White Sox: Draft Position Will Force Organization to Pick A Lane
White Sox will have decisions to make during upcoming off-season. If team intends on contending, they might have to sign a player with a qualifying offer or trade a talented young player.
The 12th position in Major League Baseball’s Amateur Player Draft is the definition of baseball purgatory. It doesn’t get much worse, unless of course you’re saddled at number eleven. The Chicago White Sox are pretty darn close.
What would normally be regarded as an achilles heel, such draft position is actually a hidden blessing for the Sox as it will invariably force their hand.
Last offseason played out like a bad movie, one in which the screenwriters got a little lost around the 45 minute mark. A once cohesive plan fell apart as a plethora of competent free agents went by the wayside. Financial constraints and the consideration of a compensation pick served as the key derailing factors.
The rising action of the Todd Frazier trade was met with a climax that might make a movie goer spit out their popcorn. Austin Jackson isn’t quite the blockbuster fans expected when they sat on the edge of their seats for three months.
While Chicago’s best course of action was to simply pay a premium for Yoenis Cespedes, who would not have required surrendering the 26th pick in the draft, remaining free agents such as Dexter Fowler and Ian Desmond both held this stigma.
Chicago’s brain trust didn’t necessarily overvalue the pick when considered in a vacuum. It did stand as their compensation for losing free agent Jeff Samardzija. The right-hander cratered in Chicago and a supplemental first round pick was a way to mitigate the loss of trade headliner Marcus Semien.
I was certainly in the camp that it made little sense to part with a draft pick to sign Ian Desmond or Dexter Fowler to a multi-year pact. The calculus changed some when both players settled for one year deals. At that point the pick could have been recouped the following off-season as both players will undoubtedly receive a qualifying offer this fall.
In isolation, parting with the comp pick was ill-advised but when viewed in context with prior transactions, it seemed counter-intuitive not to. The moment the Sox parted with a trio of young talent in Trayce Thompson, Frankie Montas, and Micah Johnson for veteran infielder Todd Frazier, the onus was placed on the front office to deliver in 2016 and 2017.
Regardless of direction, front offices must be consistent in whichever route they choose. The congruent course of action after sacrificing controllable players for Frazier, would have been to sacrifice a draft pick to reinforce that move so the acquisition price wouldn’t go for naught. Yet, Chicago seemed to have cognitive dissonance regarding how they approached the rest of the off-season. Their subsequent actions simply did not align with their perceived win-now mentality.
The implication for this off-season is Chicago will have to make an internal decision on that draft pick before they make any other transactions. It can’t be a fluid decision that comes later because it will only make them vulnerable to the inconsistency that has plagued them in the past. Once they iron out their openness to parting with that pick, the script for the rest of the off-season will inevitably appear in front of them. To demonstrate this, I’ll lay out two contingencies surrounding how this decision should inform how they subsequently operate.
Unwilling to Part With Draft Pick
Nick Hostetler’s excellent 2016 draft shows just how valuable a larger spending pool and a portfolio of early round picks can be. Potentially impact talent was infused into the farm in bunches and replenished a system that had begun to dry out.
In 2015, Chicago sacrificed its second and third round picks to bring in David Robertson and Melky Cabrera respectively. A similar strategy would need to be used this offseason to properly supplement the current core, except this time around a first-round pick would be on the cutting table.
If Hahn and company are in any way remiss to punt an early draft pick in favor of bringing in an aging star such as Edwin Encarnacion, then it should be quite clear where their real priorities lie.
Here’s a quote from Rick Hahn in one of MLB.com’s Scott Merkin’s offseason pieces:
“You saw this last offseason — at the end — we made a couple of smaller moves as a means of trying to plug our holes, some of which panned out better than others,” Hahn said. “If we were a little more aggressive, perhaps, from a standpoint of a full measure as opposed to arguably a half-measure in a certain scenario, then conceivably, the results would have been different.”
Here’s Hahn indirectly addressing some of that cognitive dissonance in which an aggressive win-now mentality was met with reserved behavior. The key here is that the level of aggressiveness has to be written in sharpie before they proceed.
If a QO free agent is off the table, then options such as Pedro Alvarez, Brandon Moss, and Mitch Moreland would qualify as mere “half-measure” plugs. The concept of 2017 being a contending year would vanish immediately.
Clearly defining this stance internally will enable the White Sox to aggressively listen on their assets with minimal hesitation. Proactive pragmatism about the pick will make Hahn much more likely to pull the trigger on a fire sale deal should an attractive offer arise.
It’s no secret that pitching starved teams such as the Boston Red Sox and Texas Rangers will come calling in the offseason. If Dave Dombrowski is willing to part with an arm such as Eduardo Rodriguez in addition to three of Andrew Benintendi, Yoan Moncada, Rafael Devers, and Blake Swihart, then Chris Sale might be dying his socks red.
