Seventy years ago, you could heat a home over the winter using newspaper clippings from trades between the White Sox and Cleveland. But ever since Major League Baseball put the two teams in the same division in 1994, the deals dried up.
In March 1994, the White Sox traded Matt Merullo to Cleveland for Ken Ramos. That prevailed as the most recent swap between the teams until the Sox acquired Yonder Alonso for Alex Call. Cleveland was looking to save money by offloading Alonso's contract. The White Sox were hoping Alonso's contract would lower Manny Machado's demands, so both teams were financially motivated to deal within the division. Once Machado signed with San Diego, the Sox spent the rest of 2019 realizing why they didn't have much competition for Alonso's services.
Without such unique motivation on both sides, I wasn't certain that the White Sox would be able to acquire César Hernández from the team closest to chasing them. Not only did Cleveland accept the White Sox's offer of Konnor Pilkington, but Hernández will be switching uniforms at a time when he was already planning on traveling to Chicago, as the two teams meet for a three-game series at Guaranteed Rate Field tonight.
It would've been a unique time for the White Sox to host the Future Guardians regardless of Hernández's part in the proceedings. Terry Francona announced on Thursday that he's stepping away from the helm for a second consecutive season due to an ongoing series of health problems.
Francona’s future in baseball is still undetermined. What he needs to determine now is whether he’ll be healthy enough to even consider coming back to the game in 2022, which he hopes is the case. The 62-year-old underwent nearly a dozen procedures from the end of the '19 season until the delayed start of the '20 season for stomach problems. He then found himself in the ICU at the Cleveland Clinic last August due to blood clots. And just as he was getting healthy over the offseason, a staph infection was discovered in his foot and he needed surgery to remove part of the bone in his big toe. [...]
Francona will get admitted into the Clinic on Friday to give him three days to get prepped for surgery to have his left hip replaced on Monday. Doctors want to be extremely careful with him after he ran into clotting issues just one year ago. He’ll likely have five or six weeks to recover from that before he will undergo another surgery to have a rod placed in his foot because of the staph infection, which will require 10 weeks of keeping all weight off his leg before he moves into a boot, aided by crutches.
It's easy to take this combination of trading a productive veteran and the retreat of one of the game's great managers and see Cleveland packing it in for next year, but the organization is uniquely prepared to test in-house replacements. The coaching staff accumulated experience in carrying on without Francona last year, and the Francisco Lindor and Mike Clevinger trades stocked their middle infield with potential replacements like Andres Gimenez and Gabriel Arias (although top-100 prospect Tyler Freeman was shut down due to labrum concerns).
Cleveland is 8-14 in July, they're eight games back, they just transferred Shane Bieber and Aaron Civale to the 60-day injured list, and now they just helped bolster the roster of the team they're chasing. Still, the White Sox aren't playing well at the moment themselves, so both teams are catching each other at the best possible time. It's fun to imagine the White Sox opening an 11-game lead in the Central. It's less so to picture Cleveland narrowing it to five.
And just as I'm wrapping this up, Cleveland just shed another veteran, albeit one who's currently injured, in what appears to be an accounting measure.
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Cleveland isn't the only team selling. The Minnesota Twins just unloaded José Berríos to the Toronto Blue Jays, and they received a couple of top-100 prospects in return. They're getting Austin Martin, the Vanderbilt shortstop picked fifth overall in the 2020 draft, and Simeon Woods Richardson, a 20-year-old righty drafted out of high school by the Mets in the second round of the 2018 draft.
For the White Sox, the trade alleviates a short-term headache of facing Berríos in the division, as he's 12-4 with a 2.91 ERA against Chicago in 20 career starts. The question is whether Martin becomes a longer-term headache in short order, as he's hitting .281/.424/.383 in Double-A. He's a good prospect in his current profile, but there's a little bit of disagreement over his defensive home (might have to move to second or center field) and power (only two homers in 55 games). Woods Richardson has taken a step back at Double-A, battling some loss in stuff and paying more for shaky control.
It's a good and potentially scary return, but for the time being, there are reasons why Toronto made those players available. We'll see whether the Twins bought low on underappreciated players, or paid a fair price for the amount of work remaining.
If Dan Hayes is right, the Twins have several moves left in them.
(Photo by Ian D'Andrea)
