At the time, I wrote leaving Clarkin exposed was a logical move.  At this point, it’s hard to imagine he has the durability to start, let alone effectively, limiting him to relief, and it’s not clear he will be very good in the next year or two, if ever.  Now, just a few days later losing him on waivers, the White Sox claimed Clarkin back off waivers and the 40-man roster now stands at 39.

Regardless of what you think about Clarkin in a vacuum, this makes leaving Spencer Adams unprotected look even stranger.  Everything from public evaluations to pedigree to statistics to health to age to proximity to the majors…well, Adams seems to be better than Clarkin in just about every way.  I suppose Clarkin is left-handed?  And yet here we are.

Perhaps, for whatever reason, the White Sox have decided the most important thing in the universe is now having left-handed relievers.  Hahn cited it as an area of need while he was in the process of acquiring a number of southpaw relievers in the second half of the season.

But as I originally pointed out—Clarkin is now behind at least Jace Fry, Aaron Bummer (pictured above) and Caleb Frare, arguably Kodi Medeiros, and there may be more to like about Hunter Schryver than Clarkin now.  You can never have too many relievers and there are problems with all of those other guys, but I still cannot figure out why Clarkin gets a spot and Adams doesn’t.  There must be something here we don’t know about, because with the information we have this doesn’t really make sense.

Lead Image Credit: Ray Carlin-USA TODAY Sports

So far so good.

Two things caught White Sox fans’ eye on the heels of the announcement:

1) The press release said it left the White Sox’ 40-man roster at 38 rather than the 39 fans counted.  The mystery was subsequently solved, as it was announced Ian Clarkin was claimed by the Cubs on waivers.  Clarkin was one of the supplementary pieces acquired in the Blake Rutherford deal with the Yankees.  He’ll turn 24 before the 2019 season starts, and between injuries and ineffectiveness he has yet to conquer Double-A after six years in pro ball, most recently posting a K:BB ratio just a shade over 1.00 in Birmingham.  A well regarded prospect once upon a time, it was understandable the White Sox would want to see if they could get him healthy and back on track.  The Cubs will have to see if they can pull it off.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a solid lefty reliever one day, but even if you knew he could be that in a year or two, just among lefty relievers on the organizational depth chart Clarkin would come in behind Jace Fry, Aaron Bummer, Caleb Frare, and Medeiros at a minimum.

2) A notable omission from 40-man protection was Spencer Adams.  Some outlets believed the White Sox had a steal when they took Adams in the second round of the 2014 draft, and the highly athletic prep arm has climbed all the way to Triple-A, pounding the zone relentlessly along the way.  Even if the control (i.e. not walking people as opposed to command) has been very good, and that has yielded some solid ERAs along the way, he has yet to show he can miss bats consistently, and scouts said he looked stiffer in 2018.  Still, this author, at the very least, thought he would be added to the 40-man roster, given that some were very excited about him not too long ago, and his proximity to the majors.

That said, the Rule 5 draft is an easy source of fear.  It plays on all of our concerns about losing talent for the low price of a 40-man spot, particularly if a player lost in such a way were to go off and become something significant.  But, the White Sox have been good about this of late.  Some began making concerned noises when Jordan Guerrero and Jake Peter were exposed to Rule 5 last year only for neither of them to get taken.  There’s a good chance Adams makes it past Rule 5 and just returns to Charlotte next season, and hopefully he takes a step forward and reaches his potential as a back end starter with the White Sox, or polishes himself up into a nice trade chip. Or, if he does get taken, there’s reason to believe the White Sox have a basis to decide it’s a loss they are willing to stomach.

And, this leaves room for them to make other additions, or even claim someone they like even better in the Rule 5 draft themselves.

None of this is fatal to The Rebuild, of course.  Part of the plan, after all, was to stockpile a massive arsenal of prospects such that you don’t need everything to go perfectly to have a path to contention.  So, when 2018 stalled out, the natural conclusion was to shift the first year where the White Sox might want to try to contend from 2019 to 2020.  And maybe the next year the White Sox can make the playoffs actually is 2020, but that doesn’t mean the White Sox shouldn’t make major moves in free agency right now. To consider:

1.  The obvious contenders in the American League next year are the reigning World Series champion Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Houston Astros.  The A’s and Rays had a good number of positive performances which may be tough to repeat, but it’s fair to say they have a puncher’s chance as well.  The rest of the AL is either in full rebuild (Kansas City, Detroit, Texas, Baltimore,  Toronto) or in some sort of limbo after suffering a setback year (Angels, Twins).  You’ll notice I’m omitting the Cleveland Indians and Seattle Mariners from this discussion.  Over the past few days, these Win Now teams have been making a lot of noise about trimming payroll or even going into full rebuilds.

