The Underground Insight 1.28.08: Mama Said Not to Touch, But You Didn’t Listen

Posted by JD Koziarski on 01.28.2008

Every year the stove heats up and baseball general managers don’t learn: it’s hot to the touch. After a disappointing 2007 season, everybody’s favorite angry, arrogant Kenny Williams has shown he must be impervious to pain. Nobody should get burned as often as he has this winter.

Money for Nothing

The scene for The Shield's anti-hero supercop Vic Mackey usually reads like a mini-battlefield photo. The ghetto thugs he's just punked are on the ground. Sometimes they're out cold, sometimes quivering and wishing for their mommy, and other times hardly moving from the fear of God – or Mackey – whichever happened to strike them as more significant at the moment. And then Mackey pulls out his calling card, literally. He places a Strike Team playing card on the poor sap before leaving to finish cleaning up the dirt on the streets of Los Angeles.

And so I wonder if a similar situation happened a few weeks ago after Billy Beane got off the phone with Kenny Williams. Did Beane whip out an Oakland A's card and mail it to his Chicago White Sox counterpart? A little "You Got Served" that lets Williams know just who really is in charge around here.

A common perception among those who rate and rank minor league systems is that the White Sox farm didn't have much more than a crippled cow that wouldn't give milk and some three-legged chickens. However, the organization had two very nice prized pitchers - or pigs, but the whole barnyard metaphor is getting a bit tired. Their names: Gio Gonzalez and Fautino de los Santos.

Scouting reports of the players can be found just about everywhere, but to sum it up: John Sickles over at minorleagueball.com had Gio and DLS as #1 and #2 in the Sox farm system. Ryan Sweeney, the third (and most major league-ready player of the bunch), was ranked #5. If the White Sox system wasn't the worst in the game before, it is now.

And you might be thinking: Nick Swisher is a terrific young player who is under contract for many years to come. You have to give up something to get something. And you'd be right. Swish is my second favorite player in the entire sport, so this is hardly a criticism of his ability. But, from Williams' perspective, the trade is one a contender makes. The problem is that the White Sox are about as far from being contenders as a team can be without playing in Florida.

Not only are the Sox not contenders, the delusion that Williams suffers from has clouded every single move he's made this winter. He has taken multiple steps backwards, and he has locked himself into some potentially ugly contracts. You know you've had a bad couple of months when the best move you made is one you didn't make – because another team was dumber than you.

We can start there: White Sox fans – the clueless ones anyway – are furious that the White Sox did not overspend to sign one of the five most overrated players in baseball, Torii Hunter. The organization has been called cheap, but the truth is that the Angels outbid themselves by a healthy margin and nobody in their right mind would give Hunter such a horrible contract. I'm sure Williams would have tried, but Hunter signed before the Angels woke up from their drunken stupor and said, "We offered you WHAT? No, no, that must be a mistake."

But Hunter playing in SoCal works out for the Sox, but it really just looks bad after that.

Keeping with the Halo theme, Williams also traded Jon Garland for Orlando Cabrera. My take: At best, this is a wash. Garland was certainly not going to return after 2008, but he's a solid young pitcher who has been healthy. Cabrera is not a very good shortstop. He's nearing his mid-30s. He can walk at the end of the year. And really, he should. Signing a mediocre, aging player to a multi-year contract is the kind of thing that hurts teams for a long time. And when you break it down, Cabrera isn't significantly better than Juan Uribe to make it worth the money – or having to lose Garland.

Oh, and Uribe is still currently on the roster. Oops.

At least the Swisher trade, the interest in Hunter, and the Garland/Cabrera swap are all defensible. They might all be shortsighted, but they aren't the worst moves a GM can make. So that's why I have to ask: How many times must GMs dole out hefty multi-year deals to post-prime free-agent relievers before people realize that's a horrible move?

Do people realize that Williams has guaranteed $30 million dollars to Scott Linebrink and Octavio Dotel? Thirty. Million. Dollars.

And neither guy is going to be the closer.

Last year, the Sox bullpen was atrocious. Regression to the mean suggests that some of those guys would likely rebound to at least average performance. But the real problem here is the motivation. Williams overreacted and threw a bunch of money at a problem. We've all learned by now that doesn't work. It especially doesn't work with a team with a somewhat limited budget. And it really doesn't work with long-term deals for pitchers in their 30s!

The Tigers and Indians are the class of the AL Central; the Twins will be alright; the Royals have some promise, but the White Sox are in an odd place. They're mediocre and old with nobody in the minors to create excitement. At least Sox fans can root for Scott Linebrink for the next four years.