The 2016-17 offseason is likely to be one of the dullest in recent memory. With Winter Meetings approaching in just a week–barring a labor crisis–there is a slim free agent market, and the signings will feature talent a bit more lackluster than in previous years. Due to this slight crop of talent, a whole lot of trade speculation is on the table heading into the most action-packed week of the offseason.

That certainly makes the whispers that have been circulating since the All-Star Break about whether or not the White Sox will move Sale somewhat of a cornerstone of barroom discussion this offseason, and the hot topic of the moment in the baseball world. Other people sit around and talk about how they don’t know how they’ll survive their aunt asking them for the twelfth time when they’re getting married this holiday season. Baseball people, specifically White Sox fans, sit around and talk about how they don’t know how they’ll survive a Chris Sale trade.

Let’s dial this conversation back for a moment. Statistically, we understand that Sale is one of the best pitchers the sport has seen in recent years. The 27-year-old has made the All-Star team and finished in the top-six of Cy Young voting every season since he’s been a starting pitcher. He’s even managed to do something that rarely happens in our great sport: post a valuable enough campaign to receive MVP votes for the last two seasons as a pitcher (though when looking at his surroundings, it isn’t hard to envision him being the most valuable player on his team). Sale has a career ERA of 3.00, a strikeout rate of nearly 28 percent, has pitched 14 complete games in his seven-year career and logged a total of 1,110 innings pitched, only 94 of which were in his first two seasons before he was added to the rotation full time. Just this past season, when he induced some panic with a rise in contact and fall in strikeout rates, at the end of the year Sale managed to keep nearly all of his peripheral stats in line with his career averages and post four games in which he struck out 10 batters or more — including a 14-strikeout game against Seattle in last August. (In line with what is typical for recent team history — somehow the White Sox managed to lose that game.)

Those are all things that fans care about. They’re things that baseball executives care about. They’re things that Sale cares about. They’re important. But they’ll only be a portion of what the White Sox fan base will endure in a world without Sale on the South side. That’s not what this is about. This is about something that goes beyond baseball stats, beyond the All-Star votes, beyond whether or not the White Sox should expect a Shelby Miller-type return for Sale or not. This is about what next year looks like with a bullpen, a dugout, a mound, a locker room, and a fan base left devoid of something that they have seen as their only source of consistent and positive identity for seven years. Sale grew up as a baseball player in this franchise, and became a perennial All-Star with it. Keeping Sale healthy and productive on their roster is the one thing that the White Sox have managed to not just be good at, but absolutely excel at on a baseball level, not just a White Sox level, in the last seven years.

There have been many tumultuous happenings that White Sox fans have managed to look the other way and cry in their beer about in the recent past; being a Sox fan is trying on one’s sanity. But Sale was never one of those things. Sale became the one piece of the White Sox franchise that left fans thinking even among the darkest of days “Well, at least we still have one of the best pitchers in baseball.”

Sale has become the foundation in which nearly every White Sox fan who has been around for the past seven years has taken comfort, an identity that fans have associated their last shred of hope with over the years. He is a pillar of normalcy that other fan bases usually feel from their team as a whole and not just one player in an otherwise noxious atmosphere. This isn’t to say that there aren’t other talented players on the White Sox, there are, most recently we have seen the rise of Jose Quintana and the promise of Tim Anderson, while Adam Eaton was good enough to muster an MVP vote this offseason. But none of them hold the same value to White Sox fans that Sale does, and so with the absence of Sale, the fan base will lose something that has guided them through the murkiness, and helped them feel as though they are not as lost as the rest of the franchise would lead them to believe.

Sale is a constant. He’s a leader, and though some baseball folks, Sox fans or not, may not agree with his sometimes crass methodology of handling the issues at hand in 2016 or previous, he’s been a voice that perhaps helps Sox fans understand that someone else sees the same discrepancies that they do, that their suffering does not go unrecognized — something the White Sox front office has failed to do for their fans until Rick Hahn’s comments just this past summer. Sale recognizes that this organization owes their fan base more, that they ought to put more interest into the betterment of the team with a focus on winning, and that perhaps this organization on and off the field is not as united as it could or should be.

Trading Sale could be important for the future of this team, but drudging through the process of a full rebuild to craft a future that this fan base can be proud of will be challenging without his leadership and without his contributions to any sort of feeling of success with which this fan base can identify; a feeling this franchise has deprived it’s loyal followers of for years with the exception of Sale’s success.

