Chris Getz angers fans by revealing White Sox’ free-agency approach, but why is anyone surprised?

The Chicago White Sox aren’t going to be doing much in free agency this winter?

Oh wow, stop the presses.

General manager Chris Getz dropped that info during his appearance on the broadcast of Friday night’s game, his team’s 115th loss of a miserable 2024 season.

“We’re not going to be working heavy in free agency,” Getz, with somewhat refreshing honesty, told John Schriffen and Steve Stone. “We’ve got guys out on the field right now that need to improve their game. A lot of these guys are young players and need to make the adjustments to be more productive.”

While his words got the internet all upset, we didn’t need the general manager to spill those beans to know how his rebuilding team was likely to operate this offseason.

Getz’s White Sox are about to set the modern major league record for losses in a single season in his first year at the helm. But while that might seem to a frustrated fan base like the kind of thing that should spur sweeping changes, it’s not likely to change the ongoing long-term planning at 35th and Shields.

Those seismic changes came last summer, in the midst of another 100-loss campaign, when Jerry Reinsdorf fired longtime baseball bosses Ken Williams and Rick Hahn and eventually replaced them with Getz, an internal promotion, who has spent the last year-plus on the early stages of his organizational makeover.

[MORE SOX: Jerry Reinsdorf weighs in as White Sox steam toward worst modern MLB season]

Though he and everyone else in the White Sox’ employ refused to use the word “rebuild” — perhaps fearful of the connotation of that word after Hahn’s project failed to reach the hoped-for heights of perennial contention — that’s exactly what was underway. Getz spent last offseason declining the pricey options of franchise faces Tim Anderson and Liam Hendriks and adding an army of newcomers on hyper-cheap deals that kept the payroll low.

The hope was that, even if wins didn’t come in bunches, these White Sox would make fewer mistakes, play better defense and see some resurgent offensive campaigns from one-time cornerstones who never quite lived up to the hype. None of it happened, hence a summer-long skid on the South Side.

But considering how unexciting all Getz’s work on the major league roster was from the get-go, a bad year was not unexpected, as the general manager himself admitted Monday.

“I think if you would have told me we were going to end up flirting with the record, I would have been a little surprised,” Getz said. “Now if you would have told me prior to the year that we would have ended up with over 100 losses, 105, 110, I wouldn’t have been as surprised.”

The truth is, we’ve been talking about a potential sequel in 2025 for a while now, the White Sox’ rebuilding project moving in a way that makes next year look like it could be another season of major league wheel-spinning while the front office waits for progress in the minor leagues.

If that’s the expectation, why should anyone be surprised that Getz plans to mostly sit out of free agency this offseason?

What is expected are more trade rumors, with All Stars like Garrett Crochet and Luis Robert Jr. at the center of them. What is expected is that the team will decline Yoán Moncada’s expensive option, something they don’t even have to do with Eloy Jiménez after trading him in July. They dealt Erick Fedde then, too, slimming the 2025 payroll even further.

This time around, though, we might not even see the low-cost additions like Paul DeJong and Martín Maldonado and Nicky Lopez and Chris Flexen.

Getz cited the players who were here now as having something to prove in his for-some-reason incendiary comments Friday. That points to a major league roster short on change of any kind this winter. Expect to see even more of Miguel Vargas and Bryan Ramos and Dominic Fletcher in 2025, that’s what the GM seems to be saying.

That’s not to say there won’t be progress over the course of next year, and the eventual arrivals of position-player prospects Colson Montgomery and Edgar Quero could start to change the idea about how far off the White Sox are. The rotation should be something worth watching from Opening Day, with youngsters like Jonathan Cannon, Davis Martin, Drew Thorpe, Ky Bush, Jake Eder, Jairo Iriarte and more in the mix and potentially playing a part in the team’s future.

But the truth is that this is the thick of a rebuilding effort. And a lack of free-agent spending in such a spot shouldn’t shock anybody. After the 95-loss 2017 season, the first full campaign of Hahn’s rebuild, the White Sox’ free-agency haul consisted of Welington Castillo and Miguel Gonzalez.

Now, fan rage is certainly understandable. While the context of the situation is important, rebuilds don’t come around because everything was going so right. That rebuilding even happens at all warrants ire, as teams should maybe, you know, try to field a winning team every season.

But at this point, no sudden spending spree from Reinsdorf and the White Sox is going to turn things around in a snap. Bring in this winter’s top free agent, Juan Soto, and this roster still won’t be capable of winning much. And with Reinsdorf last summer expressing his distaste for the kind of big-money and long-lasting deal it would take to land Soto anyway, it wouldn’t seem the White Sox would even think of swimming in such waters.

So there’s no need for surprise when Getz forecasts an offseason light on free-agent activity. That’s the way things go in a rebuild.