Then, right before Carlos Rodon went out and threw another quality start, the White Sox made a trade and a few other roster moves.  First the bad news: Jose Abreu is on the DL with an abdomen/groin surgery and early projections have him out until mid-September or so.  Given how many plate appearances they may need to devote to sorting through options like Nicky Delmonico, Daniel Palka, and Matt Davidson — not to mention, hopefully, Eloy Jimenez — perhaps we have seen the last of Jose Abreu for 2018.

The White Sox also made a trade! They sent Luis Avilan and his unremarkable left-handed competence to Philadelphia in exchange for Felix Paulino.  Paulino is a slightly undersized right-handed relief prospect who has spent his age-23 season finally pitching his way out of High-A and has had a rough go of it in his first look at Double-A. Paulino sits in a 90-95 mph band on his fastball and features both a slider and a cutter but he hasn’t missed as many bats as you’d hope for a slightly older pure reliever. Presumably the White Sox picked him because they saw something, as although moving Avilan (who is in his final arbitration year for 2019) clears a 40-man spot, Paulino will need to be added this winter to avoid being claimed in the Rule 5 draft.  He has this in common with Caleb Frare and Kodi Medeiros.

To replace Jose Abreu on the major league roster, the White Sox called up Jose Rondon.  For all that Rondon has whatever the opposite of Kopech’s hype is, he’s 24, can legitimately play shortstop, and has suddenly shown a good amount of power across Triple-A and the majors this year.  That’s certainly a player who could use another decent run of major league time before the offseason.

Last, to replace Avilan in the Chicago bullpen, they called up Ryan Burr.  Acquired for IFA money from Arizona, Burr has breezed through the minors without much difficulty.  Listed at 6-foot-4, 225 lbs., Burr is physically imposing, although his velocity is more good than great.  The right-handed reliever was only in Charlotte for a few weeks, but is certainly ready for a major league look — he’s also due to be added to the 40-man this winter.

Inevitably, for reasons both silly and legitimate, Burr getting called up ahead of Ian Hamilton (Burr. Hamilton. Everyone will point this out whenever they can) was a little surprising from a baseball perspective.  Hamilton scrapes triple digits and has been annihilating all comers with his heat and low-90s slider, and even made it to Charlotte before Burr did.  However, Hamilton doesn’t have to be on the 40-man yet, so perhaps that vaulted Burr ahead of him for logistical reasons.  Regardless, I stand by my position that Hamilton being in Triple-A made/makes even less sense than holding down Kopech and Eloy Jimenez did.

Still, Burr is a legitimate prospect as far as relievers go, and I am excited to see if he and Hamilton can form the nucleus of an elite bullpen despite minimal resources committed.

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Meanwhile, the Yankees who, on top of being fabulously wealthy, are superb at scouting and pull major league pitching prospects out of thin air / late rounds of the draft.  The only “downside” to this is every year they wind up with more players they need to protect on their 40-man roster than they can.  For instance, just last year, of the fifteen players selected in the Major League portion of the Rule V draft, three were grabbed from the Yankees.

Put these things together and voila, you have this trade:  The White Sox acquired Caleb Frare from the Yankees whom they likely can’t protect in exchange for international free agency pool money which the White Sox can’t use.

So, since the trade makes so much sense, Frare fits the Yankees surprise relief prospect profile quite well — 11th round draft pick, pop up velocity, picked out of a random high school in Montana, and is suddenly laying waste to the upper minors.  So far in 2018, he’s thrown 44.67 innings across Double-A and Triple-A and has an ERA of 0.81 with a K:BB of 3.87.  I suppose the wrinkle is he’s left-handed.

He throws in the mid-90s and has a plus slider, although he has had injury and command problems in the past.  Those are also issues the White Sox have done well with addressing historically.  As much as I try to avoid comping guys to players already in the organization because it feels too convenient to be accurate, a member of our prospect team said he could be similar to Jace Fry.

