The White Sox used up all their roster space to accommodate the five players they received from the Atlanta Braves in the Aaron Bummer trade, but there were already about five or six players who could be cut without thinking twice, so the Sox have plenty of ways to add any recently non-tendered players.
MLB.com has the list of 63 players were weren't offered a contract for the 2024 season, and while all of them have issues that prevent their projected performances from meeting their projected salaries, there are a handful that could pique the White Sox's curiosities.
Catchers: As bad as Jacob Stallings, Andrew Knizner and Austin Nola have been, Korey Lee could make them appealing if he's truly Plan A.
Former prospects: Nick Senzel would add to the White Sox's collection of top prospects from 2017, while Kyle Lewis never could follow up on his 2020 Rookie of the Year season due to injuries.
Old friends: Codi Heuer never fully recovered from Tommy John surgery, so Nick Madrigal is the last player left standing from the Craig Kimbrel trade.
Brandon Woodruff: He's kinda in his own category, given that he's 46-26 with a 3.10 ERA and the peripherals to support it over seven seasons with Milwaukee, but durability has been the knock, and any John Danks will tell you that shoulder capsule surgery is no joke. Still, the Sox have as much flexibility as anybody when it comes to what kind of pitchers can fill a rotation, so they can't afford to not do due diligence on any potential affordable quality option.
They're all as free as any free agent now, and the Sox struck oil with James McCann several years ago under such circumstances, and they have plenty of reason to take some more swings at it.
Spare Parts
The headline's a little trite, but this column by Tim Keown does a good job of explaining that the owners threw their support behind the flimsiest of plans to send the Oakland A's to Las Vegas. They haven't yet produced a feasible rendering of the potential ballpark or a plan for what the A's are going to do before it's build in, what, 2028? And that's if the public financing actually goes through.
When talking about Benetti's appearance on Richard Deitsch's Sports Media podcast, I didn't include a part about Benetti talking about somebody who made a "disqualifying comment" about respect because I couldn't tell when it happened.
On the podcast, he said "Deep into my TV career," but the tweet made it sound rather early on, so I couldn't quite square it up. Media reporter Jeff Agrest did, and said that Boyer was the one who made that comment.
Baseball Prospectus tends to have more outliers among its top 10 prospect list -- most noteworthy last year was its No. 5 ranking for Norge Vera, and Ben Spanier can't quite bring himself to give up on him (he's 20th here). He and Jeffrey Paternostro have Nick Nastrini as a reliever and Jacob Gonzalez sixth in this system, and I'm looking forward to seeing whether those views are in or out of the consensus as other lists roll in.
The Orioles are the front-runner in the Offseason Plan Project, but Nick Deeds list six teams alongside them, plus another seven teams he considers a step down, but still plausible.
Jayson Stark provides the rundown of the ways the new rules affected the average MLB game, both in the regular season and offseason. I didn't realize that Fox didn't show the pitch clock during the World Series, which is what everybody should want.
- With Padres, Peter Seidler set himself apart in many ways as the ideal owner -- The Athletic
- The choice is yours -- The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
The death of San Diego Padres owner Peter Seidler, who invested eye-popping amounts into the Padres payroll because he saw it as a social institution, is hard to square up against the ongoing greed of John Fisher. It's hard to understand how some people can have so much and choose to do so little with it, and it's such a waste.
