But then the 2000s hit and somehow the developmental switch flipped. The Sox seemingly overnight turned into truffle pigs for pitchers and forgot how to develop position players. Aaron Rowand and Joe Crede were fine enough, but when they’re the best examples of post-Y2K homegrown hitters you know things had soured. But what makes that decade of fallow fielding futures so interesting to me isn’t any of the players that stayed within the organization and failed, it’s one particular shining star who flamed out hard but wound up netting the White Sox a decade of strong pitching. I’m talking about Jeremy Reed.

Reed was the center fielder of the future. He played for the USA Summer National team in 2001 and 2002. He won Minor League Player of the Year for the White Sox in 2003 after hitting .373/.453/.537 while stealing 45 bases and playing flawless defense. He looked like a bonafide Dude and was ranked the 25th best prospect in baseball heading into the 2004 season. And then the Sox traded him.

With Rowand now firmly entrenched in center and neither his nor Reed’s bat really profiling as strong enough for a corner spot, Reed was packaged with Miguel Olivo and somehow still a shortstop at the time Mike Morse for Freddy Garcia and Ben Davis. Olivo had the worst season of his career for the Mariners before Seattle flipped him to San Diego for absolutely nothing. Between injuries and PED suspensions, Morse showed flashes of potential but didn’t break out until being traded to Washington for Ryan Langerhans. Reed was the prize peach of the trade, until he rapidly wasn’t.

His .675 OPS as a 24 year old in spacious Safeco Field was underwhelming but somewhat acceptable when combined with his defense. But two injuries to his right hand in 2006 cost him his starting job and his hitting never recovered. Reed bounced around a few more organizations but never played another full season in the majors before retiring after an 0-for-7 stretch with the Brewers in 2011.

Garcia, meanwhile, pitched 2.5 workmanlike seasons behind Mark Buehrle and Jose Contreras, giving the Sox much needed consistency and 9.1 bWAR over 547.1 innings. He wasn’t the ace he was in his youth in Seattle, but he was still pretty good and helped bring home the franchise’s first World Series championship in over 80 years. He then became part of one of Kenny Williams’ most criminally underrated trades.

I’m honestly still confused as to how Williams was able to turn one season of 30 year old Freddy Garcia into Gavin Floyd and Gio Gonzalez, but he did it. The shine had completely worn off former top prospect Floyd by this point, but he was still only 24 years old. Garcia made 11 starts before hurting his shoulder and leaving the Phillies. Floyd became a strong backend starter for the next five seasons before getting hurt and jumping to the National League. Gonzalez was sent to Oakland in the good half of the Nick Swisher trade and has been carving hitters up when not struggling with his command for the Nationals ever since.

For one ultimately fungible outfield prospect, the Sox locked down the next decade of their mid-to-back rotation in what is one of the more enjoyable trade trees to climb in recent White Sox history. Hopefully the current hitting prospects can add value in a more traditional way.

Lead Photo Credit: Dennis Wierzbicki-USA TODAY Sports

The Sox somehow managed to cap Robin Ventura’s departure with a magnanimous final news conference, where the once beloved former star was able to spin an extremely curious report about having the ‘choice’ of whether to continue in 2017, into a graceful, unselfish decision to end an unsuccessful run for the sake of the franchise. So why, with all of these good, if not actually completely franchise-curing steps taken, have the White Sox only bolstered their status as an enigmatic franchise?

Well, because they’re definitely still the White Sox, and doing the bare minimum in a truly inscrutable manner is only so convincing. Ventura is unfailingly professional and well-liked, but many baseball men who carry those descriptors have been dismissed from manager jobs for stretches of disappointment far less pronounced than four-straight losing seasons, and two-straight flops in seasons that began with hopes for contention.

Moving on from Ventura is what any organization would do, and while it’s a nice personal touch that the Sox gave him some measure of his control on his way out, the step of leaking it to the USA Today days ahead of time was at best just bizarre, but mostly a wholly unnecessary machination and public relations hit. Ventura was without a contract for 2017, and an announcement of a peaceful parting never needed three days of false panic that the Sox still did not realize the listlessness of their last few years.

Renteria is an objectively good hire, and possibly someone they would struggle to compete for if he was not already in-house, yet carrying the future replacement for a failing manager on staff for a year is an undeniably bizarre practice, possibly a hindrance to Renteria engineering a true overhaul, and another coaching change being made without any external interviews or curiosity about how the rest of the league conducts business, does little to assuage concerns that this organization looks inwards and only sees solutions, rather than problems.

