Athletic, there are still mechanical changes he wants to make to shorten his swing this offseason.

The promotion to Double-A also means that we will finally have some pitch framing data for Collins, although it isn’t quite as precise as at the major league level.  The general sense is that Collins has made a lot of defensive improvements since becoming a pro, but with something like catcher defense the more information we have, the better.

The White Sox also announced that Dylan Covey would be promoted from Charlotte having completed his rehab to take Tyler Clippard‘s spot on the 25-man roster.  It looks like the White Sox will be able to keep the Rule V pick on the roster all season, which means he’s theirs permanently if they want.  I am curious to see what he can do in relief, as I’m not sure there is starter’s durability there, regardless of stuff.

On Free Agency…

There is something of the magical when thinking about free agents. As opposed to draft picks, where you have to wait years and years for likely disappointment, or a trade where you have to give up something to get something. Free agents can just be shoved into the roster.  Instant gratification.

A byproduct of the White Sox rebuild, where you are theoretically building as much of a contender as you can from within, is that the roster should be cheap, composed of a higher percentage of players being paid the league minimum, or suppressed salaries through the arbitration process.  Therefore, such a team should have a surplus of money to allocate to free agency.  The Cubs, for example, were able to sign Jon Lester (nice!) and Jason Heyward (whoops!) to huge contracts to supplement their homegrown core, and have made deep playoff runs including a World Series win, as you may have heard.

And, given that Rick Hahn has floated 2019 as the first year he foresees the White Sox potentially contending again if everything breaks right, some have noticed that syncs up with the 2018-2019 free agent class.  For reference, that class projects to contain Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Josh Donaldson, A.J. Pollock, Charlie Blackmon, Clayton Kershaw, Dallas Keuchel, Andrew Miller, and more.

A lot of teams with bigger budgets than the White Sox have been obviously targeting this free agent class for a long time.  The Red Sox and Yankees have made conspicuous efforts to remain below the luxury tax threshold of late, and the Dodgers have to be on the short list of favorites for basically any player they would want to sign, just to name a few.

In addition, the White Sox have never signed a free agent to a contract of more than $100 million.  Jose Abreu’s deal remains the biggest in franchise history, and not since Albert Belle has the organization really gone out and grabbed a splashy, top of the class free agent.  So, until they do, I will assume that that trend will continue.

But, for all that I would bet all kinds of money against Harper or Kershaw playing for the White Sox until maybe their early 40s, some of those names further down the list could fit really nicely to help push a young White Sox core over the hump and into the postseason.  And, speaking of Lester, the Cubs signed him slightly earlier than when people believed the Cubs would be ready to compete.  That type of move makes sense, given that it is difficult to assemble a whole roster all at once, and that free agency doesn’t always provide the player you want when you want him.  To that end, although this winter’s free agent class pales in comparison to the subsequent one, it may be worth monitoring to see what pieces–if any–the White Sox add this offseason to see if they too make “early” moves in advance of their contention window opening.

Lead Image Credit: Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

The White Sox implication here is obvious: the Sox are not winning right now with their overall mediocre team, so the pragmatic course is to trade their brightest stars for packages of young players in the hopes that 2019 (or some date even farther in the future) will bring better days to the South Side. I’ve said this before and will stress it again: the 2016 White Sox and the 2011 Cubs (the year prior to Theo Epstein’s arrival) are not the same team and are not in the same situations as organizations, and we should dispel the idea that the Cubs’ path of the past few years is something the White Sox should emulate. Completely rebuilding a team from the ground up is a risky gambit in any scenario, something Nick Schaefer wrote about here, but it’s a risky move with less incentive for a White Sox team that already has a really good group of core players anchoring the roster.

Patrick Nolan of South Side Sox wrote an excellent piece on the current composition of the White Sox’ “core”.  The White Sox four best players in terms of surplus value by WARP, Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, Adam Eaton, and Carlos Rodon, essentially gave the White Sox 18.92 WARP above and beyond what those guys cost the team in monetary value.  This was good enough for fifth best in MLB last season, which is undoubtedly excellent.

Expanding upon his analysis, I looked into the Cubs roster from 2011 because I was curious about the surplus value of the Cubs’ four best players after that season. I amended his assumption and decided the value of a win in 2011 was closer to $6 million instead of $7 million (which is probably an overly conservative estimate as this 2014 Fangraphs article labeled the cost of a win at roughly $6 million and moving back further in time would only lower this). The Cubs top four players in terms of surplus value were Starlin Castro (4.31 Surplus WARP), Geovany Soto (2.76 Surplus WARP), Matt Garza (2.46 Surplus WARP), and Sean Marshall (1.84 Surplus WARP) who combined for a total of 11.37 Surplus WARP, well below the White Sox 2016 total.

In addition, the only player in this group that the Cubs had cost controlled for more than two more seasons was Castro, which is in stark contrast to the current White Sox, who have Sale controlled for three more seasons, Quintana for four, and Eaton and Rodon for five, not to mention all of these players will be 28 or younger in the 2017 season. On top of this, the Cubs’ rebuild didn’t even feature a trade of their best asset, Castro, until his surplus value and team control were greatly reduced. They saw their best asset as something to build around, not something to trade for more future uncertainty.

