Tendering Andrew Vaughn despite him being nothing more than a replacement-level player is another bad look.
The White Sox decided to spend $5.8 million to avoid arbitration and keep Vaughn in the fold. It also made him the second-highest paid player on the team.
That speaks to the poverty the White Sox are claiming when Vaughn, a -0.8 fWAR player, is making that much and is ranked second among players' salaries. Plus, he is producing so little.
He is off to another terrible start this season.
He is hitting the ball hard, but the White Sox need him to be amazing, and he continues to range somewhere between awful and replacement-level.
At some point, rushing him to the big leagues can no longer be a crutch for why he is not living up to the hype of being the No. 3 overall pick in the 2019 MLB Draft.
If the team was going to sink that $5.8 million into him rather than spread out those resources to address the bullpen and shortstop, then he has to produce better than what he is now.
The Sox could get the same production they are getting out of Vaughn from a 40-year-old Yuri Gurriel at a fraction of the cost. Prospect Tim Elko is a year younger, and a heck of a lot cheaper, who could likely do better than what Vaughn is doing now.
Instead, they committed to Vaughn again, hoping history would stop repeating itself.
The payoff right now is...history repeating itself as his start is a carbon copy of the terrible beginning he had in 2024, which helped sink the team into a historically awful season. No wonder it looks like this team is trending toward another historically miserable year.