Bruce Levine’s report that Kenny Williams is staying, and not getting dumped, or stepping down at Monday morning’s post-season news conference is wholly unsurprising. But while Williams’ scalp is hardly some imperative for real progress at 35th & Shields, something wholly surprising is necessary to change the view of this franchise from one that has either failed to realize their structural failings, or simply lacks the will or the means to address them. They still sit at the same impasse between being so lost as to require a rebuild, and so close to competing to finally inspiring major spending and investment. Until that changes, even positive steps that still reflect the same insularity and strangeness that has become all too familiar, will find diminishing returns from fans, media, and maybe even some of these equally inscrutable blogs.

Monday would seem to be too soon to put any proof behind whatever the Sox intentions are for changing their stars, but the Sox would be well-advised to start proving us wrong.

Lead Image Credit: Patrick Gorski // USA Today Sports Images

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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Kaplan was careful to clarify it as something he was told, and not something he was reporting as fact, and by Tuesday afternoon, he had already spoken with Jerry Reinsdorf, who moved quickly to dismiss concerns of discord.

I had a great conversation w/Jerry Reinsdorf today. He said his front office is 100% in lockstep on what to do this offseason.

— David Kaplan (@thekapman) August 17, 2016

More Reinsdorf: “Our offseason plans will be clear by our actions. Rick and Kenny are on the same page.”

— David Kaplan (@thekapman) August 17, 2016

White Sox plans being made clear by actions is an appealing concept, because it’s largely eluded them the last few years. An aggressive start to 2015-16 offseason, which included trades for Todd Frazier and Brett Lawrie, seemed to signal a two-year window aimed at competing. But those intentions were betrayed by inaction while a large crop of free agent outfielders was bypassed, and a hot start withered while predictable roster holes festered.

By the trade deadline, the Sox sold, but on an inconsequential and confusing level.  Only trading Zach Duke would seem to nod toward not wanting to tear down any core pieces, but Duke was originally signed to solve the Sox prolonged troubles with finding a LOOGY, and recent developments in pitching prices have not made his contract look less reasonable.  A Sox team looking to compete in 2017 will have to restart the search, for the sake of a likely fourth outfielder.

This is still a fair measure more decisive than the previous year’s deadline, where the Sox managed to pack a hot streak in a season where they were over .500 for only one day all year, at the end of July. They wound up hanging onto their chief trade asset–Jeff Samardzija–and neglecting to sign a free agent with a qualifying offer, so they could draft Zack Burdi.  The deal to bring in Samardzija pre-2015 was even more nakedly short-term in its aims, but was mixed with trusting that Avisail Garcia and Micah Johnson could be productive in their first full seasons, breaking camp with Hector Noesi and John Danks in the rotation and trusting that Carlos Rodon could come to the rescue mid-year, and relying heavily on low ceiling options like Conor Gillaspie and Tyler Flowers (offensively, at least), that would have been acceptable enough if they were not risking disaster in so many other places.

Which is all to say, if the White Sox are really being misread by Kaplan’s scout source, and are really in lockstep on how to proceed, the rumor is only gaining traction because it jives with two seasons of seemingly serving two purposes and failing to achieve either.  They want to compete, but do not spend to build more than the skeleton of a contender. Without the budget to spend over their roster holes, rebuilding until they have an elite farm system to draw an affordable roster from seems like the move, but they cannot seem to commit to doing that either.

If we were to create an archetypal baseball franchise that is the product of a house divided, it would be one stuck in a long playoff drought with no clear vision of how to go forward, it would be both in middle of the road in payroll obligations and mediocre in prospect depth. Even if it was not the White Sox, it would look like them all the same.

We could put on skeptical journalist hats and try to parse out the intention and tact of Reinsdorf’s statements, but we don’t need to, since the problem of a divided front office, and one that cannot make its shared vision into reality have similar remedies.

Lead Image Credit: David Richard // USA Today Sports Images

Alas, if we assume Williams and GM Rick Hahn are, in fact, in sync, the only thing we can reasonably expect is for the team to avoid any acquisitions that only benefit the team in 2016, which is a good idea given how bleak the White Sox current playoff odds are; PECOTA has them at 6.3 percent.  The one line that Hahn dropped that really scared me was that he wouldn’t rule any other course of action out, including a full-scale rebuild, and the full-scale rebuild is something the White Sox should definitely not do.