As with every rumor, particularly dramatic ones like these, it is safe to assume they are nothing more than just rumors until you see actions to match the talk.  Still, the Mariners were already an old team that has yet to actually crack the playoffs, and it’s hard to see a path to getting significantly better from here.  They wildly outperformed their run differential to post 89 wins (with a 77-win pythag) on the back of extreme good fortune in 1-run games, largely thanks to a truly herculean effort from Edwin Diaz fronting what looks like career years from a whole lot of no name relievers.  Nelson Cruz is a free agent. Robinson Cano has been gently declining as he is now closer to 40 than 30. And, while Jean Segura, James Paxton, and Mitch Haniger are very nice players still in their 20s, the latter two are brittle, and collectively aren’t enough to drag a lackluster surrounding cast to the promised land.  They have a creative front office, but this team as currently composed may very well be out of gas, and accordingly they have announced almost everyone on the roster is for sale.

Cleveland also features a stars-and-scrubs construction at the tail end of a contention window.  Unlike Seattle, their stars are a whole lot more impactful — Jose Ramirez, Francisco Lindor, Corey Kluber, and even Trevor Bauer rate at or near the absolute tops of their positions in all of baseball — and also unlike Seattle they have been rattling off division titles, albeit in a much weaker division.  But Cleveland is now mewling lamely about payroll, even apparently complaining about having to pay the absolute bargain Kluber his Cy Young Award bonuses.  There’s even some fire to go with this smoke.  They refused to make a qualifying offer to Michael Brantley, their only good outfielder in 2018.  And, even if they don’t sell guys like Kluber or Carlos Carrasco as reported they are willing to do, the team is going to take on some water next year.  Edwin Encarnacion is finally looking like age is getting the best of him, and mainstays Cody Allen and Andrew Miller are likely going elsewhere in free agency.

All that said, Cleveland underperformed their run differential last year and they’re clearly still the best team in the division by a long shot.  But, if they actually follow through and trade pieces like Kluber and Carrasco, they crash back that much closer to the AL Central pack.

Yes, you still have to bid against NL teams for free agents, but the American League, particularly in the AL Central specifically, at this moment, may be wide open.

2. This free agent class is different.  Some of the shine is off it as Clayton Kershaw and Charlie Blackmon wound up extending and other free agents — like Miller, for instance — aren’t quite as shiny as they looked even six months ago. But, Manny Machado and Bryce Harper are both still there.  It is my position the White Sox should sign both by outbidding everyone else, or, failing that, push all of their chips in on Harper specifically.

With the caveat that any super rich team can come out of nowhere and sign someone — the Diamondbacks aren’t even one of the powerhouses and they swooped in with the high bid on Zack Greinke, for instance — not only are these two free agents huge outliers in both talent and age, the market for Harper in particular is less sanguine than it might have been under normal circumstances.  Part of that is him having one of his “down” years (.249/.393/.496) in his walk year, but part of that is weird circumstances that have cropped up.  Yeah, you can always make room for Harper, but the Yankees’ corner outfielders are Aaron Judge and they unexpectedly were able to add Giancarlo Stanton thanks to Project Wolverine.  Similarly, I had long thought the Nationals were being underrated as a candidate for Harper’s services, but then Juan Soto basically turned into Bryce Harper II in front of our eyes, and if a Nationals organization who has lost most free agent wars they’ve been in as they desperately try to get everyone to take deferred salary wants to play it safe, they can lose Harper and still potentially roll out with three All-Star outfielders anyway.  The Cubs were long considered a candidate for Harper’s services but now they are murmuring about trimming payroll too!

Machado will likely have more suitors, as the ability to cover shortstop and third makes him suitable for more teams than the corner-limited Harper, but some of the same payroll factors — Boston is probably tapped out although watch them sign both these guys anyway — or weird cheapness might drag his salary back into the realm of reality.

And all of this brings us back to the White Sox.