The saying goes that the night is always darkest just before the dawn, that things have to get worse before they get better, that the mess has to get messier before it can be clean. Those sayings are all in good stead when the belief is that there is a dawn coming, that things will get better, that the mess will be cleaned. The track record the Sox have, which in turn has lead to this sort of Chris Sale coping mechanism, is not one that should instill much faith in a fan base, and draws the concern: if they cash in their big bargaining chip, will the loss be in vain?

Seeing Sale on the mound wearing another team’s jersey, on a calculated path to success with another franchise, will not be easy to watch — but it will be harder to watch if the White Sox remain as stagnant as ever, only this time without Chris Sale.

To that end, the White Sox look closer than ever, or as close as they will allow themselves to be, to declaring the start of a rebuild. From Dan Hayes:

“’We’ve always been focused on putting ourselves in the best position to win,’ Hahn said. ‘At the same time, I think we’re veering away from the standpoint of looking for stopgaps. A lot of what we did in the last few years had been trying to enhance the short-term potential of the club to put ourselves in a position to win immediately. I feel the approach at this point is focusing on longer-term benefits. It doesn’t mean we won’t necessarily be in a good position in 2017. It means that our targets and whatever we’re hoping to accomplish have a little more longer-term fits in nature.’”

There are trade leverage reasons why it is not in Rick Hahn’s interest to speak more directly, but it would certainly add some reassurance if he declared it outright, as half-measures and serving the dual interests of competing and strengthening the organization from within have repeatedly proven to be too great of a strain of the Sox resources.

The appeal to this direction would be a full-scale teardown. The Sox are lacking for natural advantages beyond Herm Schneider and Don Cooper, and suddenly being in the position to fence a lot of high-level talent in its prime and on affordable contracts at least makes them kings of the sellers.

There are some conflicts with reality that would come with trying to move every single fungible veteran on the roster in the offseason, or even by the 2017 trade deadline, but it should be their goal if they seek to take a step back at all. The most nauseating, galling and unwatchable teardown will spur the deepest replenishing of the Sox collection of young talent, which will be something to remember while watching Leury Garcia trying to bunt his way on in front of cleanup hitter Jason Coats in a one-third full Guaranteed Rate Field.

A line from Hayes’ story that I genuinely appreciated is to identify the needs of this current roster and assigning the same budget figure we placed on it in our analysis:

“At the very least, the White Sox as constructed need a starting catcher, a center fielder and a big left-handed bat — potentially upwards of $30-35 million in contracts — as well as another reliever.”

Everyone has gained a jaundiced familiarity with the White Sox skeleton contender, hoping several key spots of their lineup improbably break right, or at least are not disastrous enough to prevent them from being contenders at the deadline, when frantic patches can be made. If Hahn could not get approval to add the salary needed to craft a real contender, rebuilding certainly beats the prospect of crafting another fake one, even if a potential $120 million budget ceiling is a dark cloud hanging over the competitive window of the future Sox core we haven’t even met yet.

This unquestionably looks like a dark moment in the franchise history, the spurning of some of the most transcendent homegrown talent the South Side has ever seen, but the Sox could at least engineer a true moment of opportunity out of it, and we’ve reached the point where that will do.

Lead Photo Credit: Mark J. Rebilas – USA Today Sports Images

None of this is necessarily inaccurate. And yet, this sample size of one team, the Cubs, seems to have persuaded many that a hard rebuild is not only the best course of action, it is the only reasonable course of action. Part of the beauty of baseball is that there is no one right way to do things. The Rangers and Giants have consistently reloaded over the years, watching their cores on offense and defense morph significantly without any prolonged dips in success. The 2005 White Sox were somehow remembered as a small ball team even though they hit 200 home runs. The Royals went to back-to-back World Series, winning one, despite having pretty terrible starting pitching. The Baltimore Orioles have been ignoring what everyone says they should do and have made the playoffs three of the last five years.  One Red Sox team won a World Series with a personality of being loose goofballs and another got a bunch of guys fired because they were perceived as loose goofballs. There is no one right way. Someone should write a book about this…

Here’s one problem with using the Cubs as an argument in favor of a hard rebuild: money. Yes, the Cubs traded off everything they could and stockpiled through the draft and Latin America and did so in impressive fashion. And then when they realized they were close to competing they spent a ton of money. For even as skillfully as they loaded up on bats, they were struggling to generate arms from within. So they signed Jon Lester for  six years and $155 million–more than twice the size of the biggest White Sox contract in history–and when they realized they didn’t have anybody on hand to fill out the back of their rotation in a competitive year, they spent another $52 million on John Lackey and Jason Hammel. They also signed Ben Zobrist, Dexter Fowler, and Jason Heyward this offseason as well.*

*It is also worth noting that they signed substantial free agents for second base, corner outfield, and center field despite having multiple well-regarded prospects pretty much ready at all three positions. Worth remembering for when someone tells you the White Sox should try to save $5 million by DFA-ing Brett Lawrie because Tyler Saladino had a good year.**

**Another argument made for the case to DFA Lawrie crowd is that he is brittle, yet Saladino ended the year unavailable because of a herniated disc in his back that affected his right side. 

