The Chicago White Sox are currently wrapping up what will likely go down as the worst season in MLB history, and they don’t give much reason to believe that 2025 will be any different.
Speaking to reporters before the team’s final, miserable home game, White Sox general manager Chris Getz was asked about the team’s plans for free agency this winter. His answer was predictable, but still demoralizing.
In principle, don’t expect the White Sox to compete for any of the top free agents, though they will be looking for bargains to sell at the 2025 trade deadline. That’s consistent with what Getz said last week, when he acknowledged that his team “isn’t going to work hard in free agency.”
Getz says they haven’t determined what level of free agents they’ll target, “but I can assure you it won’t be the top of the market.” He says there will be an opportunity to acquire players who can later be used to acquire more prospects, like they did with Fedde. #WhiteSox
— Josh Frydman (@Josh_Frydman) September 24, 2024
There are a number of ways to respond to such statements, but perhaps the most cutting is to simply state a fact: That strategy is exactly what the White Sox employed last year.
The Sox didn’t expect to be good this season, and they went into last offseason with that in mind. Erick Fedde, a former prospect flop who turned his career around in South Korea, was their biggest outlay, at two years and $15 million. They haven’t signed anyone for more than a year or $6 million since.
Fedde was traded along with former top prospect Michael Kopech at this season’s deadline, bringing back Major Leaguer Miguel Vargas and prospects Jeral Perez and Alexander Albertus, currently ranked No. 13 and No. 14 on Chicago’s MLB Pipeline list.
It appears that after doing the bare minimum and losing at least 120 games in an all-time franchise humiliation, the White Sox are going to do the bare minimum again and … see what happens. And they’ll do it while dealing away perhaps their best remaining asset, starting pitcher Garrett Crochet.
That might sound like a reasonable course of action for a team that’s tanking, but it might be worth asking now whether the White Sox should be treated as if they’re executing a rebuilding plan. The team appeared to have completed a rebuild 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 per year since then.
Nearly all of the players who made the 2021 team good are now gone, and the players the White Sox received in exchange for those they traded didn’t prevent the 2024 disaster. The White Sox, who are at the absolute bottom of a rebuilding cycle, have the No. 11 farm system in MLB Pipeline’s rankings. That could improve if they trade Crochet, but it doesn’t help that they can only get the No. 10 pick in next year’s draft at best due to MLB lottery rules.
Jokes aside, there will certainly be long-term plans being outlined within the White Sox front office, but the bigger issue is more superficial. Fans will remember what happened in 2024, and those memories will be even clearer when the team does the same in 2025. We like to praise fans for their loyalty, but what incentive do they have to remain loyal when their ownership is willing to subject them to this kind of embarrassment repeatedly?
Teams often promise that there will be light at the end of the tunnel if they do what the White Sox say they will, but we’re three years removed from the White Sox going through the same process and allowing—or even encouraging—everyone who got them there to leave. Successful rebuilding teams spend money when they start winning, but White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf didn’t, and now he’s asking fans to join him in giving it another try—and giving this team $1 billion for a new stadium.
Why should a fan at this point believe that all of this is being done in good faith?