I will never bet on this team to spend until I see it. Historically, that’s just not what they do. To be fair, full teardown rebuilds, outbidding the field for guys like Luis Robert, or drafting highly touted Scott Boras clients like Carlos Rodon weren’t moves in the organization’s history either. But for all that you can talk about how stockpiling a million prospects helps you replenish your major league roster internally with depth — true! — the whole point of homegrown players is they’re cheap.  You’re paying Yoan Moncada $550,000 a year to be a league average second baseman* instead of $10 million or whatever for Asdrubal Cabrera. If you repeat that all over the roster, as the White Sox intend to do, it would seem, then that should free up a ton of money to supplement the roster elsewhere.

*Yes obviously he should be a better player than this, but for now bear with me.

To that end, the White Sox currently have an estimated $54.5 million in payroll commitments for 2019 right now and $5.75 million in commitments for 2020.  They could sign both Machado and Harper to $35 million a year deals and their opening day payroll would still have ranked 18th in the majors last year.  They could give them each $40 million a year and still be right about where their payroll was in 2011. You can non-tender Avisail Garcia and save another ~$8.5 million if you need to to get it done.  And, because of their age and skill sets, you don’t need to get good right away to get good value on their contracts.  They’re likely to still be very good in 2020, or 2022, or 2024. And yeah, their contracts will ultimately be riddled with opt outs, and injuries and underperformance can happen, and EVERYONE wants to sign these guys, but the stars are aligning and fate is reaching out its hand.

The White Sox have the ability to back up the Brinks truck to both of their homes as much as anybody, and given just how much payroll room they have, should be able to outbid anyone. Whether they have the will to do so is another question, but they have the ability to do so.

If the overwhelming majority of teams in the majors are in some version of a rebuild that means the market inefficiency is to go for it.  You’ve already acquired virtually all of prospects you’re going to acquire by selling pieces from the major league roster.  These are the guys you’re going to try to win with. The next free agent class does not offer anything near this type of opportunity.  You can sign these contracts and still have room to do more to shore up the fringes of the roster, which, by the way, should be supplemented by the future of the team you have already committed to. Ironically, for this franchise, the White Sox are currently choked to the gills with 1-2 WARP players and don’t seem to have a star anywhere on the roster (yet) and have a pipeline of potential stars but also potential spare parts. You can plop two 26-year-olds onto the roster who have posted multiple 5-7 WARP seasons and, in Harper, a guy who posted an 11.2 WARP season in 2015.

Even moderate internal improvement from potential stars like Anderson and Moncada (and throw in Jimenez etc. while we’re at it) and modest other moves on the periphery and that would immediately put the team’s win expectation in the low-to-mid 80s with room for more.  The division is already there for the taking and may be getting even more up-for-grabs, and the White Sox are uniquely positioned to exploit this unique opportunity.  If they don’t get one of these two guys, you are that much more reliant on what’s in house turning into gold or having to trade good pieces away to get something back. Why bother when you can use the freely available resources you have in surplus to just add two MVP candidates just entering their primes to your core?

I don’t claim to be some sort of savant for suggesting “pay the most money to the best free agents” but you could not draw up a better situation for the White Sox given their current situation.

Hell. Trade for James Paxton while you’re at it.

Lead Image Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Still, if you go to pretty much any leaderboard, particularly on the position player side, and sort from the top, you’re going to find it dominated by first round picks.  Mike Trout, Alex Bregman, Matt Chapman, Francisco Lindor, Manny Machado, Christian Yelich, and so on.

And, as we know in baseball, there can be quite a bit of lag time between adding an amateur talent and their arrival in the majors.  Jorge Alfaro just played his first full year in the majors and he was on seven BP 101 lists—I didn’t realize Baseball-Reference had a “Show All” expand tab for prospect list appearances, but here we are.

This all brings me to the White Sox.  Given they’re in a rebuild, their first round picks are the best way to add star talent at minimal cost, and if they’re planning on competing in 2020-2022, ideally they’d be getting big contributions from their 2015-2017 first round picks.  When you throw in that the White Sox went college with all three of those selections—Carson Fulmer, Zack Collins, and Jake Burger—you’d hope their arrivals would sync up rather nicely with that window.*

Granted, these selections weren’t at the very top of the draft, coming eighth, tenth, and eleventh overall, so the degree of difficulty is higher than say, the barrage of Top 5 picks Dayton Moore has used to poor results for years, but right now these picks aren’t looking great.  Let’s look at each of them in turn:

• Carson Fulmer: The pros and cons were clear. Fulmer’s stuff is electric and he performed well against the toughest amateur competition, pitching for Vanderbilt in the SEC while getting good marks for his makeup.  But, he did not boast ideal size, delivery, command, or a clear third pitch. The theory might have been the White Sox have succeeded with unconventional deliveries and it was a way to maybe get an impact performer out of a comparatively low draft pick.  The negatives have definitely won out to date.  After getting absolutely obliterated in multiple tries as a starter at Triple-A and the majors, he has now been converted to a reliever.  There’s still a chance he’s an impact reliever, and today’s game makes them more valuable than they’ve been in the past, but a star this is not.

