With exactly one month to go until the season ends for most of the league -- White Sox included -- Jeff Passan took a shot at assessing the free agent market for ESPN.com.
The White Sox aren't prominent players in any single bullet-point, but aside from Alex Colomé being on the block and Lucas Giolito being an extension candidate, there are a few chief takeaways:
No. 1: It's going to be slow. Passan says executives and agents expect the pace of this coming offseason to mimic that of the last one.
No. 2: Scott Boras holds the cards. Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rendon are expecting contracts above $200 million, and Boras has shown he'll wait as long as he needs to get there. Unlike last season, the White Sox will have far more competition for either if they want to get involved (and they won't really want to get involved).
No. 3: Qualifying offer candidates:
Locks to get it -- and reject it: Cole, Rendon, Madison Bumgarner, Stephen Strasburg, J.D. Martinez, Aroldis Chapman, Josh Donaldson, Marcell Ozuna. Outside of Cole and Rendon, it will be brought up during negotiations too.
Likely to get it: Zack Wheeler, Cole Hamels, Jake Odorizzi, Giants reliever Will Smith and Yankees shortstop Didi Gregorius.
One nice thing about the revamped compensation rules for free agents is that it's no longer necessary for root for a team finish in the bottom 10, because every team's top pick is protected. That wasn't such a big deal the last two years, but with the White Sox having baseball's ninth-worst record right now, it'd be a lot easier to justify rooting for meaningless September losses.
Spare Parts
Not much has moved since Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark reported that David Glass is discussing a sale of the Royals to Indians minority owner John Sherman a couple of days ago, but nobody's refuting it. Such a sale would probably be more bad for the AL Central than good, because everybody knew the Glass ceiling when it came to spending. That said, we've seen recently purchased clubs deal with their debt first, so any transition might not be a smooth one, even if the Royals' TV deal will make them more competitive with the league.
Neil deMause looks at baseball's decreasing unpopularity and examines the usual suspects (pace of play, tanking, cost of tickets, etc.). What's most interesting is that while baseball's attendance drop is treated as a recent phenomenon, a sports economist notes that attendance never actually bounced back from the recession a decade ago.
As Dylan Cease takes the mound today, it's worth watching his curveball, as that seems to be his primary culprit in his inability to get lefties off his fastball.
I was pulling for Dallas Keuchel to reward the Braves for signing him June, and to punish the teams that didn't pursue him before then. To my relief, he's been about a 3-WAR pitcher, even with an uneven start that's potentially attributable to a lack of spring training.
The White Sox already gave Rick Renteria a contract extension in the dark corner of a parking garage, so we can watch Detroit to see how they handle a manager who doesn't yet have a guarantee before his lame-duck season. The only thing the Tigers have locked in thus far is Gardenhire's sixth consecutive 90-loss season.
I included the last link, even though it's a fortnight old, because the Gardenhire story made me wonder what Gordon Beckham was up to.