Frare doesn’t have the franchise-changing potential of someone like Eloy Jimenez or Yoan Moncada.  He’s a left-handed reliever.  But, he could be a really good one! Not a bad way to use the international free agent money.

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The White Sox chose not to spend exuberantly on their last contention cycle and they paid the price (no pun intended) for it by missing the playoffs in both 2015 and 2016.  Knowing that the White Sox lacked talent in their farm system during those years, I consistently advocated that the White Sox should add talent to their rosters through top-tier free agent acquisitions. The White Sox didn’t have prospect capital to improve the team, but they did have cash to utilize and the easiest way to use that cash and improve the team is not just free agency, but the most talented free agents available.  But by now, if you haven’t figured it out, it’s clear the White Sox are particularly allergic to large free agent acquisitions — the evidence is abundant. The White Sox are one of very few teams to have never given out a $100 million contract to a free agent. In 2015, the White Sox passed on getting involved in free agent derbies for top free agents like Max Scherzer and Nelson Cruz, instead turning their focus to more modest acquisitions. When presented with the opportunity to greatly upgrade their club’s outfield before the 2016 season the White Sox again passed on adding top free agents like Yoenis Cespedes, Justin Upton, or Dexter Fowler because they didn’t see enough value in the signings. And Rick Hahn has even gone on record saying that free agency is where teams see the worst return on investment.  You start to add all of these things together and it becomes clear that the White Sox would prefer to avoid free agency as much as possible and looking to the future, expecting the White Sox to add a top-tier player, say Bryce Harper, to their team through free agency is a fool’s errand.

So if the White Sox continue to shut themselves off from free agency as a vector for talent, they need to find other ways to invest in the team. They started on that path with a big amateur free agent acquisition in Luis Robert (though the total monetary cost of that move was mitigated by a reduced team payroll, which continued throughout the 2017 season), but now they need to continue following that mold to help the team.  Luckily, the Giancarlo Stanton trade has created an opportunity for the White Sox of all teams.

The Yankees came into the 2017-2018 offseason prioritizing trimming the payroll below the luxury tax. They didn’t anticipate acquiring Stanton from the Marlins, but Stanton wasn’t willing to go to the St. Louis Cardinals or San Francisco Giants, leaving very few teams as options for his services. When the Yankees realized the marginal cost that they would have to pay to acquire such a talented player (he was worth an amazing 8.5 WARP last season and has averaged moer than 6 WARP during the last four seasons) they couldn’t help but jump at the opportunity. This maneuver, while very valuable in a baseball sense, pushed their payroll to greater heights and has put more pressure on them to move other contracts off of the roster.  Their first move to relieve this pressure was to trade Chase Headley along with pitcher Bryan Mitchell to the Padres for non-prospect Jabari Blash.  The Padres effectively bought Mitchell by taking on Chase Headley and this is exactly what I propose the White Sox do for another Yankee: Jacoby Ellsbury.

Over at Fangraphs, Travis Sawchik wrote about Ellsbury and his estimated negative surplus value to the Yankees as a player due nearly $70 million, including his contract buyout, over the next 3 years. Sawchik concluded that a prospect like Clint Frazier, Baseball Prospectus’s 16th ranked prospect entering the 2017 season, would be the cost of making an Ellsbury salary dump possible. Given the additional context that Frazier, a corner outfielder, is now blocked on the Yankees by both Aaron Judge, the newly acquired Stanton, and even the perfectly solid Brett Gardner, one has to believe the Yankees would be willing to part with him if an opportunity to improve their club’s financial situation arose. The White Sox should absolutely be willing to provide the Yankees this opportunity.