You can criticize almost any team by using hindsight and look at the guys who went after and cherrypick to say, “Aha! They should have picked [Player X] instead!” Still, it is kind of amusing they didn’t even take the best high risk, high reward starting pitcher from Vanderbilt in this draft available to them.

• Zack Collins: Another “zig when everyone else is zagging” pick—very few evaluators gave Collins a chance at sticking behind the plate defensively, and there were a lot of questions about his contact skills. The White Sox figured they’d coached up rough catcher defense before, and if he could stay back there they had a chance at an All Star given his power and patience.  At the ten spot, Collins’ ideal ceiling certainly had appeal.  However, as we sit here today and like Fulmer, although hope is not lost, the negatives are outweighing the positives, as he has stalled out in Birmingham, making marginal improvements on his defense while still posting batting averages in the .230s against minor league arms.  The walks are there, and the power is still pretty good, but it’s hard to say this year was a good one for his stock.  He turns 24 before Opening Day next year, and one would hope someone with his power, eye, and advance college competition would be able to muster better contact against Double-A pitchers in his third pro season.  Catchers are weird, and he’s certainly focusing very hard on his defense, but the probability he is a second division or bench quality 1B bat is frighteningly high.
• Jake Burger: Our prospect team liked Burger quite a bit—even if they thought he was a future 1B instead of a 3B. He just had a ton of batspeed and power and if you have enough of those two things you can contribute even if you have a whole lot of other problems.  Still, everything was going to have to break perfectly for him to play 3B, and as soon as you are moving a prospect to 1B they have to be absolutely elite bats in order to be stars.  Unfortunately, any chance Burger could string together some 3B seasons in the majors before moving across the diamond were blown up in dramatic fashion, as he tore his Achilles tendon not once but twice.  There’s still time for him to get back on track, but it’s a dramatic injury and it’s unclear how much power and batspeed will remain when he returns to the field.  And, as we’ve seen in recent years, the value of 1B/DH-only bats is lower than it has been in a long time.

Ultimately, despite the pedigree and obvious major league tools these three picks possessed, they all bore a significant amount of risk, and it’s looking like the White Sox may have rolled snake eyes on all of them.  If they continue to fail in the way they have to date, they can’t say these failures were unforeseeable, like, say, Gordon Beckham forgetting how to hit. And, the cumulative effect may be that once again the White Sox have a contender with holes where they wouldn’t be if they’d had better results with their first round picks.  Maybe they can just paper over it by blitzing studs they grab at the top of the draft like Nick Madrigal and whatever Top 5 player they grab next year to the majors, but they’re tying one hand behind their back if they get minimal contributions from three selections in the Top 11 overall.

The story of these three prospects is hardly over. This time next year we could be talking about Fulmer as a relief ace, Collins as the catcher of the future, and Jake Burger as a pure cleanup hitter, but if you think of each prospect as a range of possible outcomes with various probabilities assigned to those outcomes, the negative outcomes are currently gobbling up a whole lot more of the pie chart.

*The White Sox had a compensatory pick and got an extra first rounder to select Zack Burdi in 2016.  I don’t believe it changes the above analysis.  As a pure reliever, Burdi was always going to be a member of the supporting cast rather than a sizable piece of the “Core.”  The White Sox are better at it than most, but Ian Hamilton, Ryan Burr, Caleb Frare, and even potentially Tyler Johnson and others down in the minors look like late inning relievers and they did not cost the 26th overall pick.