The full-scale rebuild has been made popular across the league with the success of the Cubs and Astros, and being in Chicago, comparing the White Sox to the Cubs is inevitable. The idea may also be appealing to White Sox fans simply because it is *a* direction and even the franchise’s most die-hard fans (and star player?) are tiring of the aim-for-83-wins-and-hope-you-get-lucky approach. While it is true that the Cubs did go into a complete scorched earth rebuild, in reality a White Sox rebuild would be nothing like what the Cubs did!  If the White Sox went into a full rebuild it would be a much more dangerous play.

When Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer took over the lovable rebuilders, the Cubs best pitcher was, uh, Matt Garza who was worth a whopping 3.5 WARP the prior (2011) season. That’s fine and all, but Chris Sale is a guy who’s routinely been worth nearly twice that in every single season he’s been a starting pitcher!! The Cubs best offensive player in 2011 was Aramis Ramirez, who immediately left via free agency and was not a tradeable asset, and the only other position player that looked like he would be a strong talent to build around was Starlin Castro, and you know what? The Cubs ended up keeping Castro around through the 2015 season because they did think he was a guy they could have built around.

This Cubs team did not have the rock solid foundation the White Sox have right now when Theo and Jed took over. They had maybe one surefire long-term asset when they began their bottoming out and they had a team core that was essentially nonexistent. This is in stark contrast to the White Sox excellent current core of Sale, Jose Quintana, Adam Eaton, and Carlos Rodon, all of whom are under contract for at least three more years, at bargain rates no less, and all of whom are 27-years-old or younger. You could even include Jose Abreu in the White Sox core, though his struggles with the bat this year have been very concerning. Still, Abreu’s price tag moving forward isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, an albatross on the White Sox’ payroll. The situations entering a rebuild are completely different for the White Sox and Cubs, and the organizations’ responses to their different predicaments were also very, very different.

The Cubs, understood exactly what they had following the 2011 season. They didn’t have much to build around, so they attempted to stockpile as many young players as they could in the hopes that they would strike gold…and strike gold they did. They turned Andrew Cashner into Anthony Rizzo and then Scott Feldman into Jake Arrieta and Pedro Strop. These two moves worked out better than anyone could have imagined, and suddenly the Cubs had a budding core. Adding to this core, the Cubs were also able to hit on two top four draft picks in a row in 2013 and 2014 when they took Kris Bryant and Kyle Schwarber back to back. Adding the final piece to their core, in what was perhaps the only true example of the Cubs sending away a major league tested, talented player who would have significant value in a future year, the Cubs were able to trade Jeff Samardzija to Oakland for top shortstop prospect Addison Russell.

The Cubs now had a very good core to build around, and that’s exactly what the team did. In 2015, they made a couple of very savvy trades during the winter bringing in Dexter Fowler (for the low, low cost of Luis Valbuena) and framing ace Miguel Montero for a couple of their non-essential minor league trade assets. The Cubs also understood that they were entering an era of playoff competition, even though that may not have meant 2015, so they opened up their checkbooks and gave Jon Lester a six-year contract worth more than $150 million (more than twice as large as the White Sox largest contract ever). They also brought back Jason Hammel, whom they traded to Oakland the previous July along with Samardzija, on a two-year deal to get another veteran starter for the roster.

As what seems like a recurring theme for the Cubs, their team outperformed expectations in 2015 and they ended up in the playoffs. The season went incredibly well for them as they saw the ascension of Kyle Hendricks into an above-average major league starter, Hector Rondon, Strop, and Justin Grimm were all very solid out of the bullpen, and the young players on offense were proving that they could hit major league pitching. Then the Cubs went all-in the 2016 off-season.

The Cubs now knew they were a playoff team, but instead of just being content with that, they continued to surround their core with great players. They signed Jason Heyward, Ben Zobrist, and John Lackey to very lucrative free agent contracts.  Then, almost as direct beneficiaries from the White Sox unwillingness to spend money, they were able to re-sign Fowler for below market value. The Cubs’ payroll skyrocketed to a number north of $170 million for the 2016 season, no doubt signaling that they were completely committed to winning.