Earlier this winter, Hahn had said the White Sox were likely going to have a payroll around $70 million. The White Sox haven’t had a payroll that low in more than a decade, 2005 to be exact. The White Sox also have incredibly limited future payroll commitments in 2019 and 2020, the last two years of Ellsbury’s contract. Suffice it to say that the White Sox would easily be able to absorb the entire Ellsbury contract without issue.  The White Sox also enter the 2018 season without a true center fielder on the roster, assuming they want to continue to deploy Leury Garcia in a super-utility role. They could use this roster vacancy as a selling point to Ellsbury who would have to waive his no-trade clause in order to be dealt, which should be the biggest impediment to the consummation of this deal. The real prize for the White Sox would be adding a prospect of Frazier’s caliber who would be under team control for six more seasons at very reasonable price, fitting perfectly into the next contention window. It’s an opportunity that’s almost too good to be true for a team that wants to compete with a modest budget and avoid massive free agent contracts. I just hope the White Sox are able to take advantage of this opportunity while they have a chance.

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When the White Sox traded for Kahnle, there was a good chance he would simply never cut it on a competitive team.  The stuff was always there, providing 11.1 and 13.5 percent swinging strike rates in his two seasons with the Rockies. He struck out batters at a rate of 22.1 and 25.2 percent those years. While that isn’t elite, it showed his ability to miss bats. The biggest problem was a common one among young pitchers — finding the strike zone. His 18.1 percent walk rate in 2015 was indicative of that issue. Even in his first season with the White Sox, his walk rate was at an uncomfortable 16.8 percent.

In this breakout 2017 season, however, the walk rate has plummeted to just 4.9 percent. That alone would have helped Kahnle become a more useful pitcher. What has been even more crucial is that his ability to find the strike zone has led to even more strikeouts. 37 innings into the 2017 season, Kahnle has struck out 43.1 percent of the batters he has faced. Only Craig Kimbrel has struck out hitters at a higher rate.

Kahnle’s much-improved control has had a domino effect on his pitching. With his walk rate reduced, hitters are more willing to chase pitches out of the zone. The swing percentage on pitches out of the zone against Kahnle has risen by 11.2 percent. He’s gotten first pitch strikes 53.7 percent of the time, a drastic increase from a season ago. He’s also dramatically improved the number of 0-2 counts he’s manufactured, now sitting at a rate of 29.3 percent. What these numbers boil down to is that he’s getting ahead in counts, and as a result getting whiffs to finish off batters.

All of this has come in one breakout season, or half season, really. There’s no certainty that it will last. Relievers are volatile, and a pitcher magically finding control doesn’t often last for a long stretch of time. That’s where the White Sox brilliance in his handling comes into play.

Relievers are wildly unpredictable, but the trade market at the deadline is incredibly lucrative for teams with bullpen arms to spare. The White Sox are aware of both of these things. Debates raged about whether the White Sox should deal the righty with three years of team control remaining. When the uncertainty of relievers is considered, it was almost a no-brainer that he should have been dealt at the height of his value. If a team was willing to give up valuable assets for a reliever with relatively no track record, the team should have absolutely jumped at that opportunity.

While opinions of Blake Rutherford certainly vary, he remains a Top 100 prospect at nearly every reputable prospect website, including being ranked 49th overall by Baseball Prospectus coming into the season (he was not included in the Midseason Top 50). That’s valuable to a White Sox team in the early years of a rebuild. And while Kahnle didn’t fetch that talent alone, he was likely the most valuable of the three pieces involved in the trade. The White Sox could have seen that value and decided to keep him on the staff. Instead, they decided to trade him while it is reasonable to assume he is at peak performance. It is this type of move that could be invaluable for the White Sox in the next few seasons, especially with pitching coach Don Cooper having a good reputation, albeit mostly anecdotal, for fixing broken pitchers.

The buy low-sell high tactic is certainly not a new one to teams in the throes of a rebuild. However, it’s not often that it works this well. Even by just looking inwardly at the White Sox roster, examples can be found of failures in this strategy. But when it works, it can turn something small into something really valuable.