If Hahn has any hesitancy of parting with that comp pick, then the decision has been made for him and a deal like this should be a no-brainer.
From there, that’s really the first domino. Jose Quintana, Frazier, Melky Cabrera, and Jose Abreu deals could follow. Chicago would elect to vault itself into a top five farm system and 2019 would be the new target year. At the very least, it’s easy to see why keeping the pick and contending should be mutually exclusive.
Willing To Part With Draft Pick
It was strange when the White Sox held onto the 26th pick in the draft in lieu of adding an impact player, as they ultimately drafted reliever Zack Burdi. The rationale was that his power arm could help out down the stretch. Burdi isn’t a bad pick as he very well could have a future as a high leverage reliever. Adding a refined change up to his arsenal teases at the idea of him even being worked out as a starter. Either way, he’s a high floor player whose stuff can play in the pen relatively soon.
What the Burdi pick highlights though is the danger of indecisiveness. It would have been an impossible task to evaluate the 2016 draft field, much less project it in January, but that is exactly why Chicago should have already come to a conclusion beforehand.
Keeping the pick at the cost of adding immediate talent screamed future-driven for a team supposedly in redux of all-in. Then their draft pick hinted at the latter, but with three months already down the drain.
Adding surgically repaired sutures rather than band-aids will put the White Sox in a position to truly make some noise in 2017.
When Hahn sits down and asks himself if the team is focused on the present or the future, what to do with the 12th pick will be the most telling indicator. If Hahn deems that 40 percent of the rotation being Cy Young caliber and bats like Eaton, Abreu, Melky, Frazier, and Anderson already being in place isn’t worth selling short on, then that pick is just one more chip to be pushed forward.
Once willing to part with the pick, the White Sox can lead aggressive pursuits for the likes of Yoenis Cespedes, who will almost assuredly opt-out, or slugger Encarnacion.
After inking one of these players, Chicago will still have to insulate by looking at players without the QO attached. Here’s where guys like Josh Reddick, Jon Jay, and potentially Matt Wieters become insurance rather than the big ticket items.
Adding surgically repaired sutures rather than band-aids will put the White Sox in a position to truly make some noise in 2017.
To continue the theme of eliminating cognitive dissonance, the decision to part with the pick should manifest itself in other ways as well.
White Sox beat writer Scott Merkin got a good quote from Hahn regarding this:
“It makes you feel that if, in fact, you are going to focus strictly on trying to win in ’17, you are going to have to go outside and you may have to put a little bit of a dent into some of what you already started to build into the future, which weighs into it,” Hahn told MLB.com. “You might have to use some of them [in trades] if that’s your focus.
What should you extrapolate from this? Well, it means that a team willing to part with the number twelve pick should have no reservations about dangling someone like Carson Fulmer to reinforce that. If Fulmer is the centerpiece that gets the San Diego Padres talking Will Myers, a player with only three years of control left and entering arbitration, then you engage.
The key is staying on message. Just as Chicago parted with young talent for Frazier but not the pick, parting with the pick shouldn’t preclude them from parting with young talent. It’s all about committing to a direction and pushing all resources to said direction. That’s the name of the game.
Picking A Lane
To this point I’ve described how Chicago’s draft position could inform their offseason, not necessarily how it will. As a third party observer, my own inclinations about the pick and overarching direction have wavered like a boat on choppy seas.
About the only thing my disposition is clear on, is what the White Sox absolutely cannot do. They cannot take the hybrid approach.
Hybrid is really a synonym for mediocrity and a team “mired in mediocrity” can only tread water for so long before it drowns. It’s easy to be cynical about an organization that has treated decisiveness like the plague, but a few encouraging signs have surfaced.
Here’s some more Hahn quotes courtesy of Scott Merkin’s piece:
“There is no one within the organization who feels let’s just do exactly what we are doing right now and we are going to have better results,” Hahn said.
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the inherent definition of insanity, so it’s a low bar to expect the Sox will finally deviate from the status quo. I certainly expect them to.
The 2016 off-season is a crossroads like no other for the South Siders. For the first time in a while, it seems as though the brain trust has had honest conversations about what either full measure approach will look like.
“But I do feel certainly the notion of, we’re going to go for it in the 2017 season, [it] is going to involve a level of economic commitment.”
My interpretation of that is we’ll either see a big ticket free agent in a Sox jersey or a big ticket member of the current roster in another. Either of those things should be reassuring as a clear initiative far exceeds mundane roster toiling.
Next: White Sox Season Review: Grading the Starting Pitchers
An unprotected first round draft pick is just the igniter Chicago needs to finally set it on a clear path. The 2017 draft pick isn’t just about picking a new member of the franchise, but rather about picking a new lane entirely.