Late last season and into the first months of the offseason, there was a tension between how much Chris Getz appreciated Mike Tauchman's contributions to the 2025 White Sox, and how little he was willing to say about Tauchman's future with the team. The White Sox could have maintained team control of the outfielder at a seemingly reasonable rate in his final year of arbitration eligibility, and Tauchman was a pro at producing around a series of leg issues that culminated in meniscus surgery in September. But his visible discomfort at age 34 made it harder to buy into his age-35 season, even if for only a few million dollars.
The White Sox ended up non-tendering Tauchman, and that read has been reinforced since. He had to settle for a minor league deal with the Mets, and although he'd put himself on track to break camp with the team as a fourth outfielder, his legs are still undermining his bat.
Tauchman departed Saturday's Grapefruit League game and underwent an MRI on his left knee, and the video wouldn't have looked out of place on a 2024 White Sox lowlight reel.
Mike Tauchman attempted to run out to right field to assume his position but came up limping
— SNY Mets (@SNY_Mets) March 21, 2026
He has exited the game pic.twitter.com/gAZrdqFjvQ
But the longer MLB.com video summing up his plight captured the familiar sequence of his legs suffering from Tauchman Burner Overdrive. He didn't look great sprinting out of the box to first base in the third inning, and his knee looked less than stable when he tried tracking a fly ball to the warning track in right in the fourth. His subsequent arduous jog back to the dugout foreshadowed what it would look like when he tried returning to his position.
It wouldn't surprise me if Tauchman still had the offensive skills to replicate last year's numbers with New York, but being on a minor league deal gives him far shakier starting ground this time around. Meanwhile, his 2025 platoon partner Austin Slater was granted his release from the Tigers despite a respectable spring performance, so it isn't going great for either half of the White Sox's surprisingly productive Plan A from last year.
Spare Parts
Peyton Pallette gave the Guardians no reason to consider returning him to the White Sox this spring, as the Rule 5 pick will break camp with Cleveland after throwing six scoreless innings, striking out 11 against three hits and three walks. His fastball is averaging 97 mph, which seems like it might be the kind of early velocity boost Shane Smith described from being somebody who had to prove his worth in every Cactus League appearance.
In the last old friend update, Cristian Mena leads this post covering one prospect for each organization who has to revive his development arc. Granted, he leads it because the orgs are listed alphabetically, but Jesús Cano covers why the other side of the Dominic Fletcher trade has failed to find traction, as each of his two seasons has ended due to a strain -- forearm in 2024, shoulder in 2025. (Ky Bush is the White Sox's selection for this exercise; I'd probably go with Jacob Gonzalez.)
In the latest episode of "Why is MLB Partnering With Entities That Shouldn't Be Allowed to Exist?", the league has struck a partnership deal with Polymarket. Prediction markets strike me as insider trading engines, and while the league tried to get out ahead of the controversy by noting an agreement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, 1) most corporate partnerships don't come with an assumption of criminal possibilities, and 2) as Craig Calcaterra noted, the CFTC doesn't have any enforcement attorneys. But this is the same league that put the logos of a now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange on its umpires. In both cases, it's a legally dubious industry trying to purchase legitimacy by paying for association with an American institution, and Rob Manfred is a pretty cheap date.
In a Spare Parts from late last June, you may remember the Washington Post running a story about how the Nationals were one of five teams without a Trajekt machine. A week later, Mike Rizzo was fired.
That story's writer, Spencer Nussbaum, was laid off as part of the Post's sports purge a month ago, was able to pick up where he left off with The Athletic. Under new GM Paul Toboni, the Nationals will now have Trajekts in Washington and Triple-A Rochester, among myriad seemingly overnight changes to help the Nats catch up.
In telling the story about how Dave Cameron went from being a blogger at USS Mariner to the team's senior director of player personnel, Shannon Drayer relays a story of Cameron helping pull the Rays into the three-team trade that netted Seattle Brendan Donovan because he talked to his former blogmate.
“Jeff Sullivan and I are still really good friends, we talk pretty regularly,” Cameron said with a laugh before acknowledging the Mariners and Cardinals seemed deadlocked trying to coming to an agreement on a Donovan trade. “I couldn’t exactly see the path forward. And I remember reaching out to Jeff and I was just like, you guys have to be Ben Williamson fans, right? Like, you built an entire team out of Ben Williamsons, of like these interesting, great defenders with good makeup who can play all over the field. This is what you guys do."
“And he’s like, yeah, of course we love Ben Williamson. But I’m like, OK, well, if you could have your boss call my boss and tell him you guys like Ben Williamson, that would be great. And so (Rays president of baseball operations Erik Neander) called (Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto) and was like, hey, we’ve heard you guys are struggling with St. Louis. Maybe we can help with Ben Williamson. And that I think helped grease the skids a little bit. So it was definitely Jerry and Erik and (Cardinals president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom) doing the deal. I did put the bug in Jeff’s ear like, hey, man, this is your kind of player. You should tell us that.”
