Major League Baseball's trade deadline arrives in a week. That sentence is intended to establish the purpose of this post, but also to remind you that July 31 is next week, not next month. With the lack of activity and rumors -- especially surrounding the White Sox' potential trade chits -- it's easy to lose track of time.
The White Sox are sitting there with relievers to deal, but the buyer's market has yet to emerge. All the content around potential White Sox trades seems to hover around one Bruce Levine tweet:
The lack of activity is a little surprising, if only because the league eliminated the August waiver trade this time around, making it a lot harder to find upgrades after the deadline passes.
Alas, the conditions of the standings just might not be conducive to excitement. I think you can cleave the American League cleanly down the middle:
- In: Astros, Yankees, Twins, Indians, A's, Red Sox, Rays, Angels
- Out: Rangers, White Sox, Mariners, Blue Jays, Royals, Orioles, Tigers
In the National League, however, only 7½ games separate the fourth-best record from the 14th-best record. Moreover, it's hard to call some of the sub-.500 teams out-and-out sellers for better (Padres have a lot of young talent) or worse (Rockies and Mets have weird front offices).
This should theoretically benefit the White Sox, but they need enough teams to want to add aggressively in order to get into optimal position with Alex Colomé, and that hasn't happened yet. Assessing the competition on the block, San Diego's Kirby Yates, Toronto's Ken Giles, Detroit's Shane Greene are all on the block and all having better seasons than Colomé, at least when it comes to projectable stats. A few dominoes need to fall before Colomé becomes the best reliever available, and not just attractive for a lower potential asking price.
The White Sox could jump ahead of line if they made Aaron Bummer available. Bummer's had a terrific season both in terms of results and peripherals, as his sky-high grounder rate makes his independently ordinary strikeout rate stand out more. Stacking him up against Colomé:
- K rate: Bummer 25%, Colomé 20.8%
- BB rate: Bummer 7.9%, Colomé 8.3%
- GB rate: Bummer 68.5%, Colomé 40.6%
The argument against trading Bummer? He has five years of control left, the White Sox are going to need multiple options to record high-leverage outs as soon as next year, and Kelvin Herrera says the White Sox shouldn't try to solve that on the open market.
The argument for trading Bummer? This was the conversation and debate about Jace Fry last deadline, and Fry's command and control have slipped measurably since. Bummer brings more power, and his approach is more straightforward than Fry's bag of tricks, so maybe his success is easier to repeat, but there's something to be said for selling high on every reliever.
There's a little more risk in the White Sox dealing their only good relievers at this juncture. As we saw in the first half, the easiest way to overachieve poor projections and run differential issues is with a successful combo of late-inning options, and the White Sox might have to find three news ones if they have an active deadline period. That makes supplying a contender in 2020 harder to achieve.
Then again, the White Sox fashioned themselves this year's seventh/eighth/ninth foundation out of players who weren't either part of the mix or part of the organization last September. Maybe White Sox fans shouldn't expect them to keep digging up new high-leverage options every season, but perhaps the randomness underneath relievers gives as much as it takes.
