It didn't take Chris Getz long to apply the savings from the Luis Robert Jr. trade.
Three days after freeing up $18 million from the White Sox's 2026 payroll, Getz applied more than half of it in the form of a two-year, $20 million contract to right-handed reliever Seranthony Domínguez, who will give the White Sox the experienced high-leverage arm they've lacked.
Domínguez, who turned 31 in November, is coming off his most accomplished season to date. He posted a 3.16 ERA while setting a career high with 62⅔ innings and 67 games with the Orioles and Blue Jays, who acquired him from Baltimore at the deadline. He then pitched 12 more games and 11⅓ innings over Toronto's three postseason series, including appearances in five of seven World Series games.
Domínguez also set a career high with 79 strikeouts, although it corresponded with new highs in wildness, be it walks (36), walk rate (13.8 percent) or wild pitches (a league-leading 12).
He leads with a fastball that sits 97-98 mph, most of them four-seamers, but the occasional two-seamer mixed in. He'll throw a sweeper against righties, while a splitter he introduced in 2025 is his primary secondary pitch against lefties. It didn't necessarily help him avoid drastic splits ...
- vs. RHB: .132/.269/.182 over 145 PA
- vs. LHB: .277/.371/.446 over 116 pA
... but a look at his Statcast data says he was right to lean on the splitter, because his fastball was the more vulnerable pitch. His Baseball Savant page has a lot of red, but these imperfections are why Domínguez didn't command a bigger commitment.
Domínguez does have closing experience, saving 40 games over his seven big-league seasons. He's never been a team's closer start to finish, but he's fared decently as a stopgap option in multiple seasons. Most recently, he took over as Baltimore's closer when the Orioles abandoned Craig Kimbrel in 2024, and recorded 11 saves in 12 chances over the final two months. He then yielded the title back to Félix Bautista in 2025.
He may or may not be the wire-to-wire closer for the 2026 White Sox, as Jordan Leasure and Grant Taylor emerged as credible candidates at the end of bumpy seasons, but Domínguez will give Will Venable a seasoned option from the jump. Venable could've used one last season, as the White Sox finished with nearly equal amounts of saves (25) and blown saves (24), good for the league's most pitiful percentage. That stat can be a little misleading because not all save situations are in the ninth inning, but even when you account for how they fared leverage situations overall, the White Sox bullpen performed the worst in just about every win probability metric.
The number of late-inning failures made the White Sox's record worse than it looked. They finished 60-102, but their run differential was befitting of a 71-91 mark per their Pythagorean record, and 67-95 according to BaseRuns. With the unfinished look of their outfield depth chart, the White Sox still might have a problem producing leads for high-leverage relievers to hold, but this is their attempt to be a little better equipped to preserve the margins that survive.
