The Chicago White Sox are currently finishing what will likely be remembered as the worst season in MLB history. They aren’t providing much reason to believe 2025 will be any different.
Speaking with reporters before the team begins its final, miserable home stand, White Sox general manager Chris Getz was asked about the team’s plans for free agency this winter. His response was to be expected, and still demoralizing.
Basically, don’t expect the White Sox to be competitive for any of the top free agents, but they’ll still be looking for some bargains that could be flipped at the 2025 trade deadline. It tracks with what Getz said last week, when he acknowledged the team is “not going to be working heavy in free agency.”
Getz says they haven’t determined what level of free agents they’ll go after, “but I can assure you it won’t be the top of the market.” Says there will be the opportunity to acquire players that could be later used to flip for more prospects like they did with Fedde. #WhiteSox
— Josh Frydman (@Josh_Frydman) September 24, 2024
There are a number of ways to react to such statements, but the most cutting might be a simple statement of fact: That strategy is exactly what the White Sox did last year.
The White Sox were not expected to be good this season, and they approached their previous offseason with that in mind. Erick Fedde, a former prospect bust who turned his career around in South Korea, was their big expenditure at two years and $15 million. After that, they didn’t sign anyone for more than one year or $6 million.
Fedde was traded away, along with former top prospect Michael Kopech, at the deadline this season, returning major leaguer Miguel Vargas and prospects Jeral Perez and Alexander Albertus, currently Nos. 13 and 14 on Chicago’s MLB Pipeline list.
So it sounds like the White Sox, after doing the bare minimum and losing at least 120 games in an all-time franchise humiliation, are going to do the bare minimum again and… see what happens. And possibly trade away their best remaining asset, starting pitcher Garrett Crochet.
That might sound like a reasonable course of action for a tanking team, but it might be worth asking now if the White Sox should even be treated like they’re executing a rebuilding plan. The team seemed to have pulled one off in 2021 when it won the AL Central three seasons after losing 100 games, but it has lost an average of more than 100 games each year since.
Nearly every player who made that 2021 team good is gone now, and the players the White Sox got in return for the ones who were traded didn’t prevent the 2024 disaster from happening. The White Sox, at what should be the absolute bottom of a rebuilding cycle, only have the No. 11 farm system on MLB Pipeline’s rankings. That might improve if they trade Crochet, but what won’t help is the fact they can only get, at best, the No. 10 pick in next year’s draft due to MLB’s lottery rules.
Jokes aside, there will definitely be long-term plans outlined in the White Sox front office, but the bigger problem is more surface level. Fans will remember what happened in 2024, and the memories will be even more clear if the team does the same thing in 2025. We love to laud fans for their loyalty, but what reason would any of them have to stay if their owner is willing to repeatedly subject them to this kind of embarrassment?
Teams often promise there’s a light at the end of the tunnel when they’re doing what the White Sox are purporting to do, but we are three years removed from the White Sox going through the same process and allowing, or even encouraging, every person who got them there to leave. Successful rebuilding teams spend when they start winning, and White Sox team owner Jerry Reinsdorf didn’t, and now he’s asking fans to follow him for another go-around.
At this point, why should any fan assume all of this is being done in good faith? Or give this team $1 billion for a new stadium?