Lead Image Credit: Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports

1. After a rocky June, pitching his first games in the majors since offseason shoulder surgery, Carlos Rodon has rattled off three straight quality starts against the Astros, Cardinals, and Angels, even carrying a no hitter into the sixth inning on Tuesday night.  Over three starts in July, Rodon has thrown 21 innings with an ERA of 1.71.  He’s still walking more batters than you’d like, but opposing batters have an OPS of .481 over that stretch.  Rodon has flashed excellence before, but in a season with a whole lot of ghastly pitching and failures at the major league level, it’s a pleasant reminder that not long ago, this guy was widely regarded as a front line starter of the future.  Even after his surgery, Rodon is averaging about 94 mph on his four seamer and touching 98 when he needs it.  July has also seen him abandon a sinking fastball for a more four-seam/change up pairing, which is worth monitoring moving forward.

2. On the offensive side of the ball, the team is oddly unremarkable statistically.  Of their top ten batters by plate appearance, five of them have an OPS+ between 96 and 103, and nine of them are between 96 and 120.  Adam Engel is the only real dud in the bunch with his .560 OPS.  While it’s good nobody in particular has cratered, per se, fora  team of young players we have seen more incremental improvement than any breakouts yet.  Tim Anderson and Yoan Moncada have been uneven, if flashy, league average regulars, Matt Davidson, Yolmer Sanchez, Leury Garcia, and Omar Narvaez all continue to look overqualified as bench players but stretched in every day action.

It’s easy to forget Moncada still only has 657 major league plate appearances in his career, basically one full season’s worth and that’s reaching back to include his random 8 games cup of coffee with Boston in 2016.  There’s time yet for this group, particularly the middle infielders, to put together a strong finish to the season but as it stands it’s been a whole lot of Okay.

3. The trade deadline is coming up in less than a week, although it may be a quiet one for the White Sox.  Avisail Garcia has been good while he’s played, but he’s likely been too injury prone to draw much interest even if the White Sox did want to punt on someone who could contribute to a theoretical 2019 contention push. Jose Abreu looks like he’s coming out of his slump, but as we’ve discussed before, the White Sox would need to be blown away to part with the heart and face of the team and he hasn’t hit well enough to imagine such an offer would be forthcoming.  Still, there’s always a market for arms and James Shields has somehow pitched well enough in this weak market to be potentially worth something.

In fact, I would not be surprised to see the White Sox try to bundle a number of arms (or perhaps even hyper versatile bench pieces like Leury Garcia) to a team in the playoff race to improve their prospect return.  Thanks to some crazy win streaks and surprisingly open divisions, Oakland, Arizona, Washington, Seattle, Atlanta, Milwaukee, the Cubs, and arguably the Yankees could all upgrade their rosters with some combination of Shields, Joakim Soria, Leury Garcia, or even a Jace Fry or Xavier Cedeno.  The Blake Rutherford trade of 2017 is a model of what this might look like, even if Fry may not be as good as Kahnle and Soria is not as valuable as a David Robertson.

4.  It figures Nicky Delmonico and Avisail Garcia would come off the disabled list right about when Eloy Jimenez begins earnestly beating the door down for a major league roster spot.  Obviously, with a player of Jimenez’ caliber, you just make a spot for him and sort the rest out later, but this was the real tragedy of Delmonico’s injury, like Charlie Tilson’s before him, and perhaps Ryan Cordell’s as well–the White Sox had a window where there was a lot of playing time to be had for lesser players to show they are perhaps not lesser players, and that window is closing relatively quickly.

Center field still looks wide open, because Engel is approaching his 27th birthday with another couple hundred plate appearances of batting like the best hitting pitcher of the 21st century, but at Triple-A and above, the logjam is in the corners.

5. In case you missed it, our Collin Whitchurch has been writing regularly over at the mothership on the What You Need To Know team, covering all of the news around the league. He has an article up from Tuesday night to help you catch up on the insanity which has been the A’s, the Pirates, the Brewers and more.

1. One of the cool things about following baseball is there is always more to learn. For example, I bet you thought loading the bases increased your chances of scoring runs. The theory has a compelling, albeit facile, logic to it.  But that’s why you read Baseball Prospectus — you think on a deeper level.  The White Sox had some contrarian wisdom, loading the bases in the first on Sunday and the bottom of the second on Saturday with one out and none out respectively and not scoring at all.  It was cool and great.

2. Reynaldo Lopez took the hard luck 1-0 loss Sunday, although it indicts Pitcher Wins & Losses more than it says anything about his efforts. The term “effectively wild” is a cliché, but Lopez held the Tigers to one unearned run on the day, striking out five and only allowing two hits.  The five walks were a bit unsightly, but Lopez is missing bats so far in 2018, which is much more consistent with his repertoire and speaks to what he can accomplish if his secondaries are working.

