Kdkiebles Offseason Plan

PREAMBLE

The White Sox should be at the point where they are ready to infuse the young talent with vets to push them into contention. Let’s see if they actually do it.

ARBITRATION-ELIGIBLE PLAYERS

Write “tender” or “non-tender” after each player and their projected 2020 salaries. Feel free to offer explanation afterward if necessary.

  • Alex Colomé, $10.3M: tender
  • Yolmer Sánchez, $6.2M: non-tender
  • James McCann, $4.9M: tender
  • Carlos Rodon, $4.5M: tender
  • Leury García, $4M: tender
  • Evan Marshall, $1.3M: tender
  • Josh Osich, $1M: non-tender
  • Ryan Goins, $900K: non-tender

CLUB OPTIONS

Write “pick up” or “decline” after the option.

  • Welington Castillo: $8 million/$500,000 buyout – decline. please god decline.

OTHER IMPENDING FREE AGENTS

Try to retain, or let go?

  • Jose Abreu (made $16M in 2019): retain – 2 yrs 30mm. 3rd yr team option for 12mm making it a possible 3 for 42.
  • Iván Nova (made $9,166,167 in 2019): let go
  • Jon Jay (made $4M in 2019): let go
  • Hector Santiago (made $2M in 2019 on split contract): let go

FREE AGENTS

No. 1: JD Martinez: 3 year, 72mm deal + club option.

Year 1: 24 million

Year 2: 24 million

Year 3: 24 million

Year 4: 20 million team option or 5 million buyout

No. 2: Yasmani Grandal: 3 year, 60mm deal + team option.

Year 1: 20 million

Year 2: 20 million

Year 3: 20 million

Year 4: 15 million team option or 2.5 million buyout

No. 3: Zack Wheeler: 4 year, 84 million dollar deal

Year 1: 21 million

Year 2: 21 million

Year 3: 21 million

Year 4: 21 million

No. 4: Alex Wood: 1 year, 6 million dollar deal

No. 5″ Steve Cishek: 2 year, 14 million dollar deal.

TRADES

Propose trades that you think sound reasonable for both sides, and the rationale behind them. A good example of a bad idea:

No. 1: Trade Rutherford, Dunning, and Zavala to Pitt for Starling Marte (Josh stole my idea before I posted…).

Who actually knows what Pitt wants to do? Sell? Add middle of the road aging veterans to give the illusion of competing? Either way, I think this could be a good package to send for Marte who has 2 for 24 (bargain) remaining on his current deal.

SUMMARY

 

Projected Opening Day Lineup:

  1. Yasmani Grandal – C
  2. Yoan Moncada – 3B
  3. Jose Abreu – 1B
  4. J.D. Martinez – DH
  5. Eloy Jimenez – LF
  6. Starling Marte – RF
  7. Luis Robert – CF
  8. Tim Anderson – SS
  9. Leury Garcia – 2B

Bench: Zack Collins, James McCann (Gio personal catcher), Adam Engel, Danny Mendick*

Once madrigal gets inevitably called up, it looks like Mendick would probably be the odd man out.

Projected Opening Day Starting Rotation:

  1. Lucas Giolito
  2. Zack Wheeler
  3. Michael Kopech
  4. Dylan Cease
  5. Alex Wood

Bullpen

Closer: Alex Colome

Setup: Steve Cishek , Aaron Bummer

Middle Relief: Evan Marshall, Jace Fry, Jimmy Cordero, Reynaldo Lopez and Kelvin Herrera

 

This roster would put them at around 150 million (estimate based on arb guesses) after all the subtractions and additions. I think this is more than do-able for a team that should be ready to contend. On top of that, most are 3-4 yr deals that will  come close to all lining up together when the white sox will need to start giving extensions to young talent. It’s time!

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BeefLoaf108

I like McCann as Gio’s personal catcher, plus another odd 30-35 games a season. That’s a nice amount of usage imo.

Josh Nelson

If only I had confidence that Jerry Reinsdorf would approve a $150 million payroll. This would be a good way to go.

cwisen86

I agree… 150 feels a little too high for me… but 130-140 seems reasonable considering the savings we made by simply not signing Machado last year… I would love to see our payroll north of 130… would be super exciting and a real statement of intent!

Neat_on_the_rocks

I’m not a fan of bringing back Abreu and also bringing in JD Martinez

But yeah. JD/Wheeler/Grandal would be a monstrous upgrade for 2020.

Trooper Galactus

Yeah, except there’s no way that trade package nets Marte.

Trooper Galactus

Then it’s absurdly off. Marte is a consistent 3-4 WAR outfielder with two years of control. That’s worth more than an outfield prospect on the verge of busting, an older catching prospect whose bat completely disappeared in AAA even with the bouncy ball, and a good pitching prospect coming off TJS. They’ll need a solid top-100 guy in return for sure, else plenty of other teams would beat that package.

And therein lies the issue: I think the trade machine does a theoretical value-for-value trade only; it doesn’t take into account what teams might actually be willing to give up or be demanding. I just don’t see any way the Pirates would settle for a Dane Dunning headliner for Marte.

johnbitzer

Hi, baseballtradevalues.com guy here. Would love to respond to your comment.

The values that most people use are the median. We provide a low to high range, to account for the fact that some teams will pay more or less, depending on circumstance or need.

On Marte’s valuation: it’s not as simple as looking at Fangraphs and assuming Marte will continue to be a 3-4 WAR player. Aging curves come into play, particularly for 30+ players, and that impacts not only performance decline, but increased injury risk. This is particularly true for CFs, who tend to lose a step in their 30s, so their defensive value tends to go down, which is already in evidence in Marte’s case. That means he may end up moving to a corner, which in turn impacts his projected WAR, since he won’t get the CF benefit.

Given all that, we think he’ll produce $36M in field value over the next two years. Against $24M in salary, that’s only $12M in surplus. We’ve added a market premium to adjust the median up to account for the circumstances, as well as a bonus for the probability an acquiring team ends up with a draft pick if he declines a QO in 2021.

In other words, we thought about this carefully. It’s not a machine doing the calculating. We do have a model, and we find that it correlates well with front office activity, but its success depends heavily on humans thinking it through.

Trooper Galactus

Comparing surplus value seems like too much of a simplification when two of the prospects involved look like they’ll never make the major leagues and the headliner is coming off a major injury. The point is the Pirates are giving up a productive player (even taking into account an aging curve) for a pretty questionable handful of beans in that scenario.

johnbitzer

Agreed — that would not be a package the Pirates would want. That’s a different point altogether. There are lots of situations where the values match up but the package isn’t right. That doesn’t mean the valuations are off; it’s just the details therein. We find that users will comment and upvote/downvote them to sort through those issues until a better package emerges.

Eagle Bones

I just fiddled around with that thing for a couple min. It’s a neat little tool but you need to take any output with a healthy grain of salt.

TheBigHrabosky

This is good roster pr0n.