After a dismal start to the 2023 season, the Chicago White Sox decided to become sellers at the trade deadline, trading the likes of Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo López, Lance Lynn, Jake Burger, and others. This was the final nail in the coffin of their competitive window, and rebuild 2.0 had officially begun.
In the following weeks, the Sox relieved VP of Baseball Operations Kenny Williams and General Manager Rick Hahn of their duties, handing the reigns to then Assistant GM Chris Getz to navigate the organization through this second attempt at building a competitive baseball team. This move naturally came with criticism, as promoting Rick Hahn’s right-hand man after a failure to build a sustainable competitive roster seemed like a step backward. There was disbelief in this hire resulting in any operational changes; it just felt like the same ole’ White Sox. Instead, Chris Gets has strayed away from the previous White Sox practices. The front office looks completely different, and there appears to be a major shift in the overall approach to building this team from the ground up.
While only time will tell if this will be any different than the previous rebuild that resulted in just two playoff wins and two first-round playoff exits, the processes now vs. then look completely different.
Depth vs. top-end talent
There was really only one clear focus throughout the Rick Hahn-led rebuild: accumulate top-tier prospects. At the time, it looked like Hahn was successful in his goal, as the Sox had a top-ranked farm system that possessed a plethora of top-100-ranked prospects. The problem with that? The dropoff after those top-tier prospects was too dramatic to overcome any shortcomings.
With the core intact, the White Sox showed their full potential, making the playoffs in both 2020 and 2021. As we all know, however, injuries happen. Where Hahn’s staff failed was building organizational depth that could pick up the slack when the team’s top players were hurt, or prospects didn’t develop as planned. Their lack of internal options forced the White Sox to transition natural first basemen Andrew Vaughn and Gavin Sheets to the outfield when Eloy Jimenez pulled his hamstring for the umpteenth time and relied on them again when Oscar Colas proved he wasn’t ready to handle MLB pitching. This lack of organizational depth reared its ugly head time and time again, and when the injuries became too much to handle, the team’s playoff window shut down. The organization banked on one group of players panning out, and that failure eventually snowballed to where we are now.
Getz has made it clear in his first full season as the White Sox general manager that he has learned from Hahn’s mistakes. Last offseason, it was obvious there was a lack of respectable pitching depth throughout the organization. Getz turned that around very quickly, acquiring a plethora of pitching prospects and several veterans to compete for roster spots. This offseason, he has continued to add, and while only a few select pitchers like Martin Perez and Davis Martin appear to be cemented into starter roles, he has created a competition that involves 8+ pitchers to fight to earn a limited amount of rotation spots. This type of competition was lacking in the previous rebuild, and should promote a healthy and productive competitiveness between the pitchers.
This offseason, the focus has shifted to building the depth of position players. Case and point: Rick Hahn may have been content to give top prospect Edgar Quer the starting catcher job heading into this season without any competition. While Quero has certainly earned the chance to battle for that role, Getz has made it clear it won’t be just given to him. He has since acquired Kyle Teel as the headliner of the Garrett Crochet trade, and brought in veteran Matt Thaiss to add competition to earn an opening-day roster spot. This move gives the Sox room for error, as they now have two catching prospects who can develop into impact players, and a veteran to take the pressure off of them to make an impact from day one. If both Teel and Quero develop as expected, then great! There are plenty of ways to get them both in the lineup. However, if one of them can’t cut it at the MLB level, the Sox have given themselves an extra swing at finding their long-term answer to an important position. This is a luxury Hahn failed to provide for himself.
This is just one example of the different strategies Getz is implementing to build up this organization. While there is still a long way to go, the tactics he is implementing this time around are more consistent with what successful MLB teams do.
Complementary roster building
Building off the last point, there appears to be more thoughtfulness going into the roster building this time around than there was eight years ago. Rick Hahn had a consistent desire to acquire talented players, but where he missed was the long-term vision to see how they would all fit together. The team eventually consisted of multiple players who lacked impactful defensive homes and players who had overly aggressive hitting approaches. This resulted in two major weaknesses: bad defense and streaky offense. We are now seeing an overcorrection here, as these are the two areas that Getz has prioritized the most in acquiring position players.
We can look at the position players Getz has acquired and see how they fit these themes. Recently signed Josh Rojas, while not regarded as a guaranteed regular, is a positive contributor as a middle infielder, and has a career walk rate of around 10%. His biggest acquisition to date, Kyle Teel, is regarded as having an advanced eye at the plate and has posted elite K/BB rates throughout each MiLB stop There is also little question he will be an at least average defensive catcher. Even Miguel Vargas, despite his struggles at the plate, still posted a walk rate above 10% on the season, allowing him to still contribute despite an abysmal .150 batting average
Again using Rojas as an example, aside from his ability to draw walks has posted excellent defensive metrics. in 2024 he was good for 8 Defensive Runs Saved while playing 2B, 3B, and LF throughout the season for the Mariners. In the past, the White Sox’s idea of defensive versatility was playing positionless players at 1B and in the outfield, leading to defensive efforts that were at times laughable. True outfielders, such as Mike Tauchman and Austin Slater, were brought into the fold this season to compete for playing time while the Sox continue to develop younger outfield prospects. While neither is guaranteed to even end the season on the roster, they provide a veteran presence and a sense of reliability to a position that has been anything but over the last several seasons. This all emulates Rick Hahn’s mistake that Getz has made very clear he will not be repeating.
