3 offseason targets we’re glad the White Sox didn’t sign

The Chicago White Sox have had a terrible season so far. They are not very good on a consistent basis and now the postseason is looking bleak. A lot of it is because of the fact that they didn’t do anything during the offseason that helped them take a step forward.

Before and after the lockout, there were plenty of great players available for them to sign. There were even some that filled positions of need for a decent price but they didn’t do any of that. The biggest moves they made were the signings of Josh Harrison and Vince Velasquez.

Luckily, some of their biggest targets are ones that are not having very good years at all. Not every single signing is going to work and hindsight says that the White Sox were wise to let a few of them go (that doesn’t excuse them from being totally quiet).

Sometimes, you save your money and get made fun of for it but it ends up working out in the end. These are the three players that the White Sox actually look smart for avoiding:

The Chicago White Sox were smart to let the Texas Rangers pay Marcus Semien.

The Chicago White Sox had Marcus Semien once upon a time. When they traded him away, he became a superstar player with the Oakland A’s before taking it to the Toronto Blue Jays for a year. That earned him a massive contract with the Texas Rangers.

Now the Rangers have to pay him a lot of money over a long period of time. At 31 years old (he will be 32 soon), that contract already looks bad because he is having an abysmal (by his standards) season so far.

It is possible that he figures it out soon and is good fr the first half of the contract but the White Sox don’t need to be paying an underachieving player all of that money. It would have been exciting at the moment but it is probably good that they missed this one.

The Chicago White Sox already have offensive problems and don’t need more.

The Chicago White Sox fans got to see Javier Baez a fair amount as he played most of his career so far with the Chicago Cubs. He was mostly an All-Star level player with them as he could hit the ball far and play incredible defense. For a long time, he was the complete package.

The Cubs decided to trade away their entire core (or let them go in free agency) and Baez was one of the victims. He was traded to the New York Mets at the 2021 deadline. Things did not go well there as he was fine but the team did not take that step into the playoffs.

Over the offseason, he decided to take his talents out of New York and join the Detroit Tigers. Going into the year, with the addition of Baez, the Tigers believed that they would be one of the better teams in the American League but they have failed to meet that expectation.

Luckily, they paid Baez to be a borderline bad baseball player and the White Sox didn’t invest all of that money in him. The White Sox would have had him play second base in all likelihood which would have been nice for his defense but his bat would have left a lot to be desired so far.

Obviously, for all three guys, we don’t know how they would have played if they came to Chicago but it is good to know that the Sox aren’t locked into the bad contracts. People get on them for being cheap and it is true but sometimes being cheap can help you too. We have to hope that they can now use that money that they saved to help them win more.