Now That The White Sox Have Yasmani Grandal, It’s Time For Pitching

White Sox general manager Rick Hahn effectively signaled the end of the team’s three-year rebuild by signing catcher Yasmani Grandal to a four-year, $73 million deal on Thursday.

This is the biggest contract given by the White Sox since Jose Abreu’s in 2014. Last offseason, they made a play for Manny Machado but ultimately lost him to the San Diego Padres in the eleventh hour. This winter, the White Sox were aggressive in the free agent market for the first time in many years.

By signing Grandal so early in the offseason, Hahn and his front office are showing that the White Sox are done with finishing below .500 and the rebuild phase for the team is over.

The next logical step – and a bigger one than adding a catcher – is getting top-tier starting pitching. The White Sox have an exciting core of young starters in Lucas Giolito, Dylan Cease, Reynaldo Lopez, and Michael Kopech, but that group needs a veteran presence.

Giolito was brilliant in 2019 but has just the one successful season under his belt, Cease has pitched only 73 major league innings so far, Lopez is capable of looking like he belongs at both ends of the rotation and often waffles between the two poles from start to start, and Kopech threw only 14.1 innings in 2018 before needing Tommy John surgery.

The best choices for the White Sox to supplement this group are either Gerrit Cole or Stephen Strasburg. Both will command hefty contracts, but even after signing Grandal, the White Sox will have an expected payroll of $95,480,333 in 2020, according to Roster Resource. Next year’s luxury tax threshold is $208 million, so Chicago will have plenty of payroll space to be big players in the pitching market.

Cole finished second in American League Cy Young voting behind now former teammate Justin Verlander after winning 20 games in 2019 and leading baseball in strikeouts (326). He won’t turn 30 until next September and has been healthy through most of his career, so the appeal is obvious. The White Sox rotation would improve significantly with Cole and Giolito at the top.

If not Cole, the White Sox could do a lot worse than Strasburg as a second choice. He lead the National League with 18 wins in 2019 while throwing 209 innings, his highest total number of innings since 2014. In the postseason, Strasburg pitched well through the division and championship series, but he won the World Series MVP thanks largely to his masterful performance in Game 6. Strasburg signed a seven-year extension with the Nationals in 2016 but opted out to test free agency in 2020. His base salary last season was $35 million, so any team that makes an offer will have to operate with that in mind.

After those two, the free agent market for pitching is still strong. Zack Wheeler, Madison Bumgarner, and Hyun-Jin Ryu are all available. The Mets chose to keep Wheeler at the trade deadline and may make a push to keep him this winter, but he would be a very appealing third choice behind Cole and Strasburg for the White Sox. Ryu was an All-Star and finished second in National League Cy Young voting last year.

But of this group, Bumgarner is the best fit for Chicago.

It’s easy to forget that Bumgarner just turned 30 in August because he made his debut in 2009, when he was just 19. He’s a three-time World Series champion with the San Francisco Giants, and the MVP of both the NLCS and World Series in 2014. Injuries limited Bumgarner in 2017 and 2018, but last season he made a league-leading 34 starts and threw over 200 innings for the first time since 2016. Bumgarner had six straight seasons of at least 200 innings from 2011 to 2016.

If the White Sox do not sign Cole or Strasburg, then Bumgarner would be an excellent fit for their rotation. He would obviously be able to mentor young pitchers like Giolito, Cease, and Kopech, but Bumgarner would also be able to give the White Sox a lot of quality innings on the mound as well.

It was the pitching staff that turned out to be a part of the selling point for Grandal, and adding someone like Cole, Strasburg, or Bumgarner would take that group forward signficantly.

“I don't care where I'm going as long as I see a future in the pitching staff,” Grandal told reporters Thursday. “If I see that I can help that pitching staff, for me that's pretty much No. 1. So, their sales pitch was: Look at the young arms we have, look at the guys we have coming up. We have an opportunity here to win, and we think you can help them out.”

Grandal signed a one-year deal with the Milwaukee Brewers last winter because, as he put it, the free agent market at that time was nonexistent. His gamble paid off.

Now it’s time for the White Sox to make the right step toward finishing their rebuild by signing the best free agent starting pitcher they can.

“I loved their professionalism, their preparation, and the direction of the program,” Grandal said of the White Sox. “At the end of the day, they were able to get the equity, and that's where we needed to be at to get it done. That, to me, it just showed me that they really wanted me, and they wanted me to be a part of the future in Chicago. That's one of the reasons why we decided to sign.”