3. For his second start of the year, Lucas Giolito did not have his best command, struggling to locate his fastball, and allowing 5 runs over 5.2 IP. Maybe Giolito has trouble getting loose in cold weather or maybe these are just two random bad starts.  Regardless, it has certainly thrown cold water on the popular Spring Training narrative Giolito had figured everything out.  The silver lining is how he has managed to muddle through reasonably deep into games when he clearly wasn’t at his best, but I’m sure he’d prefer to show his best instead.

4. Juan Minaya had a really rough weekend, walking all four of the batters he faced on Saturday and then being optioned to Charlotte the next day. The corresponding move represented the White Sox’ biggest moral victory of the weekend, as they took deployed former Detroit prospect Bruce Rondon, who pulled the reverse Minaya and struck out all four Tigers’ he faced.  Rondon throws hard. Maybe he’ll be the next Cooper reclamation project to troll the league.

5. The White Sox offense fell flat on against Michael Fulmer — a good pitcher — and Mike Fiers, who is not as good as Fulmer, but they still sit No. 1 in the majors in OPS as a team. Even after two bad games, Avisail Garcia is still hitting .343, and Matt Davidson drew a walk in each of them, including after an 0-2 count.  For reference, he walked 19 times in all of 2017.  Davidson is always going to strike out a lot, but the walks and power method is a tried and true one.  He already has the latter, so the former would be a very welcome addition, and it is a trend worth monitoring.

Lead Image Credit: Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports

Rick Hahn & Co. have had to make roster decisions in advance of the Rule V draft, and the impact of the San Diego Padres pulling two players out of Low-A and another out of Rookie Ball last winter seems to have influenced the players added to the 40-man roster and those left off.  Typically, the requirement that a Rule V draftee must stay on the 25-man roster the entirety of the following year or be sold back to their former franchise meant that teams would only select players who were close enough to major league ready to pull that off without significantly compromising the team’s ability to compete.  Now, organizations are pushing contention cycle concepts further and further to the extreme, and a team like the Padres who frankly did not care if they competed in 2017 instead saw it as a way of adding free talent.  If you don’t care about the harm to your major league roster, the question then becomes whether or not the player’s development will be harmed by being buried on the bench, or facing competition far beyond their skills.

So instead of adding arms that are close to the majors like Jordan Guerrero, they protected Eloy Jimenez (I mean, yeah) but also Luis Alexander Basabe–who is raw and struggled mightily in High-A–and Micker Adolfo, among others, by adding them to the 40-man.  Even after outrighting Chris Beck and Tyler Danish to Triple-A, the White Sox sit with 39 of their 40 roster spots full, protecting some…marginal talents to say the least in the process, and only leaving one slot for a Rule V pick of their own.

Perhaps the most notable snub for 40-man protection was the omission of Jake Peter, a utility infielder coming off of a good year in Triple-A, who could easily fit as the 25th man on a number of rosters and who actually made an appearance in the “Next Ten” portion of the White Sox’ Top Ten Prospects list.  The White Sox certainly have a plethora of utility infield types who are ahead of him on the organizational depth chart, some of whom have reportedly garnered trade interest, but perhaps it is indicative of the new landscape of roster composition that Danny Farquhar and Dylan Covey were kept safe and Peter was exposed.  Indeed, perhaps other organizations were similarly terrified of Padres-like aggression and also left major league ready fodder exposed such that Peter is less likely to get popped, but again, that raises the question as to why the White Sox didn’t leave more room to draft players perhaps more intriguing than waiver-wire relievers like Farquhuar or former Rule V draftees like Covey themselves.

Photo credit: Ken Blaze- USA Today Sports

As far as the White Sox go, that sums up all of the positives from the game. Dylan Covey, Chris Beck, and Mike Pelfrey each pitched multiple innings and allowed even more runs. Anderson’s double stood as the White Sox’ only hit, with Rob Brantly’s walk representing the only other baserunner on the afternoon.

After the game, Ausmus faced down questions as to why Castellanos—a recent convert from third base to the outfield—had not been pulled for a defensive replacement.  It wouldn’t have been a routine play, necessarily, but it is not outlandish to suggest that a defender with better range would have hauled in the catch and clinched the no hitter for Boyd.  Castellanos is not fleet of foot and while he may eventually profile better in the outfield than at third, his bat certainly looks less special in right field.