The lesson here is not that you need to do a hard rebuild every time you hit a playoff drought. The reason to do a hard reset is to generate a cost-controlled, cheap, good core.  You clear salaries that won’t be helpful to you by the time you’re good again, and while being bad accumulate high draft picks. Once that core is in place you spend money to bolster the weaknesses remaining on your roster. That is literally what the Cubs did. The White Sox already have Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, Jose Abreu, Adam Eaton, Tim Anderson, and Carlos Rodon under contract for 2017 for a combined total of $36 million.  That group combined for 25.6 WARP and there is reason to believe they will collectively improve on that mark next year. There are not many teams in the playoffs with that sort of cost-effectiveness at the heart of their roster.

This piece is entitled “The Perils of a Rebuild.” The Cubs are perilous only in the sense that even though they are an example of a successful rebuild, their rebuild still required a lot of spending. An inability or unwillingness to spend has been one of the major impediments to the White Sox succeeding with this group, and there is no reason to believe that they will be more willing to spend in the future relative to the league than they are now.  Before you disagree, realize that the White Sox gave 1,487 PAs to Dioner Navarro, J.B. Shuck, Avisail Garcia, Jimmy Rollins, Carlos Sanchez, Jerry Sands, Leury Garcia, and Jason Coats this year. Avisail had an OPS+ of 91 while primarily playing DH. The rest all had an OPS+ between 52 and 77.  The 77 is Coats. The 52 is Shuck, who was the primary center fielder on the team. That’s more PAs than Eaton and Abreu got combined. For the umpteenth time in the Kenny Williams-Rick Hahn Era, the White Sox have been absolutely throttled by the Gibraltar-sized anchor that is the back half of their roster, while other teams thrive by successfully acquiring stopgaps, spending enough to cover their holes in a meaningful way, and generating talent from within their organization.

But, regardless of how you feel about the current state of the White Sox, I also ask you to consider the Houston Astros. Like the White Sox, for years they refused to accept that a rebuild was probably a good idea, winning between 73 and 86 games from 2006-2010.  Then, in a pretty dramatic volte face, they tanked harder than anybody could remember, losing 100+ games three years in a row. They emerged out of that in 2014 with some really interesting pieces, winning 70, with Jose Altuve and George Springer looking like particularly promising players to build around–indeed, so much so that Sports Illustrated declared them the 2017 World Series champions in advance.  In 2015, they arrived, making SI’s bold proclamation look prescient, winning 86 games and making the Wild Card game, which they won. Carlos Correa seemed to be emblematic of the value of a rebuild, as the No. 1 overall pick burst onto the scene to win a Rookie of the Year Award, and Lance McCullers–another prize of having the surplus draft pool money that comes with having the No. 1 pick–chipped in 125 quality innings in the rotation.

Granted, in hindsight, many of the other key players on that ’15 Astros team had hardly anything to do with a rebuild.  Their  No. 1 and No. 2 starters were Dallas Keuchel, a 7th round pick in 2009, and Collin McHugh who was added off waivers.

Still–hey, here they were–in the winter of 2015-16, coming off of a successful season built on young, cheap stars acquired in their rebuild, went the narrative. And after all, after all those years collecting revenue sharing while they ran out payrolls as low as $29 million in 2013, surely they had socked away lots of money to spend to supplement this Team On The Rise.

But they didn’t. Despite the plethora of free agents this winter, they came away with Doug Fister and that’s about it. Then they won 84 games and missed the playoffs.

The Astros could very well still spend money this winter, although there is less quality to spend it on, and even if they don’t, they could still come back next year and make Sports Illustrated’s prediction come true (or at least make the playoffs again). They did also score Alex Bregman as part of their tanking, which looks promising.

But shouldn’t this team have more than they do after that scorched earth, agonizing three years where the only noteworthy things they did were lose hundreds of games and do stuff like this? What if this is the ceiling of this Astros team if the front office doesn’t spend more money? Should the response be that this Correa-Altuve-Springer core is not good enough, like the pro-rebuild fans say of the White Sox’ current group?

