It was long clear that the White Sox would find a suitable buyer at last July's deadline for Paul DeJong, if for no other reason than the Cardinals had been able to trade him the year before while he was having a worse season.
Left-handed starting pitching is an even more durable trade asset than middle infield depth, so as a source confirms Robert Murray's reporting that the White Sox are adding veteran Martín Pérez on a one-year deal -- that José Rivera relayed is for $5 million -- the manner in which this short-term addition of innings-eating will later serve their long-term goals comes into a similar view.
Just last year a similarly rebuilding Pirates team saw Pérez rack up a 5.20 ERA in 83 innings, but still flipped him to a needy contender in San Diego, where a late-season 10-start finishing kick produced the kind of results that will probably make the 33-year-old the most expensive signing of the White Sox's quite active, but undeniably very humble, offseason.
Pérez's deal has yet to be announced, and when he and Josh Rojas officially become members of the White Sox, two members of the motley crew that is the team's 40-man roster will need to be purged to make room. If Rojas' deal hadn't already blasted out of the $2 million average annual value stratosphere within which the prior White Sox free agent signings had been contained, Pérez's 3.46 ERA in 52 innings with the Padres more than did the trick, though Jon Heyman's description of the agreement points to $1.5 million of the commitment being effectively deferred via a buyout of the 2026 mutual option.
While he doesn't turn 34 until April, Pérez is entering his 14th season major league in 2025, and his prospect journey dates back long enough to where you could recall his inscrutable prospect progression being debated on old episodes of the "Up and In" podcast, before both hosts joined front offices. Pinning Pérez down has grown no simpler with time, but over the course of 1,500 career major league innings, most prevailing theories have been explored at some point.
Pérez has tried to jump aboard the riding four-seam revolution at times, had multiple years where his cutter has taken over as his primary pitch, and since we're in the era of approach angles steering the usage ship, has once more been leaning on his sinker out of his consistently high three-quarters arm slot.
The 135 innings Pérez pitched in 2024 was the sixth time he's shouldered that level of workload in the majors, which is six more times than any incumbent member of the White Sox rotation has managed. The trade-off for such a track record of making things work is that Pérez's Baseball Savant page is a sea of blue regarding his ability to miss bats or control contact, and your traditional run estimators like FIP or xERA were not converted into believers by his 10 starts with San Diego. But those outings also witnessed Pérez posting the best in-zone whiff rates of his contact-heavy career, and the metric grades for his sinker and cutter down the stretch suggest that he was armed with a useful tweak.
Banking on Pérez to strike out 20 percent of opposing hitters has never been good business, so he won't address the White Sox's teamwide lack of whiffs in front of a potentially vulnerable defense. His best campaigns have seen his groundball rate peak back over 50 percent, and inglorious soft contact artists have frequently been the buy-low targets of White Sox pitching under Brian Bannister's guidance, so Pérez fits this franchise era better than he may specifically fit the confines of Rate Field.
Like the Cardinals with DeJong in 2023, the Pirates got a fairly sketchy relief prospect in exchange for Pérez. As it turns out, just like Pérez, young Ronaldys Jimenez also pitched a lot better in the Padres organization in 2024. Ob the other hand, a DeJong who was on the verge of clearing 20 home runs for the first time in five years was enough for the Royals to offer up an interesting relief prospect in Jarold Rosado, who struck out 23 hitters and walked just four in 16 1/3 innings with the Winston-Salem Dash down the stretch. The value gap between the White Sox returning Pérez to his peripheral-defying 2022 All-Star form, or merely replicating Chris Flexen's production by deadline time, figures to only be larger.
With Pérez and Bryse Wilson in tow, the White Sox are no longer obligated to reward the promise of Jonathan Cannon, Davis Martin, Drew Thorpe and Sean Burke with guaranteed spots in the rotation on Opening Day, or are more simply guarded against any of them -- especially given their health histories -- falling behind schedule at any point in Arizona. Just like Pérez himself, the White Sox rotation can't be confidently predicted to be good now, but seems a lot more likely to function well enough to complete its assigned work.
