While the pitching has progressed, there is nothing in the cupboard when it comes to the White Sox bats
Compared to most of my South Side Sox colleagues, I’ve been on the sunnier side as of late about the development of the team’s future outlook under the new regime. By no means did I think they’d be particularly watchable in 2025, but I did suspect that we’d see enough positive flashes from a fresh roster of young players to make it at least a little more worthwhile.
I still do think that. We’re about 1/15th of the way through a long season. For the most part, I don’t let the first two weeks of games swing what I’ve been thinking for the last two months. Even so, the team’s utter faceplant out of the gate is testing my patience more rapidly than I expected. It’s too early to judge too many performances on an individual level, but it’s not too early to be concerned that I’ve seen almost nothing to alleviate my worry that Chris Getz is making many of the same mistakes that doomed the great rebuilding effort of his predecessors.
A critical part of being a rebuilding, dregs-of-the-league franchise is giving opportunities to ballplayers who, for any number of reasons, would not have had the chance to break through elsewhere. Usually, if you cycle through enough of those players, you’ll find at least a couple who can serve as unexpected building blocks of a more successful future club.
Not if you’re the White Sox. My colleagues are certainly tired of hearing me harp on about this, but among many ways the post-Mired in Mediocrity team disappointed on the field one of the most glaring was the front office’s terminal inability to find All-Stars — or even solid MLB-caliber players — among the detritus of the league.
It’s still early days. But I’m not convinced Getz will be any more successful at it this time around than he was the first time.
Look at teams past and present who successfully followed the same full-reset, long-term rebuild model that the Sox are now attempting for the second time in a decade. The Houston Astros of the early-10s were the pioneers of this method. Their run of dominance was fueled by top-prospects-made-good like Carlos Correa, George Springer, Alex Bregman, and Kyle Tucker, but they still wouldn’t have gotten there without a boatload of help from guys like José Altuve, Dallas Keuchel, Marwin Gonzalez, and Collin McHugh, all of whom enjoyed entirely unforeseen breakouts on teams that lost 110+ games.
Much as it pains us, look across town. Two of the most critical pieces to the Cubs’ 2016 championship puzzle were acquired more or less as afterthoughts, given that the Rangers and Orioles felt that 35-year-old Ryan Dempster and journeyman Scott Feldman were more useful than Kyle Hendricks and Jake Arrieta, respectively.
Speaking of the Orioles, their recent turnaround is equally instructive, even with their lack of a championship trophy. They’ve developed a huge amount of internal star power, to be sure. They also don’t go from 110 losses to 101 wins without major contributions from Rule V Draft pick Anthony Santander, outfielder Cedric Mullins, and starter Kyle Bradish, the latter two of whom never cracked the Top 5 in Baltimore’s farm system, according to FanGraphs. Baltimore’s failure to even reach the ALCS can be largely attributed to being unwilling to spend either financial or prospect capital to supplement that core, as the Astros and Cubs did.
The post-2016 White Sox tried to follow this blueprint — and failed, spectacularly. All of that losing from 2017-19 failed to produce a single impact player who wasn’t already a highly-rated prospect, and even the scrubs-to-stars arc they did get were largely the result of Lucas Giolito and Carlos Rodón’s offseason work outside of the organization.
There are some indications that this won’t entirely be the case this time around. None of Davis Martin, Jonathan Cannon, or Sean Burke are terribly exciting on their own, but the trio seems likely to produce at least one legitimate MLB contributor. It looks as if there’s a real chance Milwaukee comes to seriously regret not giving Shane Smith a big league opportunity. This regime has already made good on one massive redevelopment project in Garrett Crochet, even if his contribution comes in the form of a trade return rather than anchoring a future rotation — neither of which they accomplished with his spiritual predecessor Rodón.
The main issue is that everything in the previous paragraph concerns pitching. On the hitting side, each disaster of a series in 2025 fuels my concern that we’re seeing the same patterns develop that ultimately tanked the last rebuild. As ranked by MLB.com, four of the team’s top five hitting prospects — Edgar Quero, Kyle Teel, Braden Montgomery, and Chase Meidroth — were acquired in a pair of high-profile trades that won’t come around again in the near future. The one of those five that they have developed internally, Colson Montgomery, has hit a brick wall in the upper minors.
If any single one or two of those big names flop, it’s not going to matter how good the pitching is, because despite much ado about doing things differently this time, we’re on the precipice of a third straight 100-loss season without producing a single long-term lineup contributor out of the endless roster churn. They’ve appeared to have all but given up on Oscar Colás and Dominic Fletcher. After three-plus years, it looks like it’s just not happening with Lenyn Sosa. The fliers taken on Miguel Vargas and Korey Lee might still pay dividends, but the timeline to do so should be measured in months, not years.
Brooks Baldwin has torn up the minors, but has been mostly overwhelmed by big league pitching. Jacob Amaya and Nick Maton don’t even look like fringe major leaguers. Injuries to veterans like Mike Tauchman, Brandon Drury, and Josh Rojas limit their ability to add more young lottery tickets on the trade market later this summer.
None of that can be taken without the context of Getz’s time as farm director, during which a pair of Top 5 picks were spent on Nick Madrigal and Andrew Vaughn. Beyond those two and Jake Burger, the 2017-19 drafts have generated just one player with at least 1.0 WAR. Remarkably, that 2017 draft (the first under Getz’s purview) failed to produce even one single MLB player after the third round. It’s a level of futility that nearly every other organization in the majors would have long lost patience with by now.
All that is a long-winded way of saying that I still see very little evidence that Getz is any good at all at identifying offensive talent; the track record is simply nonexistent. Even the relative success stories of the last eight years have been massive disappointments in their own right.
The future is definitely a bit brighter on the South Side than it was a year or two years ago, and some of the development in the pitching department is quite promising. But at the end of the day, Getz is the one in charge. We have yet to see much indication (beyond as-yet empty words) he’s actually doing things a whole lot differently from his predecessors’ MO of stocking the farm with high-profile external talent and hoping they all hold their pedigree through to the majors. It’s hard to be too optimistic as long as that’s the case.
There’s still time to prove me wrong. Plenty of it. Again, we are only 1/15th of the way through, as miserable as it already seems. But after more than a decade of futility, we need to see more than a somewhat revamped pitching pipeline to believe we’re in for much more than the disappointment and unfulfilled promises we’ve come to know all too well.