White-Sox Slight Evolves Into Might: A Deep Look At Tanking And Rebuilding

Finally! Finally, someone from the media gets what it means to be a White Sox fan. For years the South Siders have been forgotten and ignored by the media as the also-rans of Chicago. ESPN consistently snubs their 2005 world-series championship while the Cubs’ prodigious losing streak drove the narrative in America’s Second City. Remember this one from last year?

…And this…

...hold my beer…

Many of these oversights were committed by ESPN but they are far from a solo-act in their grotesque ignorance. The Chicago Tribune just cut their White Sox and Hawks beat writers, something they would never, NEVER consider doing to the Cubs. The response from Cubs fans would be swift and damaging. I guess White Sox fans are less so…? But Rany Jazayerli of The Ringer and Baseball Prospectus, a bona fide Royals fan, Cubs adopter and Sox-hater has sympathy for the Sox. His explanation is cloaked in an exhortation of how well the White Sox have “tanked” and rebuilt the organization, and qualifies his admiration for anything associated with the Sox with Royals-blue.

“As a dyed-in-the-wool Royals fan,” Jazayerli writes, “a healthy hatred of the White Sox had been my rightful inheritance, one forged in a division rivalry now in its 50th season and tempered in the 1980s when archaic television practices meant my team was rarely on TV. When they were, as often as not it was because they were playing the White Sox, whose WGN broadcasts played nationally, my venom hardening to the soundtrack of Hawk Harrelson’s voice shamelessly rooting for the Southsiders.”

Jazayerli swallows a bitter tonic in admitting the White Sox 2005 championship was every bit as historic as the Boston Red Sox in 2004 and the Cubs in 2016. The White Sox had endured 88 years of depression leading up to 2005 and part of what makes the Sox aught-championship easily snubbed is how they decimated their opponents. Only one other team – the Yankees – completed a postseason 10 games above .500.

“Not only did those White Sox win the franchise’s first title in 88 years, they did so in spectacular fashion, going 11-1 in the postseason, tied for the best playoff record in the wild-card era. (The 1999 Yankees are the only other team in history to finish 10 games above .500 in the playoffs.) They got four consecutive complete-game victories from their starting pitchers against the Angels in the ALCS, a feat more at home in 1905 than 2005, and followed that with the most exciting World Series sweep ever, beating the Astros by a combined six runs in four games. They ended a historic run of futility with a historic performance in the postseason.”

Finally, credit where credit is due. Later, Jazayerli dives into a full-throated and dense comparison of the White Sox to the Cubs and Astros rebuild. He dips into the various trades that lead to success, many of them sage-like, but what hit me square in the mouth was his indictment of the White Sox farm-system as a heaping pile of garbage for decades.

“When players aged out of their jobs or left via free agency, GM Kenny Williams brought in veterans like Alex Rios and Adam Dunn to paper over the fact that the farm system was perennially one of the worst in baseball. They drafted poorly. They routinely traded their best prospects to stay competitive at the moment—including somehow trading Gio González twice before he reached the majors. And their ability to find talent in Latin America was crippled by scandal: In 2008, their senior director of player personnel, David Wilder, was fired (and eventually sentenced to prison) for skimming money off Latin American players’ signing bonuses.”

I was part of the farm system in that window and Dave Wilder was a name I knew well. Something else we all knew was that we were mostly placeholders with very little chance of making it to the big leagues. Gio Gonzalez, Chris Carter and Brandon Allen are a few names that reached the majors, none of them with the White Sox. Stefan Gartrell – a teammate of mine and part of the 2006 draft class – was a mid- and postseason all-star in 2011 for Charlotte after cranking 26 home runs and 94 runs batted in and still couldn't persuade the White Sox brass for a cup of coffee. Despite his big-league build and consistent production, Gartrell was blocked by Alex Rios and swapped back and forth to the Braves, eventually washing out of baseball with the understanding he just wasn’t going to get his shot. The last straw for Gartrell may have been when Alejandro De Aza was called up instead of him. But that is in the past. Rick Hahn has tanked without tanking and the White Sox have skimmed an elite congress of prospects so close to the majors that optimism around Guaranteed Rate Field is already swelling. An incredible factoid Jazayerli noted is that the South Siders never had a prospect ranked in the top-3 by Baseball America since BA started publishing the rankings in 1990 – the first, Yoan Moncada. And one day later, after the Hahn flipped Adam Eaton for a quartet of elite pitchers from the Washington Nationals, the White Sox had three players in BA’s top-3. In a matter of 24 hours, the White Sox had vaulted from the cellar of minor-league systems to a top-5, gleaming prospect pool.