Whenever Major League Baseball regulates spending of any sort, it almost always serves to benefit the White Sox. The Luis Robert Jr. signing back in 2017 -- $26 million, or $52 million when including the 100 percent penalty for blowing out their budget -- is the only expenditure I can think of that is no longer available to them, and that wasn't likely to be a regular occurrence.
So when Eno Sarris reports that Major League Baseball is regulating the kind of technology and data teams can use in the minors, you're free to assume the White Sox won't be adversely affected.
Beginning next season, MLB will regulate the in-game technology available for use across all minor-league parks, multiple league and team sources told The Athletic. The move is designed to bring parity and quell what until now has been an unchecked arms race. [...]
The league will now approve in-game data and technology vendors, a change that for many teams could mean access to new information at the minor-league level. But for clubs that have already made significant investments in technology they’ve come to rely on, the rule change could result in the removal of that same technology from their stadiums if it is not approved by the league.
On its face, this seems like the kind of measure that has benefited a retrograde operation like the White Sox, similar to hard draft slots and hard-capped international budgets. Both of those served to bring the league down to the White Sox's level of investment, even though market size didn't determine which teams ponied up. Sure, deep-pocketed teams had the resources to spend without worrying about the bottom line, but small-market teams also benefited, because the gains from making the right draft pick or international signing far exceeded the down payment (the Pirates set the record for draft spending before the pools were implemented).
With regards to tech, perhaps the Sox weren't league-leading laggards, but their past few years have been dedicated to playing catch-up, and portions of those efforts might now become standardized. While they paid plenty of lip service to the technology they'd adopted, and Chris Getz made efforts to modernize the minor league information apparatus that failed to impress college players during his time as farm director, the organization reportedly struggled to mine the information that came from it. Now GM, Getz's emphasis on infrastructure may have lost its charm somewhere between the losingest season in modern MLB history and a third consecutive 100-loss campaign, but there's a reason why he feels it's important to tout, with the latest development being the arrival of Hawk-Eye in Winston-Salem at the end of the 2025 season.
The particular usefulness of that step looks to be short-lived now, because if Hawk-Eye is approved as a league partner, MLB will implement systems at every affiliate (and it would complete the set with Kannapolis). Still, the Sox's grander efforts may yet pay off, because while teams will be getting the same data, the league isn't providing any assistance in parsing it. At least not yet.
Between Sarris' article and J.J. Cooper's eight takeaways at Baseball America, the White Sox aren't otherwise exposed to the drawbacks. They probably don't have to worry about massive technological investments being outlawed because the league doesn't approve them, and they haven't relied on innovation for edges. Just like the draft pools or the contraction of the minor leagues, MLB continues to reduces incentive for imagination and punish teams that have invested while rewarding the teams that haven't given damns, and it's one of the few ways the White Sox have historically won consistently.
There are a couple of counterpoints I find compelling, however. Cooper referenced concerns over teams striking exclusivity deals, and those typically don't result in a healthy marketplace. And speaking of the draft, Driveline founder and Red Sox advisor Kyle Boddy had a perspective on it I found surprising, at least for somebody who built his brand by championing technology that the wider league either didn't know about or was slow to embrace. It's a lengthy response over the course of multiple tweets, but the theme I found most convincing was the idea that this decision empowers players, most of whom have no say in where they end up:
What is fair is that we should standardize some form of technology, make the raw information available to all (including the players), and let the market work itself out. There is no issue with an organization being smarter with the data they are given and winning more as a result. That is competition and it is what we want. But the player drafted in the late rounds who cannot access his advanced information because it simply doesn't exist doesn't deserve to be punished because his organization is negligent. It should at least be possible the player can get access to his advanced data and analyze it himself, ask a local university to help, or send to a third party coach/training service to use in their training of the player if the organization itself is negligent regarding analysis of the data.
I'm not sympathetic to the idea of leveling the playing field between teams when some of them haven't bothered trying, but my sense is there's more good than harm in leveling the playing field between players, who could soon be less reliant in coming from the right program or having the right agency to solve problems their organization fails to address. Hardcore baseball capitalists would call this an argument for abolishing the draft altogether, but as long as there are limits on minor league affiliates and organizational roster sizes, there's some logical consistency in regulating the available information.