Beckham’s failures were an indictment of the poor player development regime of recent years past, but they were able to turn him into Yency Almonte. Almonte in turn brought Kahnle to the South side. That provided the White Sox with half a season of a very valuable reliever, which then led to a Top 100 prospect landing in the organization. If the team is able to do that even just one more time, it would be a massive help in the process of rebuilding and piling on the organizational depth.

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Robertson isn’t alone in his hot start, although he has more of a track record to suggest it’s meaningful than some other players I’m about to discuss. Behind him, Anthony Swarzak, Tommy Kahnle, and Zach Putnam have combined for 34 Ks against 2 ERs and 3 BBs in 24.67 innings.

Putnam’s start shouldn’t be a surprise at this point. Over the past two seasons he has posted DRAs below 3 mixed between DL stints.  The first 8.67 innings of 2017, in that sense, are the quintessential Putnam experience, as he has a DRA of 0.98 and was just placed on the disabled list with inflammation of the elbow.

Kahnle and Swarzak represent new developments. Swarzak was fringy as a long reliever/spot starter, but is able to dial it up into the mid-to-high 90s in short outings.  While being used in such a capacity he surrendered 10 homers in only 31 innings with the Yankees in 2016, and those issues could still resurface, but a K/BB ratio of 12 does not suggest that his performance to date has been luck driven. And frankly, he has bullied hitters with his fastball in recent outings, with his streak of 18 straight batters retired broken by a weak single on Tuesday night.

Kahnle was acquired for Yency Almonte — which is looking like it might still sting — and was always intriguing if for no other reason than that he throws really, really hard, averaging 97 miles per hour on his fastball last year.  The flaw was obvious, though, given that he walked 20 batters in 27.1 innings while y’know … throwing really hard!

He still hasn’t cracked seven innings this year, but dropping your BB percentage from 16.8 to 3.9 seems like progress.  I’m not going to call him the next Matt Thornton, but there’s no doubt that if he can keep the ball in the zone there’s the very real potential for dominance.

Ironically, with Michael Ynoa hanging in there, Nate Jones is arguably off to the worst start in the bullpen while probably being the best of the bunch. For a rebuilding team, it is weird that the White Sox may profile to have a bunch of really good relievers. But either way, it sure would be nice if they could polish up NRIs like Swarzak into desirable trade commodities to go along with their higher profile chips.

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While the White Sox have been slammed from all directions for seeking free agents in the bargain bin, Duke represented the type of modest acquisition that is well worth pursuing. And although Duke was underwhelming in 2015, he was exactly what they’d hoped for in 2016 — a wipeout reliever against lefties who could be used against righties without it being lunacy. Unfortunately for the Cardinals, it was just announced that Duke will need Tommy John surgery, wiping out the final year of his contract, meaning they’ll just have to accept his 23.1 superb innings they got while coming up just short of the playoffs. Maybe one day they’ll catch a break.

Assuming Tilson is able to return from injury substantially in the state he was in before — not a given — he projects to be the type of player the White Sox have struggled to generate on their own.  He’d have to max out his development to be a solid or plus starting center fielder, but he doesn’t need to do much to be a plus fourth outfielder. That’s hardly something that changes the long-term fate of the team, but it also describes Austin Jackson, who was the team’s biggest free agent acquisition last winter. If you can have good bench pieces for the league minimum it frees up resources to spend elsewhere. For example, how nice is it to have Tyler Saladino instead of Gordon Beckham or Emilio Bonifacio for $2-4 million a pop?

With an organization like the White Sox, there is always the risk that Tilson becomes Plan A in centerfield with zero backup plan. That would be foolhardy. However, if used properly, Tilson is a safe bet to be a burner on the bench who can come in as a defensive replacement or be used to help the flexibility of the lineup — or soak up an extra couple hundred plate appearances in case of injury instead of someone like J.B. Shuck, who just posted a sub-.600 OPS while pressed into full time duty. Beyond the tragedy of Tilson potentially degrading his key tool as a result of his hamstring injury, it also meant that the White Sox didn’t get to use the final few months of the season playing out the string giving him exposure to major league pitching and getting to evaluate how well he will do moving forward.