Returning to my salient point, the Cubs total teardown was done in order to get a core as good as what the White Sox have right now. Once the Cubs had a core that good, then every effort was made to augment and attempt to win with *that* core. On paper, the Cubs didn’t need Heyward, Zobrist, Lackey, and Fowler to compete this year, but they understood that not every move they made was going to turn into gold. The Cubs insulated themselves against the possibility of one of their big acquisitions falling flat, and they were exactly right to do so. Somehow, Heyward’s bat completely tanked, but because the Cubs surrounded the team with a ton of talent, they’ve been able to stomach their $20 million-a-year outfielder turning into J.B. Shuck (h/t @WriteSox) and the loss of Schwarber for the entire season because of an ACL injury.

Meanwhile, again in stark contrast, the White Sox continue to surround their core with few talented players and, unfortunately, a large number of black holes. The White Sox operate as a team with no margin for error, but any reasonable organization would understand there’s inevitably going to be something that goes wrong for your team (apparently the year 2005 was an exception). Because the White Sox operate this way, they can’t afford things like losing Austin Jackson and Alex Avila for extended periods of time. That’s insane, especially when you consider that most contending organizations wouldn’t even employ these guys as starters to begin with.The White Sox shouldn’t need to rebuild right now, instead they need to actually attempt to put good players around their already excellent core.

If the White Sox tear down with this group, they’re admitting they can’t win with one of the best and most affordable cores in major league baseball. Tearing this core down would also be trusting an organization to identify and develop young talent in a way that they’ve never proven they can do before. Quite honestly, if the White Sox were to trade Sale and get a player back that was 80 percent of what Sale is right now, that would be out-performing realistic expectations for what value that trade package would produce.  It’s a gigantic risk to move bonafide star players like this; just ask the A’s about Josh Donaldson or the Marlins about Miguel Cabrera. Moving truly elite players almost never produces any players with similar value, and in a game with a finite limit of players, the best way to build a winning team is through talent. One six-WAR player is exponentially more valuable than three two-WAR players.  Chopping up Sale and Quintana to attempt to get the same caliber of players is a fool’s errand, players like this are just too rare.

While all of the risk involved makes me so hesitant to rebuild, the one thing that makes me desperately not want the White Sox to completely rebuild is the fact that they refused to spend money above and beyond their below league median payroll to augment an already awesome core.  The White Sox wouldn’t commit any long term money this year even though they have almost no guaranteed contracts after the 2017 season and they had the benefit of a protected first-round draft pick.  Given this precedent, why should anyone believe that they’ll be willing to spend gigantic amounts of money a few years down the road when they’d ideally have a new core to build around? Why is 2019 going to be any different than 2016? New ownership? Please.

It’s sad to think about, but being “mired in mediocrity” now and actually hoping the White Sox’ ‘half measure and pray’ plan works is actually better than being god awful for the next few years and then returning to the mediocrity we’re all so familiar with. The Sox are in a bad spot now, but going into a full rebuild is likely to make things significantly worse, and no one wants that.

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

What goes less often discussed is that assessing process is much easier said than done. We don’t know how the sausage gets made—what the scouts said, what the analysts suggested, if the owner thought it was worth his money. (In baseball, unfortunately, it’s always his money, but that’s an article for another day.) We in the public sphere judge transactions based on the eye test, some reports from aspiring scouts, and incomplete public analytics like PECOTA. A major league organization has numerous people with substantial expertise working full-time in each of these areas, so it would be foolish to think they have the same approach or rely on the same information as even the most knowledgeable fan. Puzzling out why a decision was made is even harder in the case of the White Sox, as the precise division of responsibility between Executive Vice President Kenny Williams and GM Rick Hahn remains unclear nearly four years after they assumed their current positions.

Of course, if you don’t know what information someone relied on to make a decision, you can’t really judge the process. We adjust for randomness and unknown factors when we assess on-field performance, and we are forced to do the same for front office moves. It’s Bayesian reasoning in an informal, elementary sense—after enough promising moves go south, or enough puzzlers turn out pretty well, you start to figure that there’s something important we’re missing. The challenge, then, is figuring out what to do when you can’t regress to the mean or talk about stabilization points; indeed, it’s not clear what such concepts would even look like if we wanted to rigorously analyze front offices in a quantitative manner, and qualitatively things aren’t any more obvious.

