If the Major League Baseball season started tomorrow, it'd be yet another point in favor of those saying that Rob Manfred has no idea how to market the game.
Still, if emergency struck and the White Sox had to field a respectable team in a hurry, they could. It's Dec. 22, and whenever the Dallas Keuchel signing becomes official, the White Sox will have a credible five-man rotation that doesn't have to immediately involve Michael Kopech, a major improvement behind the plate, and a minor upgrade in right field.
I'm not yet certain how it fits as a team, as I don't think the team's sizable deficits with defense and strikeout-to-walk ratios can be understated, but at least there are real attempts at solving the most pressing issues. That's a departure from last offseason, when the Sox eyes were bigger than their stapled stomachs, resulting in patches with no vision.
Could they have come up with a better combo of solutions this time around? Probably. The Nomar Mazara trade seems a year too late, and it's on the record that the Sox didn't get their first choices with pitchers, as Bob Nightengale laid it out:
The Zack Wheeler pursuit is open to a wide range of interpretations as we assess the offseason. On one hand, it's clear that the White Sox settled to some degree for Keuchel, guaranteeing him three years and $55.5 million after Wheeler spurned their offer for five years and $125 million. The Sox's disparate interest levels -- at least expressed in terms of the dollars offered -- suggests a gap in expectations.
On the other hand, a winter after the Sox took the stance that only the top of market would do, they're back to making their team better with the best players available to them, which is how it used to be. Moreover, the divide between the Wheeler and Keuchel contracts makes a great argument that the Sox have far more to offer to future additions, and at least the Sox have the right guy to catch Keuchel's arsenal:
Keuchel avoids the heart of the strike zone at all costs. Only 18.3 percent of the pitches he threw last season, less than one in every five, were in the interior of the zone (meaning more than one baseball's width inside the strike zone). Just check out his pitch location heatmaps from 2019 with the Braves -- where he got to pitch to another elite framer, Tyler Flowers. [...]
Only two regular starting pitchers stayed out of the heart of the zone more often than Keuchel in 2019: Gio Gonzalez -- now Keuchel's teammate in Chicago -- and Zach Davies. Both Gonzalez and Davies were Brewers last season. Guess who was their catcher in Milwaukee?
If Grandal can help Keuchel continue to be greater than the sum of his parts thanks to elements that are harder to identify (command and pitcher defense among them), then the Sox might be able to get what they needed from this offseason -- a pitcher who's a comfortable No. 3 -- for less than they were prepared to spend, giving them resources to allocate toward another bat. All the Sox require from this signing is somebody who makes a Reynaldo López Leap a pleasant surprise, rather than a necessity. Pair it with the Gio Gonzalez signing, and these additions make Dylan Covey an afterthought, which absolutely had to happen in order for the White Sox to be taken seriously. It's only cost them money, and not all that much of it.
I wouldn't call the White Sox contenders yet -- not in such a top-heavy American League -- but they're a lot closer this week than they were last week.
If things don't break right? Well, it depends. One can draw similarities to the 2014-15 offseason in that the White Sox are hinging a lot of their improvement on mid-tier talent, but the only reason that disappointment looms so large is that the Sox lost the will to keep pushing. It was a two-to-three-winter job, and the Sox stopped after one.
Given all the runs the White Sox lost on the margins with rookie struggles, poor defense, plate discipline, issues against right-handed pitching and so forth, I imagine they're not counting on a magic bullet winter that strikes down all those threats. I'd like to think they're prepared to add, test the fits, recalibrate and add again.
