Lucas Giolito is the only productive and/or promising young player the White Sox haven't yet extended, which makes sense for a couple reasons -- namely the whiplash-inducing track record and one Tommy John surgery already in his past.
That said, he seems like somebody the White Sox want around, if only because he's pretty good at speaking about issues bigger than himself.
He talked to reporters about how the pandemic stoppage is affecting him, both as a human (he's self-quarantining after returning from Arizona) and as a pitcher (he's working out in his garage and throwing in his backyard). This situation isn't ideal for a guy who appeared to be reaching his peak at the time his team was poised to break a seven-year losing streak, but he found ways to return to the bigger picture.
“It was getting to the point where, for me personally, being around a bunch of people every single day isn’t really what we’re supposed to be doing as people in this country,” Giolito said in a conference call with local media on Tuesday. “It’s time to really get serious about this and practice the social distancing thing for real.”
And even though he said he'd rather play in a packed house than empty stands, he expressed his preference in a way that didn't dismiss the larger issue. The league seems to be acknowledging fanless games as the only way to resume playing baseball this season, if even those are possible. The interactions between players -- and all the saliva the game involves -- still seem to pose insurmountable hazards as long as the virus is an active concern.
Spare Parts
Outside of two very notable misfires that will haunt the franchise for a few years to come, Hahn's batting average is respectable when it comes to dealing with other teams. That's not to dismiss the damage of trading Fernando Tatis Jr. and Marcus Semien for veterans who did not help, but Hahn emerged unscathed from the three key rebuild trades, the difficulty of which should be appreciated.
His track record with free agents, on the other hand...
Following up on our conversation from a few days ago, Chris Sale indeed underwent surgery on his elbow, and apparently the delay was to figure out whether he could get surgery safely. SI's Emma Baccelieri talked to medical ethicists to ask whether guys like Sale and Noah Syndergaard should get surgery at all, and none of them gave the decisions a stamp of approval.
I suppose it says something about A.J. Reed's White Sox career that I found out about his retirement from a Texas rangers blog. Reed hit just .136/.204/.205 with 21 strikeouts over 49 plate appearances after the Sox claimed him off waivers from the Houston Astros. He did hit one homer, and it made for good GIFin'.
With this retirement following the Dylan Covey DFA, the two biggest embodiments of Late Rebuilding won't be kicked around anymore. Adam Engel is on the clock, assuming the clock ever starts.
It was heartening to see so many people respond positively to David Appelman's unusually transparent appeal for supporting FanGraphs. I was among many (hopefully) who responded by subscribing to an ad-free membership, if only because I thought I got one at the same time I bought a ticket to FanGraphs' live event during the offseason.
FanGraphs isn't the only one that's hurting. A lot of journalists are in trouble. One of the freelancers mentioned in the Ringer's story, Jeff Arnold, talked to me while reporting a White Sox preview that was supposed to appear in the New York Times, but baseball came crashing to a halt right before.
Sportswriters and sports outlets aren't alone. Jon Greenberg wrote about Chicago's vendors, who are also uniquely and unprecedentedly targeted by this crisis.
That's not to say the damage they're suffering is unique, but when you think of how many jobs around baseball have ceased indefinitely, and then apply that to all the other industries with which you may not be so intimately familiar, the recovery from this crisis seems staggering in its complexity and scale.
(Lucas Giolito portrait by Carl Skanberg. Follow his work on his Instagram.)