Heading into Sunday’s game, the White Sox had been averaging 8.6 runs scored over the previous eight contests, so the prudent course would be to chalk Sunday up to One Of Those Days and move on.

The biggest news of the weekend was likely Carson Fulmer’s start on Friday evening, his second consecutive outing of 6 innings with only 1 run allowed.  Fulmer has had a tough season, getting hit around in Triple-A and getting absolutely annihilated in his first start in the majors this year.  So even if his recent run of success has been against Detroit and San Francisco’s weak lineups, he is closing on a high note.  Over his last 12 innings, he has struck out 14 against only 4 walks while logging 19 swinging strikes, getting a lot of swings and misses on fastballs above the belt.

Fulmer has good velocity, sitting around 94, topping out as high as 97, and he is able to both cut and sink it as needed.  If you watched Corey Kluber in the playoffs last year, you can see what that kind of arsenal can accomplish when thrown with impeccable command.  The organization has also raved about his makeup and work ethic.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is unchanged when it comes to Fulmer. His delivery is violent and difficult to repeat, the great life he gets on his pitches also means he fails to consistently pitch to specific quadrants of the plate, let alone hit the glove. There’s still a chance that he could stick in the rotation as a solid back-end guy, but the landscape of the organization has shifted massively since his arrival.  When he was drafted, the organization would have loved it if he quickly became a #4 starter to slot in behind Chris Sale and Jose Quintana, and he represented a disturbingly high percentage of the White Sox’ prospect capital.

Now, as it looks increasingly likely that Fulmer will wind up a reliever—and he’d probably be quite a good one, who could be used for more than three outs at a time—that would still be an acceptable outcome.  The plan for the rotation now looks like some combination of Carlos Rodon, Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez, Michael Kopech, Dane Dunning, and others.

Fulmer might still be a starter, but the odds are against him.  That doesn’t mean he can’t be a really useful piece moving forward, but a few good starts in September should be kept in their proper context.

Lead Image Credit: Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports

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.

Hearing Chris Sale price tag still high. “Maybe even higher” than in july. Still, there’s hope for a winter meeting auction

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) November 25, 2016

Well, posturing. Posturing is a really good explanation. The next leaked rumor of the White Sox shopping someone that isn’t married to reports of inflated asking prices will be a sign of some changing of the guard. Maybe a truly universally reviled player will just get rushed out for the first deal available, but Chris Sale called Kenny Williams a liar in public and ruined a team promotion and is still getting talked up as being worth a stable of unicorns in return.

One read, my read, and possibly a wrong read, is that last deadline’s shopping of Sale was more of a toeing of the waters, and this Winter is seeing more of a legit attempt to maximize a trade return to kickstart a rebuild.

But then again, Sale is the hardest piece on the roster for which to find fair value in trade. He will still pull a king’s ransom next Winter, even with a down year, and probably will still pull a nigh-unprecedented haul in July. He is the rare Sox asset with no nearing expiration date for a trade. So it is very interesting to see Sale’s name floated in rumors and no one else’s, not even, say, Jose Abreu.

Abreu will be 30 in January, is a massive slugger not renowned for top tier bat speed nor athleticism, and would be tagged as likely for a steep decline even if he wasn’t already on a two-year slide. The Sox have likely already blown through their window to win with him as a core piece, especially if they are about to step back from competing for two-to-four years. Maybe it’s a lot easier to sell two-and-a-half years of Abreu after a red hot first half, rather than three years of a possibly curdling Abreu in a free agent market that actually might be flush with first baseman if it’s flush with anything at all.

But that’s just one example of several secondary pieces whose quiet market is curious if the Sox are trying to make a legit rebuild effort, and perhaps lends credence to the notion that shopping Sale is a litmus test for rebuilding at all, and this front office is every bit as split on the merits of a fire sale as they make themselves out to be publicly. Or Sale is such a powerful piece that he was naturally going to dominate discussion no matter what, and is actually the only chip big enough to break through the White Sox typical firewall against leaks and rumors.

The CBA drama also has a staggering effect on everything, and the last time the White Sox pulled a major trade before having a chance to hash it out at the Winter Meetings was when they roped in Mark Teahen in early November of 2009. The year before, they traded Nick Swisher to the Yankees in mid-November 2008, so perhaps patience is just fine.

Until then, the Sox will just remain an unknowable franchise at a crossroads with no public concept of how next season, nor the next five seasons will look. Marketing has to be loving this.

Until Tuesday…

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