Recently I was assisting with FanGraphs' top-50 free agent rankings and writing fresh scouting reports for NPB and KBO players who are seeking MLB contracts this winter, when I wondered to myself: Wait, which job actually pays me more? How can I make this useful to White Sox fans?
The club has roughly 37½ pitchers coming back from Tommy John surgery next season, but none of them can be assumed ready for Opening Day. Shane Smith, Davis Martin and maybe Sean Burke are the only incumbent rotation pieces that can be safely assumed for 2026 at this point. Chris Getz indicated the White Sox would need to add innings in the offseason, saying it in that GM way where all the beat writers understood what he meant but it doesn't make for a good pull quote.
Regardless:
"Are there opportunities to protect some of our young pitchers and attack in the offseason to do that? Yeah, we'll look into opportunities to protect these young players," Getz said.
In this context, "protecting young players" is a euphemism for seeking starters who can shoulder a typical starter workload, or maybe more. The idea is that veterans who can post and go deep in games carve out room for accommodations -- skipped starts, shortened starts, etc. -- for younger and less experienced arms.
Predicting who can fit into this role is tricky. Last year, the White Sox tabbed Martín Pérez for this role. I concluded -- and to some degree, so did the team -- that Perez's penchant for posting would make him flippable at the deadline, even if the quality of his work couldn't be assured. Instead, Pérez was limited to 56 innings by multiple injuries, finished the year in Chicago, but was mostly excellent when he was on the mound. Go figure.
Now that we've established that whatever option we focus on is doomed to be wrong for unforeseeable reasons, let's peruse the free agent possibilities.
Run it back!
Martín Pérez
Pérez has been openly expressing his willingness to return to what he views to be a team ready to leap into playoff contention. While that's very charming, back-to-back seasons of an xERA in the 5.30s are not as troubling as Pérez saying he rehabbed his flexor strain because Dr. Keith Meister advised him a second Tommy John surgery could be career-ending, before his shoulder barked in mid-September. He clearly can still pitch, and surely his price hasn't gone up, but such a tumultuous 2025 has to be weighed into considering Pérez for an innings-eating role.
Who threw lots of innings in 2025?
Zack Littell
The 30-year-old converted reliever was 12th in all of MLB in innings last season with 186⅔, and the three-team deadline deal that sent Littell to Cincinnati in July wrapped up with the Dodgers nabbing a pretty good prospect in lanky lefty Adam Serwinowski. That alone might make Littell sound a little pricy for the Sox's recent forays into free agency, and would very likely require them to hand out the second multi-year deal of Chris Getz's tenure (the first being Erick Fedde).
But while Littell's walk rate hasn't been above 5 percent in the last three seasons, allowing him to pile up innings, his spiraling strikeout rate (career-low 17.1 percent last year) and homer vulnerability tag him as someone who should be in search of some arsenal tweaks. Littell's splitter lost some bite and effectiveness last season, and his slider got tattooed (.290 BA, .549 SLG) to the point where it needs to be adjusted, de-emphasized, or junked and replaced with something else that moves glove-side, like the sweeper he's toyed with at times.
Chris Paddack
Paddack's recent trail of AL Central work gives a real Tobias Funke feeling to listing him here, but he did throw 158 innings last year while running up a 5.35 ERA for the Tigers and Twins. There was an 11-start midseason stretch where Paddack posted a 2.25 ERA in 64 innings (he had a .219 BABIP), but there's no point wasting your time selling you on him replicating only the good parts of last season.
This is a compelling option if Brian Bannister and White Sox pitching development, with their still to-be-determined major league pitching coach, can pull off the reverse of Shane Smith last season. Smith is an extreme supinator, meaning he often winds up cutting his fastball and is comfortable spinning breaking balls, but could never turn over a changeup until finding a grip that allowed him to throw it like a cutter. Paddack on the other hand is an extreme pronator. He backspins an efficient riding four-seamer from a high arm slot and has always leaned hard on his changeup (to deteriorating results), but has never enjoyed a consistently performing breaking ball.
If the Sox don't have a remedy to such a conundrum, well that's no shame, since three other teams have already tried and failed.
Who is sort of interesting?
Dustin May
What is May best known for at this stage?
Throwing harder than should be expected going forward? He sat 94-96 mph last season, down a few ticks from his peak.
Persistent injury troubles that usually form part of the explanation for why the Dodgers are throwing a bullpen game in the NLCS or some nonsense? He's made 43 starts over the last four seasons.
Looking and moving like Waluigi? He still does that.
May is the sort of talent the White Sox typically aren't able to access on the open market, so the idea that they could now comes with good reason. He's been injured many times over and didn't perform last year (4.96 ERA in 132⅓ innings) with the Dodgers and Red Sox; two teams not exactly known for leaving a lot of pitching development meat on the bone. He is however, right in the White Sox sweet spot of low arm slot guy who's in dire need of a viable changeup, and the Sox successfully refurbished Yoendrys Gomez, who had been DFA'd by the Dodgers and Yankees earlier in the year. Even though it ended with elbow neuritis, 2025 was May's healthiest season in years.
Anthony DeSclafani
Speaking of ideas the Twins tried to no success, DeSclafani was an integral part of the 2021 Giants rotation when Bannister was in San Fransciso, and also hasn't had an effective season since. He went down in Twins camp in spring of 2024 with a non-TJ elbow injury, resurfacing in mid-2025 with stints for the Yankees Triple-A affiliate and the Diamondbacks.
Neither were particularly successful in aggregate, but DeSclafani's Arizona tenure saw him fashion a new splitter that opposing hitters were baffled by (.071 BA, 0 XBH).
Wait, weren't we supposed to be looking for bulk innings?
The next Erick Fedde
Erick Fedde
He's available and by all accounts would be intrigued by a reunion with the team that enjoyed the most effective work of his career, and he did still manage to accumulate 141 innings last year while making the rounds along the waiver wire. Who better than the White Sox to figure out why his arm slot dropped, all his pitches became sweepier and harder to command to upper corners of the zone, and his changeup goes to seemingly random locations?
No, no, no, the next Erick Fedde archetype
Cody Ponce is the latest American pitcher turned KBO ace now eyeing a stateside return. But he's sitting 95-96 mph with a dominant changeup and looks too traditionally good to be an under-the-radar pickup.
Hiroto Saiki
Rather than a paragon of health, the slender Saiki is about to turn 27 and has never logged more than 25 starts in a season. His four straight years of sub-2.00 ERAs have come during a relative dead-ball era for NPB, his strikeout rate dipped under 20 percent last year, and he throws a lot of 93 mph fastballs from an overhand arm slot that will likely get hammered in MLB.
That said, this li'l dude is pitching pitching, and if any fan base could be made to rally around a man trying to get around marginal stuff with exquisite command, it would be this one. Saiki's splitter is a plus offering, but he could really shine if his next team could find a better breaking ball that works out of his arm slot.
If watching Saiki walk a tightrope makes you wonder "wouldn't it be more exciting if this tightrope was on fire, too?" there's also Kona Takahashi.
Anthony Kay
The former Mets first-rounder hasn't developed some wild new out-pitch over two years in NPB, but he has a 2.53 ERA over nearly 300 innings in that span by way of throwing tons of strikes, mixing a lot of fastball shapes and generating grounders over 50 percent clip.
For a 6-foot-tall pitchability left-hander, he surprisingly sits 94 mph with ease. But stylistically, this is as direct of a Martín Pérez replacement as the universe could possibly conjure.
Is the short-term No. 4 starter of your dreams not listed here? Sound off in the comments, folks!
