Ken Rosenthal wrote 1,000 or so words about the free-agent market on Monday, but "White Sox" weren't two of them, at least next to each other.
There are a couple of interesting notes with connections you can draw yourself, such as the market for starting pitchers with no qualifying offer moving quickly, and the Astros liking Anthony Rizzo more than José Abreu at the moment. Rosenthal said the markets could jump once today's deadlines for protecting prospects from the Rule 5 draft and accepting/rejecting qualifying offers passes.
But one note that stands out for a connection I'm drawing myself concerns the Atlanta Braves, who are maybe the only team that embraced early career extensions to the extent that the White Sox have. You could argue they've surpassed what the Sox have done, given that they've locked up nearly their entire lineup for the next few years, and some far, far down the road. The Sox still maintain the biggest extensions before a player's first MLB game, and perhaps they'd be running right alongside the Braves if they had more players to consider.
Anyway, Rosenthal writes this:
The Braves are not considering trading right fielder Ronald Acuña Jr. — or, for that matter, any other young player they have signed to an extension.
While the club, as a matter of policy, does not award no-trade clauses, a player who signs an extension does it with the implicit understanding he will not be traded. Obviously, things can change — a player, for example, eventually might want out. But if the Braves break the trust they’ve created internally, players will become more resistant to the extensions that have positioned the team for long-term success.
That's one thing that might apply to the White Sox when we're requesting a little more transactionality from Rick Hahn, although given the uninspiring returns from the White Sox's big commitments thus far, maybe distrust would serve as a sort of safeguard.
Spare Parts
With more women getting involved in professional baseball in the coaching and umpire ranks, Major League Baseball mandated separate locker rooms for men and women. The White Sox and Dodgers are fighting the city of Glendale, Ariz., to determine who has to pay for it. The terms of the lease seem to be working against Glendale, but everything is working against Glendale when it comes to the deal with the White Sox and Dodgers.
To Phelps, the locker room issue is an example of how the relationship between the city and the teams is out of balance.
“It seems to be such a one-sided relationship,” he said.
The city borrowed $200 million to build Camelback Ranch; the Dodgers and White Sox each pay $1 per year to use it.
That might be a decent investment when tourists flock to the Cactus League, and the city generates taxes from packed hotels and restaurants and shops, but the last three springs have been a financial disaster: the pandemic canceled half of spring training in 2020, the teams played with limited attendance in 2021, and the owners’ lockout killed half of spring training in 2022.
Ben Clemens sizes up the significant contracts signed by Robert Suárez and Rafael Montero. The White Sox might actually be ahead of a leaguewide trend, although at the wrong time for their own fortunes.
It might be time to reconsider how we think about team behavior around relievers. The price of solid bullpen innings is going up; last winter, a ton of solid relievers signed deals in the $8 million AAV range. The same was true in the pre-COVID 2020 offseason. One of two things is likely true: all free agent contracts are going to be higher than we’re used to this offseason, or teams are allocating more of their budgets to relief pitching. I think the second is more likely than the first.
- Mariners outfielder Julio Rodriguez wins AL Rookie of the Year -- BBWAA
- Braves outfielder Michael Harris II wins NL Rookie of the Year -- BBWAA
The Rookie of the Year finishes resulted in a couple of first-sinces. The ROY results hadn't featured teammates 1-2 (as was the case in the NL this year) since 2011 with Craig Kimbrel and Freddie Freeman, and it's the first time that players younger than 22 won it since Mike Trout and Bryce Harper in 2012. That ain't bad.
- Yasiel Puig to plead guilty to lying about illegal sports betting -- ESPN
- As athletes become the face of legal betting, baseball enters ‘delicate and dangerous world’ -- The Athletic
With José Abreu likely playing elsewhere, at least we're doing hearing people raising the idea of Yasiel Puig playing right field for the White Sox, which occasionally happened even though Puig was effectively persona non grata in Major League Baseball after sexual assault allegations that surfaced in 2021. I was always under the impression that Abreu didn't have much of a relationship with Puig, and didn't really want the Sox to put Puig under his wing.
Anyway, Puig's gambling problems reminded me of an Athletic feature about Charlie Blackmon becoming the first player in more than 100 years to be paid by a bookmaker. Blackmon's self-described second reaction will probably be prescient at some point ...
“My first reaction was, well, I didn’t know who the company was. They’re new,” Blackmon said. “My second reaction was, is this allowed? And yeah, the new CBA allows for this. And I think you’re going to see a lot more relationships between athletes and sportsbooks going forward.”
... and it's also not great that he's "the most hesitant to make sure that the rules are being followed," because everybody can end up in dark corners when chasing money.
Speaking of which,. baseball had a smaller but weirder piece of FTX's sports spending, as its logo was emblazoned on the chests of umpires. While not as noticeable, it's not great when it makes it sound like they paid the cops?
Both the White Sox and Royals will have old Tampa Bay hands backing up their first-time managers. While former Rays bench coach Charlie Montoyo will be the bench coach behind Pedro Grifol in Chicago, Matt Quatraro is bringing over Paul Hoover from the Rays, with whom he served as field coordinator the last four years, to fill the role Grifol occupied.
While I was familiar with Pete Palmer's ground-breaking work with linear weights that created the foundation for the modern analytics movement, I didn't know he did it on Raytheon computers.
Meanwhile, Palmer returned to Raytheon to work as a subcontractor for the Department of Defense’s Strategic Air Command, a central cog in the American side of the Cold War. Palmer’s job was to man the computer that operated a radar system located on Shemya, a barren island off the coast of Alaska. The Cobra Dane radar monitored the launch of Soviet test missiles shot into the Pacific Ocean from the Kamchatka Peninsula on Russia’s eastern seaboard. Palmer would analyze the data and try to deduce what the Russians were up to.
On his lunch breaks and after work, Palmer used the computer to crunch baseball numbers. Everybody knew what he was doing with such a crucial piece of military hardware. Nobody minded.
Bob Vanderberg, who wrote several books about the White Sox, passed away last week, and he plays a part in Sox Machine's origin story. Back when I was 14 or so, my dad and I went a book signing for "Minnie and The Mick," which we'd learned about because Billy Pierce was supposed to be there. Alas, Pierce was a no-show because he'd forgotten about it, so the turnout was sparser than expected.
Still, we went up to the table to get a copy signed by Vanderberg, and then he and my dad started talking. After about five minutes or so, he said we could pull up chairs. So we did, and we stayed there for about an hour, with my dad and Bob doing most of the talking about the 1950s and 1960s White Sox. I was struck by Bob's recall, and how he could fill in the gaps of my dad's knowledge about the teams he followed as a teenager, and I thought it was cool how somebody could turn institutional knowledge about the White Sox into a tangible product.
Flash forward to a dozen years later, when I wrote my first White Sox Outsider, I sent Bob a copy of it unsolicited, because he'd inadvertently modeled what I hoped to develop myself.
Any of his books are worthy of a spot on a White Sox fan's shelf, but I'd seek out Sox: From Lane and Fain to Zisk and Fisk in particular, because it's the one I've opened the most, because I'll always find a bit of color he has about a figure from that era that I wouldn't have learned elsewhere.
