Two moves into the White Sox offseason, nobody has been thrown for a loop.
The Sox checked off their first items of winter business on Monday, exercising the $4.65 million option on Nate Jones while declining the opportunity to pay James Shields $16 million in 2019. Shields says he "absolutely" plans to pitch next season, and considering he's coming off a 204-inning season, he probably has some value to some team for one more year, and it's probably premature to start wrapping up his career.
If that's it for his White Sox career, it wasn't a good one. The Shields acquisition cost the Sox Fernando Tatis Jr. while going 16-35 with a 5.31 ERA over 2½ seasons. He made good use of a stall in Tatis' ascent by giving the Sox desperately needed innings from a starting pitcher, which helped him close the reputation gap a little. Maybe we'll hear his name come up years from now the way David Price still talks about Shields to this day.
“James Shields is how I developed that pitch,” Price told reporters Tuesday ahead of his scheduled start against the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 2 of the World Series on Wednesday night. “Just being with him early on in my career and the changeup that he has possessed over the course of his career, and for him to take me in the way that he did, and to play catch with me every day, unless him or I were starting that game. And just being able to work on it every day with him. One of the guys that had one of the best changeups in all of baseball, to work with me on it every single day, that was huge.”
Shields' true impact on the White Sox remains to be seen, at least outside of a couple anecdotes. All we can say for now is that he wasn't able to fully leave the Jaime Navarro neighborhood of disastrous pitching acquisitions. The complete list of pitchers who threw at least 400 innings for the White Sox despite an ERA+ below 80:
- Shields, 79 ERA+ over 436 IP
- Dave Danforth, 79 ERA+ over 447.1 IP
- Vic Frazier, 77 ERA+ over 444 IP
- Navarro, 76 ERA+ over 542 IP
Maybe Shields can come back for one more year as an effective-enough innings-eater, but the Miguel Gonzalez re-signing serves as a cautionary tale against retaining a guy who relies heavily on that "enough" tag, as things can unravel quickly when he no longer meets that description.
One could counter with the Derek Holland or Mat Latos signings for arguing against pursuing question marks with theoretical upside, but Mickey Rooney moments aside, Holland had an OK year with the Giants in 2018. The less said about Latos' 2018 the better.
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[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s for Jones, exercising his option was always the more likely path, although as we've seen with the Offseason Plan Project, one could easily form an argument for moving on.
It was a $3.4 million decision in terms of accounting, although the $1.25 million buyout follows him into the 2019-20 winter, so that money could still have to be spent somewhere along the line. If he has another injury-marred season, it'll be a $3.9 million conversation the following year.
The decision is basically a scale, with "upside" on one side and "availabilty" on the other. The leading points for each:
- A healthy Jones can basically slot into any bullpen in baseball.
- Jones is seldom healthy.
In favor of the first point, his velocity and swinging-strike rate were both in line with his history. The walk rate ballooned on him, although perhaps that can be attributed to rust.
Regarding the second point, Jones only threw 30 innings in 2018 -- and somehow that was his second-highest innings total over the last five years. Jones is a guy who, according to Cot's Contracts, had an elbow surgery provision written into his contract, only to have a season-ending ulnar repositioning procedure that somehow avoided triggering that contingency.
The question comes down to loss aversion more than risk tolerance, because the risk cuts both ways. The idea of Jones is comforting, because if he can regain his old form or even something close to it, that's easily worth the club option. But that good Jones has only been an idea for four of the last five seasons, and maybe it's worth applying those resources to a free agent, and/or opening up a spot on the 40-man roster.
Of course, it'd sting to watch him throw 60 good innings on an affordable deal for another club, even if the Sox would be hard-pressed to convert any future strong performances into substantial trade value. And the Sox would have to replace Jones with an equivalent veteran in order to better ensure a watchable bullpen, which isn't easy for that kind of money.
After visiting and revisiting this decision in my head and while reading plans over the last couple weeks, I didn't have strong feelings one way or the other, because I don't see any outcome as being particularly consequential.
However you see it, this particular debate has been settled, and now we'll see if this conservative course is a tone-setter for the offseason, or a way to offset more daring moves down the line.