For instance, with the Marcus Semien/Jeff Samardzija and Trayce Thompson/Todd Frazier deals, Rick Hahn’s had two straight off-seasons where a player who looked like a bench contributor for the White Sox performed on par with the marquee name he was traded for, despite the trades’ being fairly well-received initially. But who’s to blame for those two suboptimal outcomes? How much is on the coaching staff for not helping players make adjustments day-to-day? Pro scouting and analytics for having a bad handle on talent? Player development for failing to nourish prospects? How much is on Rick Hahn for pulling the trigger? Or Kenny Williams for that matter? How much responsibility do the latter two have for hiring and firing the first four (especially given Jerry Reinsdorf’s well-known loyalty to front office staffers)? And how much of all of this is just bad luck?

Without being inside the organization at the time of the trades, we don’t know what their expectations were or where things went wrong. We just know that the results don’t look great, and while that tells us something, it’s hard to be sure exactly what.

You can ask the same questions for some of the more ignominious moves the White Sox have made the last few years—signing Jeff Keppinger and Emilio Bonifacio, sticking with Gordon Beckham and Dayan Viciedo, trading for and sticking with Avisail Garcia, trading for Matt Davidson, everything involved in this season’s carousel of fourth and fifth starters, anything having to do with Robin Ventura, bunts, and bullpens—without it becoming any more clear to an outsider where the biggest problems lie. (Well, not entirely. The White Sox’s decision to not spend money on—and in some cases literally steal money from—amateur talent for a solid decade was a pretty obvious problem, and the corresponding debilitation of the farm system has led to many of the regrettable moves mentioned above. As it stands, the particular issue regarding amateur talent acquisition seems to have been mostly resolved, though its effects will continue to linger for a couple more years.)

Of course, the Sox have also made some very successful moves the last couple years, acquiring four-win player Adam Eaton for a sixth starter and quasi-ace Jose Quintana as a minor league free agent. Those also have to be included when assessing how good the front office as presently constituted is, but given how unexpected the results have been, it’s a fair (but unanswerable) question to ask if even the optimists in the front office really saw them coming.

Stretches like the White Sox’s last six weeks are the sort of things that make a fanbase start reaching for the pitchforks, for reasons I don’t have to explain. Ultimately, what frustrates me is not just the reappearance of some of the same issues that have plagued the team for years; it’s that as an outsider I can’t speak confidently about what their exact issues are (nor do I trust any diagnosis from someone without sources inside the front office). Do I think the brain trust has been particularly impressive on the whole? No, but that doesn’t mean I can pretend that I know the problem is Rick Hahn, or the scouts, or anyone else, so a purge in the front office wouldn’t exactly inspire confidence in me. Only one member of the front office both signs the checks and helms another franchise with a reputation for squandering opportunities. Unfortunately, firing the owner isn’t particularly straightforward.

That potent uncertainty makes it harder to predict what they’ll do next, understand the implications of what they have done, or be hopeful about any future moves. Appropriately, that makes the White Sox front office of the 2010s pretty comparable to the team itself: occasionally thrilling, more often frustrating, and on the whole mostly puzzling. It’s not a problem unique to this franchise, but it certainly gets tiresome when nothing seems to change over more than half a decade.

Lead Image Credit: Mark J. Rebilas // USA Today Sports Images

While Williams handed over the GM reins to Rick Hahn after the 2012 season, he still serves as the team’s executive vice president, and while there have been some operational changes during Hahn’s tenure, Williams’ influence is still there, and it would be a safe assessment to say the current incarnation of White Sox management has been around since Williams took over.

All of this is a way of getting to how we assess the MLB Draft, as well as the White Sox history of drafting and developing the players they select. While the White Sox have had three different scouting directors since Williams took over (Nick Hostetler replaced Doug Laumann, who replaced Duane Shaffer), the pattern in player preference during the 16 drafts that have taken place during that period of time has mostly stayed the same: college players. But how drastic has that been? Let’s look at some of the numbers:

