There are numerous signs the White Sox front office is in a healthier place in 2026, starting with comparing their record against the preseason projections. If they go 8-34 the rest of the way, they'll beat PECOTA; 10-32 zaps ZiPS. Lest the White Sox develop the urge to see how close they can come to buzzing the crowd at the Air & Water Show, this should not be read as a challenge.
But an equally significant indicator of their progress could take place after the season, when we find out how many – if any – White Sox employees are poached by other teams.
While expressing satisfaction about the offensive player-development engine he and the White Sox have built, hitting director Ryan Fuller expressed awareness on these pages that all the pieces may not stay in place for long. As a great baseball writer summed it up:
With the offense full of developmental success stories, the White Sox might have to anticipate a problem arriving this winter that they haven't dealt with much in the past few years -- a brain drain when other teams hire away minor league hitting coaches and assistants to bigger titles elsewhere. Fuller is generally in favor of his colleagues having success and getting good career opportunities, but also says it's why he has to treat minor league hitting coaches like a second farm system he's trying to develop.
Brain drain is ultimately a great outcome, even if it immediately results in a void. It means the organization identified talent worth hiring, and that talent developed – and/or were part of enviable processes – that made them worth promoting further. Turnover can be painful, but it also generates circulation, which is healthy. The White Sox didn't have to deal with poaching under the previous administration, and while they branded it as continuity, it led to stagnation, which bred mold and decay.
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That's the attitude we're taking as we confront brain drain at Sox Machine, because as James Fegan announced Thursday night, he'll be taking over the White Sox beat at the Chicago Sun-Times next week.
Anybody who read his work at The Athletic knows it didn't take a brain to hire James here at Sox Machine, because it never should've been possible in the first place. Anybody who knows the business of journalism knows it doesn't take much thought to take a beat writer job at a major metro newspaper and let other entire departments worry about the cost of decent lodging and flights at convenient times.
When James came aboard in February 2024, the pipe dream was that the model would generate enough revenue to sustain this experiment indefinitely. Josh and I also courted a very real risk that James would receive one of these no-brainer offers from an established media entity two months in, and we'd have rearranged our entire structure without fulfilling any of the promises or potential.
The way it actually played out – nearly three full baseball seasons of the pain-crafted, handstaking, in-person White Sox coverage at the major and minor league levels through our specific individual prisms – feels like an 80th-percentile outcome. The Sox could've made it easier by not nuking fan interest over the first two seasons by losing 223 games, but we also had our own obstacles to overcome. We hit our heads against the user-experience ceiling with a Patreon-paywalled website, and made the decision to shift content-management, payment and advertising platforms, and those transitions took time and money.
All the while, though, the production of the actual written, podcast and now video work directly for an audience – a community – that let us take our coverage wherever we wanted it to go remained a joy and privilege. Ditch the past tense – it remains a joy and privilege for me and Josh; James may soon find himself scratching the phantom limb of unlimited word counts.
Though we'll all miss the direct line to James and the creative, extensive, detailed work his inquisitiveness produced here, it truly is better to have loved and lost. We're in a better position than we were three years ago, and on all fronts. Technologically, the site is on sounder ground, and able to serve more readers and listeners with fewer headaches. After years of daily discussions and collaborations with James, we're a lot smarter about covering baseball than we were. Also, unlike the last time James’ work could no longer be found at the place he spent years doing it, we'll still be able to read him at the Sun-Times, and we look forward to relaying and riffing on his reporting like old times.
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We're also in a better position as an entire community, which I might not have been able to articulate until a couple of articles crossed my feed as James was winding it down. One was from Bloomberg consumerism reporter Amanda Mull, who used the prochronistic sight of Travis Scott's veneers in Odyssey as a way to launch into an article about a growing backlash against optimization, and the way supposed ideal aesthetic choices end up looking and feeling the same.
While you can argue that overplumped lips and Dyson Airwrapped hair extensions were always tacky, they at least used to mark a person as someone who could splash some cash. Now a lot of this stuff just makes you look like a Love Island contestant or a Mar-a-Lago member. This look also happens to be popular with AI image generators—not that surprising when you remember it’s optimized to be photographed and displayed on the internet, which means it’s likely overrepresented in the training data that generative AI models hoover up. Part of the ongoing backlash to AI means finding novel ways to distinguish yourself as human, whether that’s purposely leaving a couple of typos in your emails or preserving the humanity of your face.
Then there was a paper published in the Journal of Quantitative Description detailing shifts in U.S. social media use, with the big takeaway being that people are posting less, and the people who are posting are doing it worse:
In a nutshell, the ANES data shows:📉 Social media use is shrinking; engagement collapsing💥 Twitter/X posting has moved ~70 POINTS to the right🧩 Platforms are splintering🔊 Fewer people are talking — but those still talking are more politically extreme
— Petter Törnberg (@pettertornberg.com) 2026-04-22T06:13:15.954Z
That isn't the case here. The community has grown, the comment counts have swelled into ridiculous territory at times, and yet the conversation always remains respectful. OK, almost always. But you can look at those flare-ups and accept that human thoughts and emotions are behind them, and you can look at their few-and-far-between nature and take an enormous amount of pride in the respect that everybody has for the 20-year-long rolling conversation upon which Sox Machine is based, and the membership that keeps it going.
We hope we showed you why it's worth subscribing to Sox Machine, and intend to continue making it worth your while. Had you not supported us before 2024, we would've never been in a position to make James any kind of salient offer, and maybe he'd be working some six-figure corporate communications job that leaves him dead on the inside. That seems unlikely, given his insatiable curiosity about White Sox and the sport of baseball at large, the products of which you read on a daily basis here. Nevertheless, we all sidestepped a doomsday scenario where he no longer published his insights about the White Sox, and we'll take a brief victory lap for whatever part we had in it.
Regarding the future, we have no immediate plans to replace James. We'll explore ways to maintain a presence at the ballpark for the remainder of the pennant race and October if necessary in order to see this most unexpected of seasons all the way through, but in terms of the overall mission of Sox Machine, all choices will remain considered ones. We've never added for the sake of adding, because more isn't always more. It has to be the right kind of more, and whenever we encounter the next opportunity for the right kind of more, we promise we will pursue it to the best of our ability, and to the breaking point of our budget. Nobody is getting rich doing this, but man, it is ever rewarding.
