Josh, James and I are all flying to Dallas for the winter meetings today, and reflecting the bad blood and animosity surging among the Sox Machine staff, we'll be on three different flights.
Last winter, Josh and I hung around the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville for a few days, and while we only came away with the Erick Fedde signing to cover, it was an enviable amount of activity compared to the rest of the league.
This time around, it's not safe to touch the hot stove. Pitchers have been coming off the board at a steady clip, and now the position players not named Juan Soto are starting to join them, highlighted by Willy Adames setting a San Francisco record with a reported seven-year, $182 million deal, and Tyler O'Neil going to Baltimore for three years and $49.5 million.
Whether this foreshadows equally momentous White Sox developments remains to be seen, but we'll tell you what we're seeing and hearing around the Hilton this week. While we're in transit, enjoy this P.O. Sox mailbag, and Patreon supporters should stay tuned for an open Winter Meetings mailbag for us to cover on our podcasts from Dallas.
Will Crochet be dealt at the winter meetings? If so, who do you think lands him?
-- KEVIN P.
James: I don’t know, and I don’t know. This is the sort of insight you have to pay for, folks. There were a lot of active talks going on this past week–multiple three-team scenarios rising as possibilities and then stalling–so you could convince yourself it’s building toward a climax next week. At the same time, the Dylan Cease trade talks had similar points of tension in the winter before dragging out to the spring. Maybe you can’t still hear Rick Hahn’s voice saying “there’s no reward for getting things done during these three days” but I can. The existence of three-team talks make me feel like sizing up who is the perfect partner is folly. There is no perfect partner, and the White Sox seem to already be accounting for that.
Jim: Yeah, I was on the wrong end of the will-they-won’t-they wager the last time, so this time I’ll say he doesn’t get traded, with the hopes that it gives us something to do in Dallas. I'll stick with Boston as the most logical landing spot because I lack creativity.
Assume a scenario where the White Sox build a decent core with 3 to 5 hitters in the 1-3 fWAR spectrum. They lack star power. In your opinion, will they 1) Sign an impactful hitter (like Soto) or 2) Spread around payroll room with various 10 to 15 million players like (think of players like David Peralta or Gleyber Torres). Which route do you think it is more effective?
-- AS CIRENSICA
Jim: Jerry Reinsdorf chose the latter path in both rebuilds, and I’ve already been fooled twice. The first time, I thought the White Sox were choosing smaller bets like Adam LaRoche because it’d give them an ability to spend past them if it didn’t work, which absolutely wasn’t the case. The second time, I thought they had amassed enough talent to make one huge addition worth it, but instead Kenny Williams just threatened fans with not being able to retain guys like Yoán Moncada and Eloy Jiménez if the Sox forsook their prized financial flexibility. I’m guessing Chris Getz wouldn’t mash the “HUBRIS” button the way Kenny did, but he’ll have to workshop his own signature way of talking about why the Sox stayed out of that market.
James: It would take an ownership change or a change in mentality for me to ever predict them to land a free agent commanding the biggest contract ever. But if they become the organization they want to be, where they can find post-hype bats on the cheap and rehab them into productive role players, then all the more reason a single star is a better investment than mid-level declining veterans in multiple spots. They definitely should not give David Peralta $15 million this winter.
Over or under: Will Will Venable make more or less during his total tenure as White Sox manager (current contract/possible extension if they end up ever being "good" lol) than the $14,537,000 he earned during his playing career?
-- JORDAN
James: I will say under because I simply don’t know enough about his operation to confidently project him getting multiple contracts. He’s taking over the worst team ever. The shelf life for those sorts of managers aren’t great, and it’s more than many qualified candidates could overcome. The more cynical red meat for our readership is to say that if Venable is really that good, the Sox are in a position where teams with more prestige will feel like they can pry him away, and I doubt current ownership is trying to get into the manager salary arms race.
Jim: Let’s math it out. If you believe Bob Nightengale’s reporting – the only source for getting anything resembling precise terms of employment for a White Sox manager – the spectrum for an annual salary is $1 million (Pedro Grifol) to $4 million (Tony La Russa). We also know that Ozzie Guillen said that $2 million wasn’t enough to live on. Let’s say Venable earns a little bit more than Grifol -- I dunno, $1.2 million -- partially because there was a little more documented interest in his services, and partially because the Sox are saving money on retaining most of their old coaches. If he signed the customary three-year deal, that puts him at $3.6 million guaranteed to start. If he gets extended, let’s put him at $2 million per for three more years. You’re now at $9.6 million for six years. Then he’d need another two years at $2.5 million to hit the over.
Guillen and La Russa are the last two managers to last eight years, and Guillen would have been fired earlier if he didn’t have a direct connection to Reinsdorf. The under is the safe bet. Invoking a fourth managerial precedent, if the Rick Renteria experience taught us anything, the frustration of so much losing early is hard to keep in check.
Any ideas on how to balance out the war between pitchers and hitters? Pitchers are so far ahead now that it has, to me, made baseball a worse game to watch and think about.
-- ROB
James: Paul Konerko likes to use the phrase ‘the game is always right,’ when processing changes to the sport that he doesn’t quite understand at first blush. This is mass market entertainment in hypercapitalistic society, so the league is constantly going to be tweaking things to inspire growth, because everyone sitting around collecting a profit doesn’t seem to satisfy anyone in American business anymore. But in terms of a game that has existed in professional form for over a hundred years and shown the capacity to evolve time and time again, I do wish we could all lend it a bit more trust. It evolves in cycles more gradual than the small multi-year trends that we point and gawk at.
