White Sox’ horrid start is just the start: ‘This wasn’t going to be a quick fix by any stretch’

Get comfortable, White Sox fans. This might take a while.

Chris Getz was promoted to general manager last summer in part because he could bring a new winning era around quicker than anyone else, so said Jerry Reinsdorf, who didn’t interview any outside candidates to replace Ken Williams and Rick Hahn atop the baseball department.

“One of the things I owe the fans is to get better as fast as we can possibly get better,” Reinsdorf said the day Getz was introduced as Hahn’s successor. “Speed is of the essence. I don’t want this to be a long-term proposition.

“Everybody talks about when you build a building, the foundation comes first. We’ve got a foundation here. We’re not going to take the guys that we have now and clean out and start over again. We’re definitely not going to do that.”

But that seems to be what he and White Sox fans got anyway.

We’ll see if there are player-development surprises or unexpectedly massive contracts for free agents that speed things along. But right now, it seems the White Sox’ miserable start — a franchise-worst three wins through 25 games — is just the beginning of a new long-term project on the South Side.

“The easiest thing to do is to just focus on the results of your major league club,” Getz said Friday. “And I get it. We’re here to win games at the major league level. But you’ve got to look at the foundation of an organization, you’ve got to look at every department, you’ve got to make sure you’re sound in all those areas because at the end, that’s a byproduct of every process that exists. And it takes time.

“This wasn’t going to be a quick fix by any stretch. We had a lot of areas that needed to be improved. It’s my job to do that and make good decisions for the health of the organization.”

Getz spent a lengthy media session Friday — which followed the team’s oh-fer road trip through Philadelphia and Minnesota — talking about that desire to improve the health of the organization and touting victories in the minor leagues. He’s well aware, of course, of just how disappointing this start has been, even for a team with rock-bottom outside expectations. But there was little mention of big league urgency and much mention of player development.

You know, rebuild stuff.

“You look at the farm system and the prospects that we have and those rankings and how we compare to other organizations, and we’re climbing up there,” he said. “I hope to get us toward the top. That’s something that we’re set out to do. When you have a good farm system, that’s an indication of talent that is coming that has a chance to be impactful and will get you wins at the major league level.

“We’re getting healthy. We certainly need to get healthier.”

Not that Getz is wrong, of course. He took the reins of the franchise with an intent of engineering a top-to-bottom makeover. He voiced a desire to establish an organization-wide identity that he said hadn’t existed prior. Those kinds of things do take time, a lot of it.

But he, Pedro Grifol and basically everyone in the White Sox’ employ bristled at the word “rebuild” late last season and throughout the offseason, surely a reaction to Hahn’s project failing to reach its expected heights. The connotation of that word, which once landed Hahn’s face on T-shirts, has now turned poisonous for a frustrated fan base.

And the fans aren’t the only ones, as Reinsdorf’s comments illustrated.

That the White Sox were in rebuilding mode was plenty obvious before Friday. Reinsdorf didn’t want another teardown, but his handpicked general manager traded Dylan Cease away in March, shipping the team’s top pitcher out of town right before the season began.

But that came before the team faceplanted to this woeful start, a sequel to 2023’s miserable April that no one wanted. After going 8-21 before May 1 last year, the White Sox came into Friday’s series-opener with the Rays at 3-22, one of the worst 25-game starts in baseball history. The offense isn’t scoring any runs, the pitching is giving up a lot of runs, and an offseason focus on defense and fundamentals hasn’t yielded the expected improvement in those areas.

While the record is worse, the clubhouse seems to be in much better shape than it was at this time a year ago, one positive result of Getz’s offseason work, which often appeared to go hand in hand with significantly lowering the team’s payroll. But that’s one of a very small number of things that have gone right.

And so the worst news of all for White Sox fans and the chairman might be that this might not get turned around, at least not dramatically, anytime soon. Sure, things should get better than 3-22. But much better?

Getz can tout all the positives he wants in player development, his old department, but the minor leagues don’t harbor the kind of eye-popping talent that defined the Hahn rebuild. While Colson Montgomery is among the game’s highest rated prospects, there’s not a fleet of easily identifiable future stars like there was when Cease, Luis Robert Jr., Eloy Jiménez, Lucas Giolito, Yoán Moncada, Michael Kopech and Andrew Vaughn had fans salivating about the future.

And even if there is talent — there is; the White Sox have indeed climbed those farm-system rankings from their previous place toward the bottom of such lists — it’s not coming with much rapidity, as Getz readily admitted.

“I certainly don’t want to rush any of our players from our minor league system,” he said. “They’re maturing on a daily basis. There’s been so many bright spots, Kannapolis up to Charlotte, and obviously those are strong indications of greater success in the future. I know everyone wants it to happen now, but we’ve got to be patient and go about it the right way with those players.”

So what’s it all mean for 2024?

Getz put an offseason focus on defensive and cultural improvement, at times, at the expense of improving one of the game’s least productive lineups. And losing Robert and Moncada to injury has only weakened that lineup. In other words, runs might remain hard to come by.

In an effort to inject anything into a moribund offense, Tommy Pham was brought up Friday. Mike Clevinger will soon follow as an addition to the rotation. This rebuilding team sure has a lot of veterans on it, the best outcome of which might be landing a prospect or two in deadline deals.

“You’ve got six months to play baseball, and we’re at the end of April. There’s going to be plenty of at-bats and plenty of innings for our young players that we want to see up here,” Getz said. “We want to surround them with guys who have had some success, and there’s a lot of value in that. Certainly, some of these players that get the opportunity on one-year deals to show what they can offer to Major League Baseball, there’s other chances to perhaps grab some value at the trade deadline or at some point to help once again to get our organization healthy.”

Getz’s repeated use of that phrasing means the organization isn’t healthy now and wasn’t when he took over. That conclusion is not the result of some shocking development, of course; the top two baseball decision-makers lost their jobs.

But it indicates that there might be a lot of losing still to come.

Reinsdorf didn’t want a drawn-out process that could take years, didn’t want to go through another three-year stretch like 2017, 2018 and 2019, which saw his White Sox lose a whopping 284 games.

But less than a year into his tenure as general manager, Getz is already reminding folks how long this might take.

This start? This 3-22 start?

It’s just that: the start.

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