• Since 2000, the White Sox have made 760 selections in the MLB Draft. Of those 760, 12.2 percent (62) wound up signing with the team that year and reached the majors. (Note: players the White Sox drafted multiple times, such as Jake Petricka or Marcus Semien, are obviously only counted once).
• From 2000 to 2014 (so excluding Carson Fulmer a year ago), the White Sox made 20 selections in the first round, including supplemental first round picks. 11 of those 20 have reached the majors, ranging from Chris Sale and his career 28.6 bWAR to Joe Borchard and his minus-1.5 career bWAR. That number is likely to increase to 12 if and when Tim Anderson ascends to the majors, and recent first-rounders still with the organization include Courtney Hawkins, Keon Barnum and Keenyn Walker, although divine intervention would likely be at play if any of those three found themselves making the leap at this point. First round flame-outs during that time span include Jared Mitchell, Kyle McCulloch, Tyler Lumsden, Kris Honel and Wyatt Allen.
• It has widely been assumed that the White Sox target college pitchers in the first round, given recent year picks Carlos Rodon and Fulmer. However, during the 16-year stretch, while the trend has certainly been toward college players, pitchers haven’t always been the choice, as out of 21 draft picks, nine have been college pitchers and eight have been college hitters. Only four of those 21 picks have been high school players (position players Hawkins and Barnum, and pitchers Honel and Gio Gonzalez). Gonzalez, of course, is the lone success story of those four high schoolers, and he never suited up for the White Sox. In fact, they traded him twice, sending him to Philadelphia in 2005 when they acquired Jim Thome, reacquiring him in 2006 for Freddy Garcia, and then sending him away again in 2008 in a deal for Nick Swisher.
• The difference in thinking likely boils down to the success of those respective players. Two of the nine college pitchers the White Sox have drafted are Sale and Rodon. Sale’s 28.6 career bWAR actually ranks fifth all-time among White Sox first round draft picks behind Frank Thomas, Robin Ventura, Harold Baines and Alex Fernandez (and he’s only .3 away from passing Fernandez for fourth). Sale actually makes up 51 percent of the bWAR accumulated by White Sox first rounders since 2000, and if you take off Gonzalez, who never suited up with the Sox at the major league level, and that number jumps up to an astounding 80 percent. Rodon, for what it’s worth, has already accumulated 1.6 career bWAR, which is tied with Josh Phegley and behind only Gordon Beckham for second highest among White Sox first-rounders since 2000. And he’s only thrown around a season’s worth of innings at the big league level.
• Draft position can have an impact on the direction the White Sox go with the pick, as well. It should be noted that the team’s three most noteworthy college pitcher selections (Fulmer, Rodon, Sale) represent three of the team’s four highest selections, with Rodon going third overall, Fulmer going eighth (Beckham also went eighth), and Sale going 13th (tied with Hawkins). One could hypothesize that the higher the Sox draft, the less risk the Sox want to take, as all three of those pitchers represented high-floor options, and Beckham was considered the same from a position player standpoint. However, in recent years the White Sox have at least said publicly that their selections were simply best player available, and in the case of the last two years, as well as with Beckham, the rankings mostly justified that mindset.
• A team’s success drafting players doesn’t limit itself to the first round, of course, and the White Sox have found a few gems. I wrote last year at our old home about how the White Sox draft history compares to other AL Central teams, and non-first round picks who became major league contributors include Nate Jones (fifth round), Daniel Hudson (fifth round), Michael Morse (third round), Chris Young (16th round), Brandon McCarthy (17th round), Hector Santiago (30th round) and Semien (sixth round). The 2010 draft has actually been one of the more successful in recent years, with the Sale selection followed by Petricka in the second round, Addison Reed in the third round, and Tyler Saladino in the seventh round.

The 2016 MLB Draft begins in less than two weeks, and while history doesn’t necessarily provide us with a formula for what the White Sox might do in the future, looking at what they’ve done in recent years can at least indicate what direction they might lean. It should also be mentioned that this will be Hostetler’s first year as scouting director, as he took over for Laumann in August of last year (Laumann is still with the organization as a senior advisor to scouting operations). As mentioned above, the White Sox have mostly shied away from prep players during the last 16 years, which makes them being linked to prep outfielder Blake Rutherford all the more unusual. Whether they go with him, a college arm such Dakota Hudson, a college bat like Zack Collins, or elsewhere, in two weeks they’ll have ample opportunity to transform the top of their farm system.

Lead Photo Credit: David Banks-USA TODAY Sports

This mentality extends from everyday fans to the most powerful judicial body in the land. Baseball is exempt from federal antitrust laws because the Supreme Court didn’t want to think of it as a business.

