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PHOENIX – On Wednesday night, Dylan Cease was having dinner with White Sox pitching coach Ethan Katz. By Thursday morning, he was packing his belongings in the clubhouse at Camelback Ranch and hoping he could track down his passport in order to join his new team in Korea.
The centerpiece of a five-player trade with San Diego, Cease is on his way to join the Padres in a move that has been anticipated for months. He’ll hope to get acquainted with his new club as they’re playing the Seoul Series to kick off the regular season on March 20-21.
The rest of the White Sox, namely the pitching staff, will have to figure out how to move forward without their best pitcher. Katz said there are as many as ten different arms in the mix for the rotation, but laying out that five-man group with so many choices is new territory for Katz after a few years of coming into spring training with the rotation pretty much set.
Adding to the complexity, general manager Chris Getz announced Thursday morning that Michael Kopech has been moved to the bullpen and manager Pedro Grifol said he doesn’t yet know who will take the ball on Opening Day.
“It’s different. For three years, I would come in here and we kind of had on paper who were [in the rotation],” Katz said. “So I’d throw guys out to get ready for the season and made sure they were ok, give them their breaks and right now we are trying to figure out who is going to be in the rotation while trying to piece this together until the end.”
That reflects the reality for a club moving on without Cease. Getz said he had a “value line” he was aiming for in the return, and until the Padres met that line this week, Cease was set to remain in a Sox uniform for the time being.
“There’s different ways to shape a deal. There were different deals that we were evaluating,” Getz said. “You’ve got a group of players that can be impactful with your major league team right out of the gate and offer some ceiling, and then you’ve got a player in (Samuel) Zavala where the sky’s the limit, an 18-year-old that’s already in full-season ball and now is going to be 19 in High A.
“An opportunity to help your major league club out of the gate, certainly to add to our farm system, a farm system that’s continued to improve. We feel like it was a very balanced deal.”
In all, the Sox got three players in their return for Cease; three of whom were in the top ten in San Diego’s system, and one in Steven Wilson who has two years of major league experience under his belt. Right-handed pitcher Drew Thorpe is MLB Pipeline’s 85th-ranked overall prospect, and outfielder Zavala and pitcher Jairo Iriarte were ranked 7th and 8th in the Padres system, respectively.
Instead of grabbing a team’s top prospect, Getz went the route of deepening the farm system. Not a matter of quantity over quality, per se, but at different points along the way it was rumored that Cease could yield another club’s top minor leaguer.
“You look for a set of value in a return, right? There’s different ways to find that value,” Getz said. “And once we felt like (an offer) met that mark, we were going to go ahead and make that move. There’s certainly some players out there that carry significant value as an individual, or there are ways to do it with multiple players.
“There’s different ways to go about it, and every sort of offer we were considering was shaped differently because every organization is set up differently.”
But the reality of the players the Sox did get from the Padres is that the outlook for 2024 looks even more bleak than it did before. Beyond this year, things could get brighter if these highly-ranked prospects pan out, but the Cease trade cements the reality that the Sox are not realistically contending this season.
Cease came to the Sox in a four-player trade that sent Jose Quintana to the Cubs in 2017, and he’s been a part of their big league staff since his callup on July 3, 2019. By the end of last season, Cease had become the longest-tenured member of the rotation and de facto veteran mentor for younger arms, so he leaves behind something of a legacy.
“He’s taught a lot of our pitchers that we have here today,” catcher Korey Lee said. “Yeah, we lost someone, but we still have a lot of knowledge and a lot of guys that can come in and fill that role.”
But trading Cease was probably necessary. The Sox weren’t realistically contending even with him in the rotation for another couple of years, and Cease has just two arbitration years left. The dropoff in his performance from 2022 to 2023 cooled the trade market over the winter, but Cease’s outings this spring helped push it forward. In three appearances, he has posted a 2.16 ERA and has 14 strikeouts in 8 ⅓ innings.
Cease was going to get traded, and especially after he dominated the Reds with 8 punchouts on Tuesday, the timetable accelerated. It’s hard to ignore the fact that not quite two days after his outing against Cincinnati, his locker in Glendale was empty.
Now that Cease is gone, the Sox are closer to Getz’s vision for how he wants the Sox to look going forward.
“I feel like we have been able to accomplish a significant amount in a short period of time,” he said. “We certainly prioritized our defense, players that understand how to play this game. We’ve got impact on this roster. We think it’s going to be a much cleaner style of play. Is it a reflection of the decisions we’ve made this offseason? Certainly. But it’s also a reflection of our coaching staff that’s been working with our players day to day. Do we still have work set out to accomplish for us to work toward our goal? Absolutely.
“But present day, we feel very good about where the Chicago White Sox are, not only for our major league season, but certainly for the future.”
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