White Sox avoid arbitration hearings, sharpen payroll projection

Thanks to the lockout and a contentious negotiation with Lucas Giolito, the White Sox didn't have all their players under contract until April 1.

Back to a normal schedule, the White Sox resumed their usual pattern of having all players under contract before the filing deadline, which arrived on Friday.

The White Sox opened the offseason with eight arbitration-eligible players, but non-tendered Adam Engel and Danny Mendick while outrighting Kyle Crick. That left five players, and all of them reached deals on Friday.

Shoutout to MLB Trade Rumors, which came $100,000 away from nailing the sum with its individual projections.

That brings the payroll to a little more than $170 million for 19 spots per Spotrac. Throw in seven other spots at the league minimum of $720,000, and you get to about $175 million. That's $15 million or so short of the 2022 team's Opening Day payroll, which was $193 million according to Cot's. (To be fair, I'd call it $191.5 million when adjusting for roster deflation, since the 2022 season opened with a 28-man roster.)

Back in November, Rick Hahn said he thought the payroll would be "somewhere in the vicinity of where it was in 2022." You can argue whether a 9 percent reduction counts as "in the vicinity," but I'd rather focus on the idea that the White Sox are removing resources while their status as a contender is in critical condition, which represents either a terrible financial plan or the absence of one.

At least the Sox are trying to compensate by adding resources elsewhere. Along with the reconfiguration of their hitting infrastructure to accommodate 2½ coaches under an enthusiastic Pedro Grifol, James Fegan reported that the Sox hired former Nationals assistant GM Sam Mondry-Cohen to their baseball operations department in their continued efforts to put their hitters on a data diet.

Mondry-Cohen spent the past year as a consultant for the National League champion Philadelphia Phillies, an executive in residence at a biomechanics company called Reboot Motion and as a senior fellow for Wharton’s sports analytics and business initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. But Mondry-Cohen is best known for his time with the Washington Nationals, where he was credited with effectively creating their research and development department and developing their internal statistical database, beginning as an intern with the team in 2009 until he left after the 2021 season.

The White Sox roughly summarized Mondry-Cohen’s role as an offensive complement to [Rod] Larson’s. And despite all the fancy front office titles and responsibilities, Mondry-Cohen’s experience with the Nationals is rooted in trying to distill analytical information into actionable takeaways for players on the field. That figures to also be the thrust of a role that per a source, will also involve traveling with the team throughout the season. As will also be the case with the White Sox, Mondry-Cohen’s time with the Nationals was an effort in blending advanced metrics into the process of a franchise that maintains an open reverence for old-school baseball concepts, and it culminated in a World Series championship in 2019.

Because we're talking about the White Sox, this development is simultaneously praiseworthy and lamentable. It's great that it's happening at all, but it's a shame that the White Sox wasted two years and a record payroll on Tony La Russa, whose only real nod in this direction turned out to be more of a Duncan Children Jobs Initiative.

Going back to Giolito, as he and Hahn exchanged versions of their contract discussions before last season, Fegan reported that the White Sox offered Giolito a four-year, $50 million extension before the 2021 season. That would've covered his three arbitration years and his first year of free agency, with a club option for 2025.

As I wrote at the time, the White Sox seemed to have offered Giolito a fair deal in terms of dollars. The decision came down to whether Giolito had any interest in delaying free agency, and I'm guessing the answer was something like, "Not for less than seven figures."

Now that he locked in his third and final arbitration salary, we can put a little finer of a point on the topic. Giolito's 2023 deal ran his total through $22 million for his arb years, so that means he'd have to make $28 million next year in order to earn the money the White Sox were willing to guarantee him through 2025.

That seems more unlikely than likely at this moment, but it's also probably besides the point for a player of a certain mindset. Carlos Rodón possessed a similar belief of his self-worth from draft day forward, and while he slipped behind the salary curve by going year to year, it only took him one winter to regain the lead, and a second winter to blow it up and redevelop the land into something entirely unrecognizable.