Tilson may need more time in Triple-A or he may be nothing at all.  And there’s also the aforementioned possibility that he hits his ceiling and he’s a perfectly usable center fielder. Or, if the White Sox retain Brett Lawrie — and there is no legitimate reason that they should not — they could run out a bench of Tilson, Saladino, Omar Narvaez, and perhaps the other half of a DH platoon like, say, a Pedro Alvarez or Mike Napoli. And you don’t have be a wild optimist to believe that would have a good chance at being one of the better benches they’ve had in recent memory.

Despite Rick Hahn being coy about the offseason plan, this is an organization that has been gallingly passive in recent years.  In that sense, it is a positive to see them trade away a player that is clearly not part of the future, is blocking someone worth evaluating in the present, and looking for ways to add talent–any talent–to the organization.  After all, whether or not the White Sox choose to rebuild or try to actually capitalize on the good, cheap core that they have in place this winter, Navarro was expendable either way.

Colton Turner is the return coming back from Toronto.  As you might imagine, it’s not exactly the biggest haul, again–this is a free addition to the organization, because the alternative is just watching Navarro leave at the end of the year for nothing.  He’s a 25-year old LHP who was vaporizing both levels of A-ball (as you’d hope) and has struggled quite a bit with his promotion to AA.  The best hope for him is that he’s a LOOGY eventually, but that’s still useful.  The White Sox have certainly had their trouble finding someone to fill that role without spending a decent amount of money on a guy like Zach Duke.

Along those same lines, the trade syncs up with Alex Avila‘s activation from the DL.  There are still a few days to make waiver trades, and one wonders if someone would be interested in giving up something for him.  After all, Avila has had a better year than Navarro has.  Even if the White Sox wanted to bring him back in 2016, he’s a free agent at the end of the year regardless and he’s not getting a Qualifying Offer–there’s no reason you can’t just sign him anyway.

As for Navarro himself, anecdotally he became a lightning rod for criticism, and not without reason.  His bat fell apart, statistical and visual evidence that his framing was killing the pitching staff piled up quickly, and the guy he replaced was Chris Sale‘s personal catcher who was better in every way and promptly went off to have a career year in Atlanta.*  While catcher is a difficult position to solve, and pitch framing metrics do not inspire as much confidence as say, OBP does, a platoon of Avila and Tyler Flowers looks like a it would have been massively preferable to what they wound up doing.  And while no organization is perfect on this score,** the White Sox have been in the red on player evaluations for a while now.

*Sale’s off-the-field blowups this year didn’t come out of nowhere, as we’ve seen him confront the front office before, and anybody who has watched him give up a home run and come back throwing 99+ with zero control knows he’s….competitive.  However, one wonders if the White Sox non-tendering Flowers this winter pushed him into feeling more adversarial with management.  

**For example, the Astros are widely lauded as a Smart Organization that is On The Rise, but this is the same regime that drafted Mark Appel over Kris Bryant, and let J.D. Martinez, Robbie Grossman, and Jonathan Villar go actually for free or basically for free.

Well, despite all of that, Navarro gets to go play in playoff race with his teammates of the last two years, while the White Sox will continue to flush year five of Sale’s Hall of Fame Peak down the toilet without him.

Tilson is a Chicago-area kid who was drafted out of New Trier High School in Winnetka by the Cardinals in the second round of the 2011 draft.  Tilson is of the “super fast 4th outfielder” phylum of player.  He can legitimately play good defense in center field, although evidently his throwing arm is underwhelming, and he steals plenty of bases.  But, he’s also posting a .750 OPS in the hitter-paradise PCL.

To put it lightly, the White Sox have struggled to produce solid depth options internally for a long time now.  To that end, Tilson does offer useful, legitimate major league skills–defense at a premium position and speed–which is more than I can say for a lot of players the White Sox have employed in recent memory.