I disagree. I think the most important things you can do are evaluate players well and spend money effectively when it is appropriate.  The Astros let J.D. Martinez, Robbie Grossman, and Jonathan Villar go for free, and drafted Mark Appel over Kris Bryant. They didn’t sign any meaningful free agents to shore up the weaknesses on the roster. So even though they’ve done some things right, it’s now looking very possible that their evaluation is not good enough to make up for their thriftiness.

So yes–if you are selective about the lessons you learn from the Cubs, you can pound your fist on the table and demand that the White Sox sell off everything because you’re sick of the status quo. But I would caution those who believe the path of the hard rebuild is the path to guaranteed success.  Sometimes the path of the hard rebuild is just being really bad and then winding up not much better off on the other end. Sometimes ownership just pockets all those savings instead of re-investing them in the team when it’s good again. Sometimes the problem is that your front office makes too many mistakes and ownership won’t provide the money to make up for it.

You rebuild to acquire cheap superstars.  You don’t do it when you already have them.

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

The Aug. 1 deadline passed quietly on the South side, and left the mediocrity of the White Sox still intact as it moseyed away. Despondent as ever, fans checked off each game in August wondering why they had to bother with this month that felt like nothing more than purgatory anyway. The season’s second half on the South side was nothing more than a white walled, windowless waiting room in which to expel impatience for the slowly arriving offseason.

Now, that offseason is barely more than three short weeks away, and the dirt is yet again being kicked up on the real question at hand: what will happen to this team? For a moment, let’s say they do blow it all up. There are a few valuable assets it would be hard to see go, because it would be counterintuitive to trade away pieces of a young, controlled, affordable core such as Sale, Jose Quintana, or Jose Abreu when attempting to rebuild. If the Sox are looking to start small and shed some extraneous payroll, the first piece that needs to be discussed is closer David Robertson.

As part of the infamous 2014 offseason haul that left the baseball world buzzing, Robertson signed a lofty four-year $46 million deal with the Sox. It seemed steep even at the time when money was of little object for a team that was a World Series contender in December, but if an organization is going to go for a quality closer in free agency, then they better be ready to pay the price.

Robertson was impressive during his first year on the South side, despite a career-high seven blown saves, posting his lowest career walk rate and striking out 34 percent of batters he faced — the third-highest mark of his career.

But during a 2016 season in which everything that could have went wrong for the White Sox did, Robertson simply added to their bounty of troubles. This year, Robertson has seen his strikeout rate plummet to just 26 percent, a low which he has not seen since 2010, when he was with the Yankees. The interesting thing about Robertson is that this isn’t the first time he’s suffered such a poor season. Robertson is actually posting some nearly identical numbers in 2016 to the ones finished with in his 2010 campaign in the Bronx. Take a look:

The FIP and DRA differ between these two years, mostly due to the amount of home runs Robertson is giving up this season (Robertson has actually lowered his HR/FB rate by almost four percent from last year, though), and the change of environments between the two seasons. Other than that, in the two most concerning categories for a closer, walks and strikeout rates, the seasons are a match.

So what’s the purpose of pointing out that Robertson has had two identical seasons, six years apart? Well, he ended up bouncing back. Eventually. Check out what happened in Robertson’s next two seasons after his poor 2010 campaign with the Yankees:

In 2011, Robertson was good. So good in fact, that it wasn’t sustainable, and the extremely low ERA is mainly due in part to that extremely high strand rate. The walks stayed high in 2011, but the strikeouts returned–Important point No. 1.

Then in 2012, everything evened out. The walks went down–Important point No. 2. The strikeout percentage stayed good, the left on base numbers returned to a more sustainable level and the home run rate wasn’t as suppressed. Robertson was good again, and normal good. So is there hope for Robertson to have a good rest of his White Sox contract? Possibly.

Now, is that to say that the White Sox should stick with Robertson for another year or the remainder of his contract? No. But it is a telling sign that if they do decide to wait it out, Robertson may look a bit better on the trading block than he would after such a shabby season.

If the White Sox decide to trade Robertson now, they’ll be left with a dismal bullpen with no solid foundation and no direction for a closer, and they certainly won’t be able to capitalize on his value. Down years are never a good time to attempt to leverage value out of a player, especially one who is still owed $25 million over the next two seasons. So, they should wait it out.

It’s a sticky situation for the White Sox, as an offseason approaches in which they need to leverage as much of their unwanted talent as possible for the trade market, but one of their main bargaining chips is coming off one of his career-worst seasons. The bright side of the situation at hand is that Robertson has suffered a year like this before, and he bounced back. Of course, he wore a younger man’s clothes back then, but at 31-years-old, it’s not impossible. Another year of Robertson on the South side wouldn’t truly hurt anyone, so why not?

Photo courtesy of Jerry Lai-USA TODAY Sports