PHOENIX -- Player development types can have different priorities than you and me.
"It's fun when expectations are really low," said senior advisor to pitching Brian Bannister. "No one expects us to be good this year and when you come in at the bottom of a win cycle and you have a lot of upside surprises, you can put a fun team on the field that the fans can get behind. They see what's happening, they start to build trust with the front office and the staff, and all of a sudden you're becoming a playoff team in front of everyone's eyes. It's a fun narrative for a fan to be invested in."
To Bannister's credit, he's not envisioning buy-in from the deeply disgruntled White Sox fan base coming until after the team demonstrates they can turn out a slate of surprisingly good performances from their record-high crop of camp invites. But no one would scrutinize his other assertion: No one expects the White Sox to be good this year.
Projections don't. Fans don't. Scouts and rival teams don't. Even some White Sox players privately set their hopes on "better than last year," rooted in optimism that a cleaner style of play can outweigh slashed payroll and a clear decline in star power. It also helps that clearing 61 wins is simply not a very high bar. With a farm system publicly viewed as middle-of-the-road even after last summer's sell-off, it reads as a situation that calls for the franchise to go through a long rebuild -- willingly or unwillingly.
"I know some teams have done that where it's 'Let's just lose in the big leagues, let's get a bunch of high picks and let's turn it around three, four years down the road,'" said assistant general manager Josh Barfield. "I don't think that's anyone mindset here."
The new draft lottery rules remove some of the rewards for spending multiple years at the bottom of the standings, as the White Sox won't be able to draft higher than 10th in 2025. Also, the expanded playoffs and dreary nature of the AL Central theoretically lower the threshold to return to the postseason. Both factors are regularly cited by White Sox front office members for why they want a quick return to relevance.
But there's a chicken-or-the-egg question with the team's direction.
Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf expressed his desire for a quick turnaround on the day of Getz's promotion to the GM chair, and lo and behold, the Sox front office is touting a plan to return to contention that doesn't require a long down period. That filling out the roster with glove-first signings is less expensive is something Sox personnel admit nudges them toward their chosen route, as they prepare a roster with a payroll reduced by $50 million from last season. Correspondingly, there's a widely shared hope that the Sox payroll will expand as they return to credible division contenders, since their emphasis on adding talent at Double-A and above -- even in Dylan Cease trade talks -- makes it trickier to add high-ceiling players.
"Right now we're looking at who's available that we know we can help, that represents an effective use of our payroll, so that we can start -- sooner rather than later -- to build a playoff team and get there quickly and leverage the things we can do on the player development side," Bannister said. "You're trying to get to a point in the win cycle where you've developed a lot of homegrown players. They're cost effective, they're sustainable because they're under control for multiple years. And then you start to layer in the more expensive free agents on the market."
Another element is that the White Sox rebuilding for so long, and then crashing so rapidly, has provided themselves with their own cautionary tale. Getz rightly gets questioned why someone who has such a large role in the current mess was promoted to head up its cleanup, but he's certainly been disillusioned against the idea of letting the major league team languish and expecting a critical mass of prospect talent to fix everything. A series of teams that should have been better based on talent but bled value at every margin exhausted patience across the organization, and convinced Getz & Co. that their contention window has to be built on more than hoarding years of control.
"It's really hard for us to have that mentality that we're OK with losing, we're fine with losing right now with the hope that it's going to be OK down the road," Barfield said. "You want to be in a position as the time guys are coming up, of establishing a foundation of what we want to do up here [in the majors]. After what's happened the last couple of years, I think we need to re-establish that foundation and we're already starting to do that."
Two years ago, Barfield's old team, the Arizona Diamondbacks, lost 110 games, and faced similar outside expectations for a major sell-off and a long road back. Barfield said confidence that a strong 2019 Corbin Carroll-led draft class was on the way steeled their resolve. A frenetically speedy and slick-fielding team boosted the Diamondbacks win total by 22 games the following year, and Barfield said the similarity of the White Sox's current situation drew him to his new role. The foundation he talks about establishing this season is also similar.
"If you want to go out in the big leagues, it's not just go out and bang and the defense is the icing on the cake," Barfield said. "You have to be able to go out and do both to play for this team. That is the expectation and guys know that going in."
As someone currently consumed with trying to convert on as many reclamation projects (or "upside surprises") as possible, Bannister sees an even more immediate payoff and tangible benefit to the team's emphasis on defense.
"If you're pitching well, or you're a ground ball staff, having good defense out there and combining multiple attributes of a team that can compound on each other is really powerful," Bannister said. "There's just a lot of things that that we're working on, that are going to pay dividends down the road. The goal is to get out of the bottom of a win cycle as soon as possible.
"Especially with the new draft rules and the lottery, you can't just hang down in this area, the bottom of a win cycle, and benefit from the way some teams have over the last decade. You're incentivized to get out of it and put a winning product on the field. Our goal is to be there as soon as possible, and to be a place that is not known for players complaining, but players want to be there because the culture is so good. They're getting help. They're getting better. They're getting paid. They're winning ballgames. They're in the playoffs. That's the type of culture we want to build."
Bannister makes note of the fact that both his and his father's playing careers were ended on short notice by shoulder injuries, fueling his distaste for wasting time at the major league level. Furthermore, his intentions to boost the White Sox's reputation for improving pitchers and turning into a popular place for talent is dependent upon immediate results. Interestingly, manager Pedro Grifol thinks a lot of it can come from changes in their catching group.
"The setups for the catchers, the communication [between] pitcher-catcher is where we want to make sure that we put ourselves to have success in the midst of, maybe, not complete execution," Grifol said. "Which means in our [catcher] setups and that a miss still stays on the plate. We've got to get ahead in the count. Twenty-ninth out of 30 last year in walks. That's low-hanging fruit."
Low-hanging fruit remained tantalizingly out of reach for the most expensive rosters in franchise history, leading the White Sox to believe if they reverse course and prioritize it, they will wind up closer to consistently competing in the AL Central than they ever got through much more torturous efforts.
