White Sox Get Bats Back for Erick Fedde and Tommy Pham

Today the White Sox made a three-team trade with the Cardinals and Dodgers that sent Erick Fedde and Tommy Pham to St. Louis and Tommy Edman to Los Angeles. In exchange for Edman, the Dodgers picked up the prospect tab in the deal, sending Miguel Vargas and teenage Low-A infielders Jeral Perez and Alexander Albertus to the other side of the Camelback Ranch complex. You can read about the Cardinals and Dodgers parts of the trade here.

The White Sox had mostly gotten pitching back in their previous trades made under new GM Chris Getz, but in this one they turned to hitting, receiving three batters whom I have been a little lower on than the prospect-watching consensus. I like all three players but don’t love any of them, though I think Vargas has a feasible shot to be a decent everyday player, and soon.

The seeds of this deal were planted when Chicago signed Fedde during the offseason. After a lackluster tenure in Washington, Fedde remade himself in a Scottsdale pitching lab and had an incredible 2023 season for the KBO’s NC Dinos, posting a 2.00 ERA in 180.1 innings while striking out 209 and walking just 35. He was named the KBO’s MVP and won their equivalent of the Cy Young. Getz and the White Sox bet a very modest amount ($15 million over two years) that Fedde’s improvements would translate to the big leagues, and they were right. Fedde has pitched well and turned into a prospect piñata. Pham’s salary was a little over $2 million. Essentially paying to acquire prospects (especially hitters) is exactly what a team like the White Sox should be doing, and over the course of about eight months they’ve executed that with Fedde and Pham.

A big part of the reason I was lower on prospect-era Miguel Vargas than my sources and peers was because I didn’t think he could play the infield well, if at all. That has turned out to be true and, after trying a few infield positions besides his native third base, Vargas moved to left field this season. This occurred even as the Dodgers had big league injuries on the dirt, which I think is telling. He isn’t great out in left either, but it’s conceivable he could improve as he continues to play there. I haven’t heard from anyone in the org as to whether the White Sox will revisit the infield with Vargas. If they do it would strike me as a 2025 spring training task rather than something they ask Vargas to do right away.

Vargas is lacking the raw power typical of a great left fielder. He’s not an especially explosive swinger and depends on his feel for sweet-spot contact to generate extra-base power. The combination of Vargas’ plate discipline and this slick barrel feel create enough offense for him to be a lower-impact everyday left fielder. Here’s how some of his performance and talent-indicating metrics compare to that of the average MLB left fielder:

These are solid numbers that back up the visual scouting report that this is a skills-over-tools type of hitter. I think he will have produced close to 20th at the position (give or take) when we look back at all the left fielders across the league five years from now. The outfielders in front of Vargas in Los Angeles blocked him from the big league playing time that his minor league performance merited for most of the last two seasons, and he should be given a big league opportunity immediately in Chicago. Andrew Benintendi is under contract until… (checking Roster Resource… holy shnikes) until 2027, and so the White Sox have to figure out what they’re going to do about that. Benintendi is not playing well enough to block Vargas.

The other two infielders in the trade, Alexander Albertus and Jeral Perez, were both playing at Low-A Rancho Cucamonga until Albertus was diagnosed with a lower leg fracture a little over a week ago and put on the IL. Albertus’ name has been bandied about each of the last couple trade deadlines because he does stuff that appeals to both scouts and analysts. The soon-to-be 20-year-old infielder is a career .303/.449/.415 hitter (mostly at the rookie level) who puts the bat on the ball and controls the strike zone. He takes a hellacious cut and has been athletic enough to do so while maintaining strikeout rates down in the 14-18% range the last two seasons (MLB average is 22%). As hard as he swings, Albertus doesn’t generate a ton of power and his swing path runs downhill. He’s a much cleaner defensive fit at third base than at shortstop, and he might end up being quite good there. (He’s played all three non-1B infield spots the last couple of seasons.) This is the Yandy Díaz branch of the infield prospect tree (OBP and contact skills, third base fit, less power than you want) where Díaz is what happens when the athlete becomes very, very strong deep into his twenties. Paths to an everyday role will probably require that of Albertus. He is more likely to be a utility guy.

If you want evidence of Albertus’ shot to get strong, look no further than Jeral Perez. Perez has already become much more physical than I would have guessed having watched him a ton in Arizona last year when he was a compact Others of Note-type player in the Dodgers system. He now has average big league raw power at age 19 and, physically, looks maxed out. Perez’s compact build and strong top hand through contact allow him to be on time with regularity, but his feel for moving the barrel around is not great. Though he’s posted above-average contact rates so far, I do worry that he is a candidate to be exposed by better fastballs in the upper minors, ones located on the upper-and-outer quadrant of the strike zone. Perez is a similarly a mixed bag on defense; he has acrobatic actions and can really turn it around once he’s secured the baseball, but he too often struggles to do that. He has flub-prone hands (which will probably get better) and mediocre range (which likely will not as he ages). This is the sort of second baseman who lacks range but who is great around the bag and basically average overall. I like his chances of getting to power enough that I have a priority grade on Perez (a 40+ FV is like a mid-to-late second round prospect in a typical draft), but I consider his profile to have a good amount of risk and variance. This is not the type of athlete who ends up with defensive versatility, so he’s going to have to keep hitting.

You can see how these guys stack in the White Sox system here.

In addition to Edman, the Dodgers also picked up 17-year-old DSL pitcher Oliver Gonzalez in this trade. He had worked 21.1 innings in a piggyback role before the deal. He’s a very projectable 6-foot-4 or so, and his fastball currently sits 89-93 mph with around 20 inches of induced vertical break and just over 7 feet of extension. His curveball has a nice foundation of depth and shape, but he doesn’t have feel for locating it. It’s a pretty good starting spot for any teenage pitching prospect. Again, the draft is a nice way to gauge the way we should think about Gonzalez, who would probably get about $750,000 to $1 million in bonus money. He has been added toward the bottom of the Dodgers list.