Sporcle Saturday: The money will be spent?

Sep 2, 2022; St. Petersburg, Florida, USA; New York Yankees left fielder Andrew Benintendi (18) makes a leaping catch against the Tampa Bay Rays in the first inning at Tropicana Field. Mandatory Credit: Nathan Ray Seebeck-USA TODAY Sports
(Photo by Nathan Ray Seebeck-USA TODAY Sports)

Good morning!

First and foremost: to those who celebrate, a very merry Christmas to you all. To those who do not, I wish you a restful and relaxing weekend with hopefully some additional time off between now and the New Year.

Yes, it’s that time of year again, where we review the largest free agent signings in franchise history. This year, the White Sox have added two to the free agency Sporcle! Unfortunately, we’re still all waiting around for the first $100 million-plus signing, so I guess $75 million will have to do.

At any rate, I chose not to eliminate any names from this Sporcle, so there are now forty names for you to guess. The short version of it is: which free agents have signed with the team for at least a one year, $5 million figure? How many can you name? Good luck!

Quiz Parameters

  • I’ve allotted 10 minutes for completion attempts.
  • For hints, I’ve provided the date of the signing (usually when it was reported, not the day it became official; with the Correa/Giants debacle, I guess I shouldn’t assume anything!) and the contract details.

Useless information to amaze, annoy, confuse, and/or confound your friends and family:

  • 11 of the 40 signings on this list are relief pitchers.
  • Just five have been starting pitchers and just two of those have been for more than one year (if you don’t count things like options).

Direct link here

Data from a combination of Baseball ReferenceMLB Trade Rumors Transaction Tracker, the New York Times archive, and Newspaperarchive.com

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asinwreck

35/40 before I ran out of time. May the ghost of Eddie Einhorn haunt Jerry Reinsdorf tonight and scare him into competing for free agent talent the way they did when Carlton Fisk and Floyd Bannister were the marquee players on the market. (As with last year, I am only a little relieved that those names are not still on this quiz four decades later.)

28/40 before the clock ran out. Great quiz; depressing list.

ForsterFTOG

Gave up 3:00 in due to disgust at the content.
7th biggest free agent contract 26 years ago…

Foulkelore

I’m not sure what’s more sad: that the one free agent signing this year is the most they ever spent, or that the other, modest free agent signing makes the top 25.

Foulkelore

Also, 30/40 before running out of time. This was a fun one with just the dates and contracts listed. I probably would have gotten a few more with a few more minutes. I forgot an all time bad one in

Spoiler
Kelvin Herrera
, who somehow has the 17th highest free agency contract with his 2 year/$18 million deal.

Last edited 1 year ago by Foulkelore
a-t

Yeesh.

roke1960

31/40. Should have had them all, just forgot a whole bunch of relievers. What a sorry list that is for a big-market team. But I’m sure Jerry is proud of his lack of big contracts.

jhomeslice

I think Josh Harrison got a 5.5M contract last year as well.

Just eyeballing, it looks like a little less than a billion dollars spent. Nowadays 1 big 300M contract (maybe like they were supposed to spend on Machado?) amounts to like 1/3 of what the Sox have spent on free agents in their history. What a sorry ass ownership.

Queso

The Mets have committed more $ to free agents this offseason than the top 20 White Sox contracts combined.

Trooper Galactus

$1.5 million of that was a buyout, so I can understand why you missed it.

GrinnellSteve

What a pathetic list.

roke1960

31/40. Should have had them all, but I forgot several of the relievers. What a sorry list that is. But Jerry must be proud of the lack of big contracts.

Joe

Well, that was a depressing Christmas present. Really is sad to see how little Jerry has done to truly compete. It will take him moving on, ala Bill Wirtz, for the Sox to move on to bigger and better things.

Trooper Galactus

Leury Garcia being on this list is pathetic.

Leury Garcia being in the TOP HALF of this list is a fucking travesty.

upnorthsox

Lots of weird/shit in this list.
There are as many utility MI, 2 (Garcia and Keppinger) as there are starting MI (Valentin and Iguchi).
There are no 3B.
The largest contingent is RP with 14.
7 of the contracts are for the Sox own FA.
3 of the contracts are for players who had never played in the majors.
Out of 113 contract years in the list there are 0 GG won.
Clevinger is just the 3rd SP on the list and makes a total of 8 contract yrs out of a list of 113 contract years.
Jaime Navarro went 25-43 with a 6.06 ERA and Dallas Keuchel went a surprising 17-16 with a 4.79 ERA. Neither finished the last yr of their contract with the Sox.
Meanwhile, Roger Clemens who could have been signed in 1996 for $4 mil more than Navarro went 41-13 with a 2.33 ERA and 2 CYA and Zack Wheeler who could’ve been signed in 2020 went 30-19 with a 2.82 ERA.
27 contract years go to 7 1B/DH types.
22 of the contracts, or half, were signed by Hahn as GM. Why does JR keep him around again?
On a positive note, 18 of these contracts were on a playoff roster for the Sox and another 4 are still active so can still make a playoff roster.

Augusto Barojas

This ownership is a joke. Just the worst. This list is why I cannot take seriously the idea that the Sox are in the midst of teams that have an actual chance at a World Series. Their upside is winning the Central, after which they would be a huge underdog in every series if not every game they played. Can you imagine the Sox playing the Jays, who mash against right handed pitching (with the Sox starters being all right handed), as well as will throw a RHP starter against the Sox in every game?

Which is why I hope they make trades with an eye toward 2024/25 when they will have the payroll space to hopefully spend more wisely on players better than most on this list.

Burke

Didn’t do well, because most of the players on the list were pretty unimpressive and forgettable, if not just bad. Jaime Navarro? I intentionally forgot that name!

Mark

Did we really pay Zach Duke anything to join our team?

SupportSoxFamily

Besides 10 minutes of our lives we’ll never get back, out of the 40, I think I would sign at most 5 knowing now how they played out. I actually stopped entering names because the site was accepting my entries. I was trying to think of the worst through the years (Holland, Duke, Dotel, Navarro, Keuchel, etc.), not necessarily the highest paid……

The results would be impossible to achieve by accident. We achieved it by supposedly using a thought process. My therapist says I should be drinking and doing drugs more if I continue to care about a good outcome.