Inspired by the recent White Sox in the Postseason article, I decided to do a deep dive of "What Could Have Been..." So I decided to try to assemble the best possible team I could from players who are currently or have previously worn a White Sox uniform. There is only one player on this list who did not appear with the big league club.
There will be several liberties taken in this post.
- Knock-on effects of trades and free agent moves won't be considered.
- WAR totals are provided by Fangraphs and are based on what actually happened in the 2024 season so there might be more/fewer PAs as a team based on aggregation than what might have happened if this roster was real.
- All salaries presented represent "2024 Cash" as provided by Spotrac. It also assumes whatever contract they currently have is what the White Sox would have had to lay out to have them on the roster.
- I tried to limit any player selected to people who qualified at the position but there are surprisingly few good offensive players to choose from. I deferred to plate appearances as the ultimate decider of who would end up on the roster which is why you'll see Sosa as the starting 3B and Moncada not even on the roster even though Moncada has a higher fWAR.
Observations from this exercise:
- Overall, this team's payroll comes in at just shy of $170M and would rank 16th in baseball in cash outlay.
- They would combine for 41.4 fWAR which would place them in a tie for 12th with the Mariners.
- The batters would rank 27th with 13.9 fWAR
- The pitching would rank 1st with 27.5 fWAR
- If you wanted to penny pinch, you could swap out Rodon for Quintana to save 14M and lose 0.7 fWAR which still leaves the pitching comfortably in first place.
- There are also probably better/different choices to be made in the bullpen but I don't know that those materially change the end result.
| Position | Player | Salary | fWAR |
| SP | Chris Sale | 17,000,000 | 6.4 |
| SP | Dylan Cease | 8,000,000 | 4.8 |
| SP | Carlos Rodon | 27,000,000 | 1.7 |
| SP | Reynaldo Lopez | 4,000,000 | 3.4 |
| SP | Garret Crochet | 800,000 | 4.7 |
| RP | Michael Kopech | 3,000,000 | 0.4 |
| RP | Justin Anderson | 525,096 | 0.2 |
| RP | Tanner Banks | 755,050 | 0.9 |
| RP | Chad Kuhl | 1,500,000 | 0.2 |
| RP | Aaron Bummer | 5,500,000 | 1.1 |
| RP | David Robertson | 5,000,000 | 1.9 |
| RP | Declan Cronin | 674,141 | 1.3 |
| RP | Tim Hill | 1,795,972 | 0.5 |
| C | James McCann | 12,000,000 | 0.2 |
| 1B | Jake Burger | 760,000 | 1.4 |
| 2B | Marcus Semien | 26,000,000 | 4.2 |
| SS | Paul DeJong | 1,900,000 | 1.7 |
| 3B | Lenyn Sosa | 497,250 | 0.1 |
| LF | Kevin Pillar | 1,811,776 | 0.5 |
| CF | Luis Robert | 12,500,000 | 0.5 |
| RF | Fernando Tatis Jr | 11,000,000 | 3.2 |
| DH | Yasmani Grandal | 2,500,000 | 2 |
| Bench | Nicky Lopez | 4,300,000 | 0.9 |
| Bench | Tommy Pham | 3,900,000 | -0.1 |
| Bench | Andrew Benintendi | 16,500,000 | -0.3 |
| Bench | Korey Lee | 745,000 | -0.4 |
