“We now have some financial flexibility to continue to bring in talent.”
Talk about a real knee-breaker. The White Sox GM certainly knows how to tell them.
Chris Getz made that comment after the Luis Robert Jr. trade. with the Mets, a move that not only forced everyone on the team to figure out how to type the ñ in Luisangel Acuña’s name, but also took Robert’s $20 million salary off the books. Of course, most of the coverage had to do with the trade itself, which is understandable, but left little to no coverage of Getz’s joke about financial flexibility.
That’s a sad omission, but not the only one. Both the Mets and Rangers (who originally drafted Ronald Acuña’s little brother) had him signed up as a center fielder despite his elite speed due to a tendency to take, um, let’s say, “creative” routes in the more or less (usually less) general direction of the fly balls coming his way.
(Forgive me with a caveat: acquiring a star player’s brother may be a big step better than acquiring a brother-in-law, but it’s still a big step for Soxkind to actually get the star himself.)
Both teams selected Luisangel as a middle infielder, a category the White Sox have in abundance, with Colson Montgomery at short, a slew of shortstops working their way through the system (or about to be drafted?), and a deep stack of useful infielders who themselves had hopes of starting at second or third. With Acuña out of options, Chase Meidroth, Miguel Vargas, Lenyn Sosa, Curtis Mead, Bryan Ramos, etc. may not have been excited about the trade. (Yes, it’s probably better to have too many middle infielders than too many 1B/DH types like a few years ago, and we all have terrible memories of Jacob Amaya, but such a surplus is still not particularly useful.)
Of course, we can’t forget that the Sox also picked up a low-minors pitcher from Harvard, who should be able to help the other players with their homework.
The real problem, however, is Getz’s quote. Let’s look at it again, in case you’ve already forgotten, as apparently almost everyone who covered the White Sox did.
“We now have some financial flexibility to continue to bring in talent.”
On any other team, that could be a serious statement. On the White Sox? Not so much.
Sure, saving 20 million smackers is a big chunk, even bigger than the $17 million going to Munetaka Murakami. It also doesn’t cover the $10 million then offered to Seranthony Dominguez to be the 2026 closer — a move that Grant Taylor probably didn’t make, but throw in the savings on Josh Rojas, Aaron Civale, Martín Pérez and Mike Tauchman and there’s plenty left over for the other offseason picks.
Which brings us to why it’s all just a joke:
What financial flexibility was missing before the transaction, Chris? Can you take your lips off Jerry Reinsdorf’s ass long enough to answer that?
Different sites come up with different team payroll figures, measuring at different times and in different ways, but let’s go with USA Today because they used 2025 Opening Day figures, adjusted for other things. They had the Sox at 27th — more generous than most odds — at $82,279,825.
That’s only higher than the two teams that played the season in minor league parks and the Marlins, and half the level they would have needed to reach 15th out of 30 teams (Orioles). It’s almost $120 million less than 10th place, which happened to be a team that also plays in Chicago. It’s so low that the White Sox could have signed both Shohei Ohtani And Kyle Tucker and had plenty of room under the salary cap. If you add Juan Soto to that, they’re still not at the top.
Want to see what else is possible? The Athletic this week listed the top seven remaining free agents, and the money gap between the Sox and the Top 10 allowed them to sign them all, including old friend Lucas Giolito.
Financial flexibility? The financial flexibility on the South Side is virtually infinite! Or it would be, if they had real ownership instead of being led by a player-, fan-, and media-hating control freak who will lead the charge for a lockout in the 2027 season, be damned.
With de-Scrooge-ification, Getz’s line wouldn’t just be a bad joke. But we all know the one thing that will make that happen.
The White Sox, or at least Reinsdorf, love to cry poor and claim to be only the lowly second team in the third market. So be it today. But in 1981, the year the MLB got White Sox fans by denying a sale to Ed DeBartolo and forcing Bill Veeck to sell to Reinsdorf instead and the Tribune Corp. bought the Cubs, Sox attendance was nearly double that of the Cubs — 946,651 to 565,637 — and it remained higher until 1985, three years before Wrigley Field got lighting.
It’s not just recently that Mr. Potter has poisoned everything he touches.
#Chris #Getz #sense #humor