Shift in approach to player development
Again, the Chris Getz promotion was met with much criticism, as hiring from the previous failed regime seems like a path toward repeating the same mistakes. However, Getz had a front-row seat of the last rebuild’s failure and took the job knowing that things had to be different this time around. Following his promotion, he immediately gutted the front office and hired new faces to lead the scouting and developmental departments. Even more importantly, these hires are coming from outside organizations and don’t have previous connections to the old White Sox ways.
Last offseason White Sox brought in Brian Bannister to oversee the pitching development for the entire organization, including both professional and amateur pitching. With him leading the charge, the White Sox saw recently traded Garrett Crochet blossom into a legitimate ace, and top prospect Noah Schultz evolve into one of baseball’s elite pitching prospects. He also assisted numerous other young pitchers to become ready to make their MLB debut in 2024, and over the course of the season, the White Sox pitching staff became respectable despite a lack of high-end talent. With a full season under his belt, the young pitchers in this organization should continue to grow, and with the organizational depth Gets has built up, Bannister should have no issues developing several of these guys into legitimate MLB pieces.
This offseason, Getz was determined to find a counterpart to Bannister on the hitting side. He believes he found just that, hiring Ryan Fuller as the Director of Hitting back in November. Fuller spent 2024 as a co-hitting coach for the Baltimore Orioles, where young phenoms like Adley Rutchman, Jackson Holliday, and Gunnar Henderson have thrived at the plate. He played a pivotal role in building plans for these players to tap into their ability at the plate, and instill a philosophy that resulted in a top 5 run-producing offense. In Chicago, he will be tasked with working with Marcus Thames to turn around a historically bad lineup. This will involve getting Luis Robert back on track and putting together plans for when top prospects Kyle Teel, Colson Montgomery, and Edgar Quero make their highly anticipated MLB debuts this season.
The White Sox did not have a Brian Bannister or a Ryan Fuller equivalent eight years ago, and their developmental strategies have since been highly scrutinized. This time around, they are taking a different approach, one that is more consistent with teams that are successful in development and roster building.
Overhauling the amateur scouting department
One of the most important aspects of b building sustainable depth in an MLB organization is amateur scouting. This includes the ability to scout both MLB draft prospects and identify international prospects to sign every international signing period. The last rebuild made it glaringly obvious that the White Sox were behind the mark in both areas.
In 2019, the White Sox inked Mike Shirley to become their new Amateur Scouting Director, and he has been one of the few members of the front office who has earned the chance to stick around for the Chris Getz era. Shirley has spearheaded scouting efforts for every draft since 2020, where they selected Garrett Crochet in the first round. Since then, he has drafted three of our top prospects Noah Schultz, Colson Montgomery, and Hagen Smith, while also identifying MLB contributors in later rounds, such as Brooks Baldwin, Sean Burke, and Jonathan Cannon. The Sox’s ability to identify and draft prospects has dramatically increased since the beginning of the previous rebuild, leading to a larger player pool to bolster the MLB roster long-term.
International scouting is still well behind the curve, unfortunately. The White Sox have finally begun to shift away from a focus on older “closer to the MLB” prospects who have continuously fizzled out and instead have shifted toward scouting the younger prospect group who offers more upside and talent despite being further away from MLB readiness. This still hasn’t netted successful results, however, as signings such as Erick Hernandez and Eduardo Herrera have failed to live up to their pre-signing hype (with Hernandez being released this offseason). Because of this area of weakness, Getz made the decision to part ways with long-time international scouting director Marco Paddy.
Getz has since tabbed David Keller to run their international scouting efforts. Keller, who was previously with the New York Mets, has been tasked with overhauling the Sox international scouting efforts as a whole. Since most international prospects agree to contracts years before they are eligible to officially sign, it will be a few years before we fully see the efforts of Keller’s international signing classes come to fruition. While we don’t know a ton about Keller, we do know he is an outside hire who will have a different approach to what the Sox have done for the last decade plus.
The purpose of this article is not to convince you that this rebuild will result in the success we hoped for last time. Rebuilds are volatile, and as much as we want to pretend that we know which prospects will hit and which ones won’t, we don’t. What we should take away from what we have seen so far from Chris Getz, however, is that this is not a complete repeat of the last time. Rick Hahn had a very specific approach to his rebuilding efforts, and it is clear that it was a complete failure.
The approach Chris Getz has taken since being named Hahn’s replacement as the White Sox general manager has been taken in a different direction. Getz has realized from his time under Hahn that banking on one specific group to be the future core leaves the team with little to no margin for error, and in an aspect as volatile as prospect development, the most likely outcome from an approach like that is failure. Because of this, Getz has done everything in his power to give the organization plenty of bullets to hit when one shot misses. While we don’t know if Getz will be more successful than Hahn was, we can say with certainty that it won’t be an exact repeat of the last time.
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