But business people know that baseball is big business. The Yankees franchise alone is worth $3.2 billion, according to the latest annual Forbes report titled, “The Business of Baseball.”

Every once in a while, a news story appears that reorients baseball fans’ thinking a bit. Helping them imagine baseball players as employees, in situations relatable to their own workplaces.

The Adam LaRoche saga is a prime example. In wake of news that club president Kenny Williams confronted the Sox DH about his son’s presence at the team’s facilities, the Chicago Tribune reported, “[V]ocal Sox fans seem to agree with [Williams’] decision to curb Drake LaRoche’s clubhouse time. Many believe it’s a workplace issue.”

For whatever reason, stories like this strike a collective nerve. And fans are often quick to judge athletes who are seemingly overpaid, entitled, and oblivious to real work in the real world—especially those who significantly underperform, like LaRoche.

But rarely does this contempt extend to coddled sports team owners. It should.

The White Sox ownership group, led by Jerry Reinsdorf, are not necessarily given special favors in the workplace (although accommodations were made by the club for Reinsdorf’s grandson), but in real, material terms—i.e. money!—by the state and city, in ways that businesses employing most Sox fans couldn’t dream.

For example, how many Sox fans’ half-billion dollar business facilities were built, maintained, and renovated upon request by the state?

Because U.S. Cellular Field, the White Sox place of business, is paid for by taxpayers. Every year, the city and state contribute $5 million apiece to maintain the ballpark. An additional $40 million or more comes in annually from hotel taxes. And when the Sox request stadium upgrades, like new video boards, a legal agreement obligates the state to pony up.

And how many Sox fans’ businesses don’t pay property taxes? Or are exempt from tax increases?

Although built almost exclusively for private use, U.S. Cellular Field is publicly owned. Therefore, taxing bodies receive no revenue from the property. And the White Sox agreement with the state protects the team against any future tax increases or new taxes imposed by the city, county, or state.

Most of this information can be found in the White Sox management agreement and annual reports from the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, some of which can be found here.

Also, the White Sox, like all MLB teams, benefit from an industry structure that functions like a cartel (as a result of the aforementioned antitrust exemption). Through collusion, MLB owners have been able to leverage things like, additional television revenues, and reduced player (i.e. employee) salaries via team control and arbitration.

Because they are propped up by taxpayer subsidies and legalized price fixing, White Sox operators have remained highly profitable, and have seen the estimated value of their franchise triple over ten years, all while being pretty bad at their business: assembling a successful baseball team.

Likewise, Adam LaRoche was pretty bad at his business—hitting—last season. And fans turned on him when he then scoffed at his locker room privileges being revoked.

I don’t want to conflate the special treatment of LaRoche and the White Sox—one has an effect on team chemistry in sport and the other on the local economy and distribution of taxpayer resources—other than to say this:

If business performance is the standard by which fans justify special privileges in the work world, the White Sox should be catching hell right now.

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The spirit of refusal to pin this on one person is understandable, and I agree with it, but there’s a better alternative. Finding fault for the organization looking ridiculous and alienating their fans by turning a clubhouse policy change into a civil war can be spread all over.

First, there’s Adam Eaton, who redefined the concept of overstating a point by calling 14-year-old Drake LaRoche “a leader” that the White Sox had lost. That major league clubhouses are alien organisms that cannot be compared to normal workplaces is a truism that players are understandably diligent about emphasizing, but the Sox roster repeatedly overdid it with comments that had no chance of coming off as anything but ridiculous to casual fans and seasoned industry observers alike. Worse yet, this time it came from a voice that previously has been trusted to be relatable about goings with the team.

The players who liked Drake really liked him, liked having him around and are aggrieved about him being removed in what they see as an unjust manner, but this kind of talk only discredits the team, rather than burnishing the reputation of a 14-year-old

In that vein, there’s Chris Sale, who had the right and responsibility as a franchise player on the roster to confront Kenny Williams, and forcefully, but came off just as detached from reality as Eaton did just with the severity of his tone. Sale is such an elite talent that there’s a degree that any reaction he has is legitimized because management needs to assuage him, but “reasonable,” “level-headed” and “measured” will never be qualities tagged to him after he stood in front of a self-made LaRoche altar at his locker and escalated this dispute to the level of calling for the team’s executive vice president to be fired.