Some public evaluators praise Tilson’s ability to make contact and draw walks, which are certainly the most important things you can do with his skill set.  So there is also a non-zero chance that his bat plays enough where he can replicate the contributions that, say, Austin Jackson was making.

While it has been clear that the White Sox would not be buyers to compete for 2016 for weeks now, this move still doesn’t necessarily shed any light on the grand direction of the team.  Duke is one of the players I suggested could be flipped without compromising the ability to compete in 2017.  But, trading away veteran relievers is also consistent with a total teardown.  Thus this trade doesn’t really move the needle in revealing the organization’s larger plans.

Rather, it was a sensible decision to trade Duke away under either framework.  A modest piece was traded for a modest return, who may be a bench contributor as soon as next year.  It also frees up $5.5 million for 2017, which would normally be an amount that isn’t worth taking into consideration, but then again, that’s more than the White Sox spent on any free agents last offseason.

1. The White Sox could use some more pitching;

2. A left-handed bat would be very nice; and

3. You get more value out of a player by adding them sooner rather than waiting all the way to the deadline; and

4. You can’t buy unless someone is out there willing to sell.

Several teams that looked like they would be sellers got off to good starts, which makes it harder to buy, although they have subsequently come back down to earth — the Brewers, for example.  However, the American League seems to consist entirely of teams that have non-crazy playoff aspirations, other than the A’s or the Twins.*  Meanwhile, teams like the Rockies, Phillies, and Marlins are performing better than pre-season expectations and would have a tough sell to their fanbases and clubhouses if they punted assets at this juncture.

*The Angels and Astros are at the bottom of the AL West, but the former are desperately scrounging about for supplements to the roster, and Houston is probably still too good for people to shovel dirt on them just yet. 

So Hahn’s remark about not having a dance partner is visible front and center, and not just in the smoky backrooms of MLB front offices.

But the White Sox don’t need a major piece to improve the roster.  The easiest places to get better are the areas of biggest weakness–it’s simply a lower bar to clear.  And right now, even if we give Avisail Garcia the benefit of the doubt, the bench is an unmitigated disaster.

Alex Avila is basically the backup catcher, so unless something crazy happens and they add like, Jonathan Lucroy, he’s not going anywhere.  Regardless, his TAv this year is .212.  Jerry Sands is at .208. Carlos Sanchez was just demoted because he was hitting about as badly as you possibly can and Tyler Saladino‘s presence made him completely redundant.  The former had a .129 TAv (!!!!!) and the latter is somehow putting him to shame at .226.

You don’t exactly need an NL cellar dweller to completely crash out on the season and scoop up all of your prospects to improve on that.  So while it is nice to fantasize about trades for Ryan Braun, Lucroy, and Jonathan Villar to plug every hole on offense and turn the team into a Mad Max: Fury Road-style war rig, you could still make improvements right now.  The 2015 Mets, for example, helped their team out a lot by replacing the Eric Campbells of their roster with Kelly Johnson and Juan Uribe well before they added Yoenis Cespedes.

The estimable Matt Cassidy of FutureSox pointed out to me on Twitter that Danny Hayes (of the Knights not CSN) and Jason Coats are players that he thinks could be useful internal options, and Matt Davidson is having his best year in Charlotte yet.  But, much like how Miguel Gonzalez–a freely acquired outside asset–looks like he may outperform Jacob Turner and Erik Johnson, the White Sox should be aggressively digging through the bargain bin.

Even if you want to keep Avila, Saladino, and Sands on board that should still leave a fourth spot on the bench that you can devote to the best bat you can find without compromising your backup at any given position.

The White Sox are in first place, but it is a tenuous hold, there is a long way to go, and AL Central rivals are seeing key players go down with injuries at an impressive rate.  There is an opportunity here, the margins are the easiest and cheapest places to add and hoo boy is the bar a low one to clear when it comes to improving the bench.