Breaking Down Today's Big 3-Team Trade Between The White Sox, Dodgers and Cardinals Involving Erick Fedde and Michael Kopech
With the trade deadline a day away, your 27 win, 81 loss Chicago White Sox make a MAMMO WHAMMO WHOPPER of a trade, sending Michael Kopech to LAD and Erick Fedde + Tommy Pham to STL:
With the White Sox being historically pathetic, even by their own standards - which are already exceptionally, if not impossibly low - everyone knew Fedde was gonna get dealt.
The Cards got themselves a solid SP3ish type, albeit a re-invented one:
That's a nice little trade chip for anyone, let alone a team that is absolutely fucking desperate to shed the rest of his 2024 salary + the insanely high $7.5MM he's owed in 2025.
So what did the White Sox get in return?
Well at a glance this is 3 players for 3 players. Duh. But it should have been more. Pham you could have gotten a lottery ticket for, Kopech a little more than a lottery ticket, and at least two players for the cheap + controlled + good SP3-4 Fedde. So like…wtf is this? How do you not get a single player back from the team you're trading Erick Fedde and his awesome stats + contract to…??
So right off the bat, that's a failure by the White Sox front office, IMO. They should have brought back something from the Cardinals. I don't get how they didn't, but to me it's a sign of a young, inexperience, unqualified front office. It's Jerry fucking Reinsdorf's fault that this crew is even in a position to fuck up like this.
That's not to say the rest of the prospect package they returned is full of trash. It's not. It just isn't near deep enough if there isn't a decent headliner. I know Vargas was an MiLB top 40 prospect just one year ago, but the Dodgers have seemingly quit on him as he hasn't had any success as a big leaguer.
I hope that changes and he turns out to be a quality player. I don't trust that will happen, and for obvious reason. Should it, it'll help make this deal a lot more palatable.
None of this matters though - I've been told the White Sox will carry a payroll of about $100MM next year - down about $30MM from this year, because Jerry Reinsdorf is instructing Getz to gut payroll as much as humanly possible.
Again.
I've also been told the White Sox had better offers from different organizations for Fedde. Not sure which organization(s) or which player(s) were part of this hypothetical package, but it jives with this statement:
Now again, I cannot confirm the validity of the Tweet above. I'm just trying to put puzzle pieces together. It'd be hilarious considering the White Sox are LIGHT YEARS from contending again, or whatever they consider "contending" (don't forget about that carrot!!!), so it should have mattered Z.E.R.O where they were dealing Fedde, but I thought this was worth mentioning.
I really, really hope it ain't true, but it's the White Sox so who the fuck knows? They could fuck up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so I'll say there's a non-zero chance of that particular rumor being true.
As for Miguel Vargas, Alexander Albertus and Jeral Perez?
Well…they get on base…
Awesome. Need a lot more of that. But I'm BEYOND done with "trusting the prospects", in spite of these OBP numbers:
Vargas: .395 OBP in 2326 MiLB plate appearances
Albertus: .449 OBP in 545 MiLB plate appearances
Perez: .381 OBP in 803 MiLB plate appearances
Awesome shit. Now do it at the MLB level. And that brings me to my next point…
One one hand these guys have to prove it over an extended amount of time at the Big League level for me to think they're a "guy" or not, and on the other hand the White Sox have to prove to me they can extract the absolute most out of their talents.
Until that time, it's wait and see for me. The White Sox international scouting department is an abomination to the Lord, Jesus Christ, and until they reach a point where they can identify, sign/draft and develop players ON THEIR OWN, they're gonna force themselves to keep making trades like this. They'll just have to rely on real organizations like the Dodgers to do their developing for them, and it'll keep costing them cheap, controlled assets to do so.
They did the same thing, albeit to a much larger extent, when they traded for Moncada, Eloy, etc. and everyone was freaking out about how good they were at getting on base.
Round and round we go. "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results…"
Jerry Reinsdorf's evil reign can't end soon enough. Oh and if Crochet + Robert are dealt in the next 24 hours the White Sox sincerely might not win a game the rest of the year. Quite the feather in Jerry & Co's cap, huh?
Next year will be more of the same, too….