Of course there’s actually Kenny Williams himself. Beyond critiquing the wisdom of taking it upon himself to commandeer a clubhouse situation, it’s simple enough to say that if multiple players come out of a team meeting calling you a liar, or your media accounts of events inaccurate, it was an unsuccessful run of conflict management. Williams intentionally positioned himself to be the bad guy in what he knew would be an unpopular team decision, and now he’s the team executive at the center of the most bizarre MLB dispute in years.

Williams’ role in this conflict strangely drowns out manager Robin Ventura, who appears in retellings of the Sox slide into madness when he diffuses a potential work stoppage, and retained the clubhouse’s respect, but is mostly uninvolved in the process of fielding player concerns about Drake’s presence in the clubhouse, or perhaps more importantly, on the field, and isn’t around in the saga of Williams asking LaRoche to reduce his son’s presence, then angrily trying to revoke it entirely when there was no sign of that reduction taking place. It’s hard to tell if Ventura is unassertive or was just underutilized, but for a guy whose merits as a clubhouse presence are typically touted when his in-game tactics are questioned, being a bit player while the clubhouse detonates is uninspiring stuff.

Finally, there’s Reinsdorf himself, who has finally rolled in and committed everyone to silence only after every fissure in the organization was laid bare. He is perhaps the only figure in the franchise centralizing enough to mediate the situation, but by now the notion that all the team’s divisions and damage to their league reputation could be patched in a single weekend seems beyond fatuous.

Maybe the only major Sox figure who avoids blame is Rick Hahn, the general manager who made the agreement with LaRoche which the fracture of kickstarted this whole mess. Sale even gave him a nod of improvement during his immolation of Williams, noting “Rick, I truly believe is trying to build a winning team.”

It was a nice exception to make, but Hahn’s reputation as a skilled actor swamped by mitigating factors didn’t need another entry.

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Williams and Rick Hahn have displayed stark independence that would draw its own coverage at a marquee franchise, but ironically its Williams’ attempt to leverage that split for crisis management that has launched the franchise to the status of national curiosity.

It only made sense–if any of this makes sense–that players’ complaints prompted Williams to act and ask the Adam LaRoche to reduce his son’s presence in the clubhouse. But Williams seeing himself as the one to “take the heat” by confronting LaRoche and then the entire clubhouse–as LaRoche was stepping away from the sport in response–took the forcus off Rick Hahn and Robin Ventura too much, and instead nearly inspired a full-scale mutiny that reads as being as much about outrage over Williams taking unearned control of a clubhouse manner as it is about Drake LaRoche.

“Sale told Williams, unequivocally, to get out of the clubhouse and stay out, per a source. Williams acknowledges meeting was passionate.”

-Ken Rosenthal.

It doesn’t help that Williams actions ran counter to agreements reportedly extended to LaRoche with the approval of Rick Hahn and Robin Ventura when he came aboard, weakening the trust that agreements made with them are coming with the full backing of Williams and ownership.

The resulting blowup has enflamed supporters of LaRoche on team, making things even more tenuous for the players who privately complained in the first place, and exposed everything that the Sox would seek to hide; that a player split existed at all, that for whatever reason player complaints weren’t taken to Ventura–the man who would theoretically runs the clubhouse–or that Ventura wasn’t tasked with handling the situation himself, and has resulted in the Sox being seen league-wide and nationally as an organization unable to deftly accommodate their players desires and concerns.

It’s not as if Williams accomplished nothing with his tactic, as Daryl Van Schouwen reported, the players’ support of Ventura has survived, and is even credited with preventing a full boycott of Wednesday’s game taking place. The team can very easily hate Williams and still be a united and focused clubhouse that fights for each other.

But even then, stacked up against the cost of fraying relations and trust with one of the best players in franchise history, exposing division between the team and national embarrassment, the benefits pale in comparison, and LaRoche himself hasn’t even spoken openly on the matter yet. That, and any more fallout from new revelations into this clubhouse it brings with it, is still coming, and LaRoche’s unpredictability is what set this off in the first place.

LaRoche’s actions were shocking and unique, and this whole crisis is unbelievable; a black eye that Williams and the Sox can hardly have seen coming. But the blame for it reaching this scale still travels back to them. That’s how accountability and chain of command works, especially when you rig it up that way on purpose.

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