Jim: The only proposed solution that makes sustained sense is moving the mound back to restore reaction times what it was before the velocity boom. It doesn’t affect the symmetry of the game any, and the mound was adjusted a few times before baseball settled on the ideal balance. However, they tried moving back the mound a foot in the Atlantic League a couple years ago and nothing came of it, so perhaps any gain from extra time is offset by pitches having more time to move.
Are there any trends or useful historical references that suggest Winter Meetings trades are more or less likely to move franchise-altering prospects than other trade timings? I could see it going either way. Maybe optimism is at its highest now and GMs view the contention window as more open so they get more risky. Or maybe you have to wait for desperation to take hold during the season for GMs trying to save themselves. Any recent winter meeting deals that might look like good (or bad) frameworks?
-- STEVEN V.
Jim: The most recent point of reference is Baseball America noting that no top 100 prospects changed teams at the most recent trade deadline, and there were only three the year before that. While it makes some sense to think that teams might prefer to shoot their shot once they have a better idea of what it’ll get them into October, it seems like the prevailing notion is trading before the season, simply because more games equals more value.
Silly question for James, but what is the atmosphere like inside some of the White Sox clubhouses you’ve been around? Are the players friends? Does it seem like a place that people enjoy being around? I’m thinking of this in the context of baseball being a job and how much easier it is to do your job when folks like their workplace.
-- STEPHEN M.
James: If the 2024 Sox were any good at all, there might have been some cutesy stories about Erick Fedde getting the whole pitching staff addicted to Clash of Clans, or Gavin Sheets and Chris Flexen dueling for supremacy on the ping pong table. But with the way the season was going, most of the response would have been that Grady Sizemore should have sliced the ping pong table in half with a katana on his first day. My general sense is they understood things were going to be difficult going into the year and wound up being bonded by feeling like they were in a foxhole together all season.
Takes on the clubhouse tend to be preposterously subjective, and I try to just focus on concrete: Garrett Crochet being the leader of the pitching staff because you can loudly hear him doing it when you walk in. All of the players speaking on the record to disagree with Grifol after the F’n flat game and no one speaking against it when he got fired. Sheets being a leader because you can see him reminding guys of meeting times and speaking for the team at moments (Grifol firing, loss 121) no one in their right mind would want to.
The returns from Getz’s trades have been underwhelming at best. What does a minimum acceptable return for Crochet look like and do you think Getz can attain that?
-- ANDREW S.
Jim: This question was asked before my post about Baseball America’s attempt at listing the top 10 White Sox prospects for 2025, and I think that provided my answer – at least one position player prospect who you feel good about inserting into any projected White Sox lineup for 2028, because the internal lineup is so lacking. I think it’s within Getz’s power to attain that, especially if the money flying around the free-agent market shows teams indicates a “win now” appetite that extends to trades, but it’d be cool to have some proof that he can land a truly enviable position player.
What is the realistic projection for this team to return to respectability? And what do they see as respectability? The Jerry goal of finishing just out of the playoffs so the fans are left wanting more?
-- PETE H.
James: Until you have a clearer idea of their stadium, TV and revenue future, since the organization is clearly signaling discomfort with spending at their current level, I don’t think you can realistically talk about this team taking down the Dodgers as some sort of bar for success. Just feels fantastical. Especially given how the first year went, and the lack of such titles in the franchise history, winning a division probably has this front office walking with their chests puffed out for a good while. Constantly talking about the AL Central being winnable right before three of their teams made the playoffs and they had the worst season imaginable is pretty funny. But unless you regard Detroit as a sleeping giant or see the Royals becoming a money machine with a downtown stadium, there’s not a franchise in the division that is able to wipe anyone off the map in terms of spending or infrastructure. They’re just better run than the White Sox have been, which is theoretically within the Sox’ power to fix.
I don’t know, 2027? The positional core of the next good Sox team is largely not even in the majors yet, let alone hitting their stride, coming together as a team. Your presumed starting catcher of that team will be 24 years old on opening day 2027.
When do we find out the identity of the PTBNL in the Fedde trade? Does Getz have any leverage in who he asks for because of the fantastic performances of Kopech and Edman in the Dodgers' late season/World Series run?
-- BOBSQUAD
James: Seeing as it could just be cash, possibly never. I would imagine there are agreed upon parameters beforehand. The Rays didn’t get to completely back out of sending someone for Jesse Crain, even though he never threw another major league pitch after the Sox dealt him.
Jim: Someones. Ben Kline and Sean Bierman, to answer the implied trivia question.
Any cool anecdotes about Bill Melton?
-- SNACKYOASIS
Jim: Unfortunately, no, aside from hearing him on a hot mic for 10 minutes during a spring training webcast, which some here may remember. But covering the White Sox from a distance basically makes “no” the answer to everybody associated with the team. Chuck Garfien’s podcast episode about Melton won’t be topped here.
That said, I’m glad that Melton was good on TV, and that the White Sox were able to keep him relevant to the successive generations of fans that hadn’t seen him play. One of the things I like about covering the White Sox is the way the team’s history is a sort-of secret language because so few general baseball fans can speak it. That’s probably true of every team to some extent, but everybody who learns that the White Sox didn’t have a 30-homer guy until Melton in 1970 is startled by the fact.
Thanks to his pregame and postgame visibility, Melton could define himself as more than a couple of big seasons on a Baseball-Reference.com page. He helped drag the Sox into the modern era after decades of being unable to crack the code on the field, and he stayed modern – or modern enough – into his 60s and 70s with his plainspoken TV work. I suppose that’s another advantage of being paid to talk about the White Sox: Whether the person grappling the White Sox is a former player from days of yore or a 22-year-old analytics grad, the correct takeaway is usually, “I have no idea what they’re doing,” and the difference is how many words you use to say it.