The 2011 Cubs also had a lot of dead weight on the back end of their roster and very few players beyond the top four who made significant, positive contributions to the team’s surplus value, so it’s not as if that Cubs team had a ton of depth to help offset their complete lack of star power. That team did only win 71 games, after all. Because of the lack of star power, surplus value, and depth, all told, it was an easy call for Theo and the new Cubs brass to tear the whole thing down because there really wasn’t much of anything to tear down.

The Cubs weren’t mired in mediocrity, they were about to be Entrenched in Awfulness™ with everything trending downward. This is an important difference between the two teams. If you wanted to tear apart the 2011 Cubs core, you’d essentially be tearing apart a 1982 Ford POS truck with a wheel missing, while in the case of the White Sox core, you’d be ripping up a pretty well-run Cadillac that even included a spare tire.

The whole point of the Cubs big rebuild was to assemble a core like the White Sox for their organization. This is the hardest part of a rebuild because it involves finding very good players that are also inexpensive. The Cubs were really awful for a couple of years and did really well on several draft picks and they ended up with some of the best, most valuable players in the majors this past season. Luckily for the 2017 White Sox, they have already accomplished the most difficult part of a rebuild, their core is going to be awesome (and cheap) again next year. They don’t need to find several, rare, incredibly good players as those guys already exist on the roster. All the White Sox have to do to compete in 2017 (and this same thing was even more true 12 months ago) is fill out the roster with players that are better than Dioner Navarro.

The White Sox inability/unwillingness to supplement their team’s core is another important difference between the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox if you’re strongly considering the rebuilding path. When the Cubs had finally amassed the elusive “excellent team core,” they went out and signed Jon Lester, Jason Hammel, Jason Heyward, Ben Zobrist, and John Lackey to lucrative contracts to help reinforce the team’s chances for ultimate success. And then, on top of that, the team went out and signed Dexter Fowler, when they didn’t even have a desperate need for him just because they understood that talented roster depth is an incredibly important thing! This pushed the Cubs total payroll over $170 million on opening day in 2016, which was sixth in the majors. The Cubs even pushed that payroll higher during the season, acquiring a few pieces for their bullpen and rotation.

Meanwhile, the White Sox flopped around like a fish out of water and ended up with their most lucrative free agent contract being the one year, $5 million deal they handed out to Austin Jackson. The White Sox, with a prime opportunity to go all in, went about as all in as I do when I stick my foot in the water of a cold hotel pool. In the most predictable fashion, things went belly-up mid-season and the White Sox slid under the low bar of 80 wins in the 2016 season for the fourth year in a row.

Armed with the knowledge that the White Sox are unwilling to increase their payroll above the league median, rebuilding now does nothing for the team in the future except push their window of mediocre baseball back a few years, unless, of course, the White Sox get incredibly lucky with the players they are getting in return. If you’ve been paying any attention to the White Sox in the last decade, you should know by now that luck-based plans are not a smart way to run an organization. There’s a reason why “exceptions to the rule” don’t come around very often: they simply aren’t likely. If the White Sox trade away their best players in 2017, the team will likely end up hardly watchable in the very near future and the future beyond that wouldn’t realistically look much better.

To quote Mr. Nolan: “With knowledge that the White Sox’ four best major league assets from 2016 were among the best in the game, it’s probably not reasonable to expect a rebuild to produce a better quartet than Sale, Quintana, Eaton, and Rodon.”  That’s the unfortunate reality the White Sox find themselves in. Teams won’t be offering the type of deals that would allow them to get a more valuable “core” of players, which is why trading Sale is so difficult for the White Sox as they’d likely be selling their best assets for less than they are actually worth. The Red Sox aren’t going to be surrendering both Yoan Moncada and Andrew Benintendi for Sale, so deals that are overly favorable to the White Sox just won’t happen, and those are the only type of trades that should motivate a team to trade a controllable seven-win pitcher

Rebuilding would likely get the White Sox a larger base of inexpensive major league average baseball players, which would indeed help the White Sox address the massive black holes they continue to play on a regular basis. However, it would also cut down on the star power on the roster, and in the end, the Sox arrive at the same status quo. One seven-win pitcher and one sub-replacement position player is theoretically equal to one three-win pitcher and one three-win position player, but having the seven-win pitcher is actually better, because there should be plenty of reasonable replacements available that are much better than a sub-replacement player.

The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of options available for the White Sox, they just cost the team money. Even with all of the tearing down the Cubs did, even with five consecutive years of top-10 draft picks, they still had to reach into their pocketbooks in order to put the finishing touches on their World Series championship. The Cubs probably don’t win without Lester or Lackey or Fowler. At some point, in all likelihood, the White Sox will have to make their payroll uncomfortably (for them, not for any other team in a major market) high if they want a reasonable shot at a championship, this is true for most teams, as that’s just how a competitive cycle works. There are certainly examples contrarian to this, but again I caution against attempting to be the exception to the rule, rather than following the rule.

Nothing fundamentally changes for the White Sox, unless they adjust how they attack their upswings in the competitive cycle. If they didn’t support their best chance at a winner in 2016, why would they go out of their way in 2020 to do the same? Furthermore, if they are willing to change their strategy, why are they waiting for 2020 to do so when they probably won’t have one of the five best pitchers in the game of baseball then? They had a window of opportunity to bring in talented free agents last season and they chose not to. It was a very bad decision. They’ll have that opportunity again this winter and I hope they don’t miss it.

Lead Image Credit: Dennis Wierzbicki // USA Today Sports Images