White Sox Take Two Steps Toward Stinking Less

Not every team shows up for spring training with a reasonable hope of winning the World Series, but there is a grand, overarching narrative to follow in every camp. For the Chicago White Sox, it’s whether they can achieve an all-Sean-and-Shane starting rotation — they’re currently 60% of the way there.

That might sound like a modest goal, but it’s a lot more ambitious than what they set out to achieve just last year: Avoid losing 120 games. Again. The White Sox will sink or swim (or at least sink more slowly) based on how their young homegrown players perform, but Chicago’s supporting cast is looking relatively OK.

All the more so after this weekend, when the White Sox made two moves: signing free agent outfielder Austin Hays to a one-year contract, and trading for Red Sox pitchers Jordan Hicks and David Sandlin.

Hays is the dictionary definition of a second-division starter in the corner outfield. A third-round pick out of Jacksonville University in 2016, Hays established himself as Baltimore’s starting left fielder in late 2020, and parked there for more than three seasons. He was pretty good for Baltimore, batting .261/.313/.439 from 2021 to 2023. He even rode a red-hot first half to the All-Star Game in his last full season as an Oriole.

What does Hays do well? I guess it’s never a good sign when you lead off a list like that with “he’s got a good throwing arm,” but nevertheless… Hays isn’t an exit velocity monster. He’s never posted a double-digit stolen base season, a full-season walk rate over 7.0%, a full-season ISO over .205, or a full-season wRC+ over 111. He has been a very good corner outfield defender in the past, but that skill seems to be sliding back toward average as he ages. (Hays turned 30 this past July.)

It looks like Hays, who posted pretty average platoon numbers early in his career, might be turning into a lefty-killing platoon bat as he gets older:

The thing about Hays is that he’s not awful at anything. Here’s the range of offensive numbers he’s posted over the past five seasons:

Hays was plenty fine for the Orioles, until they got good and Colton Cowser was ready to be promoted. Then he got traded to the Phillies, who intended to use him as a platoon buddy for Brandon Marsh until he strained a hamstring and went down with a kidney infection. Then he was OK playing regularly for an OK Reds team.

Hays might not be amazing at anything, but he’s also not terrible at anything, and he pulls the ball enough to finagle 15 homers a year out of unremarkable batted ball quality. Is that underwhelming for the 2024 Orioles or 2024 Phillies? For sure.

But for the better part of a decade, the White Sox have been filling every position player vacancy with Leury García. A couple years ago, they had García change his facial hair and start going by the nom de guerre Lenyn Sosa, but they’re not fooling me. I’d expect Hays to be an improvement on that situation in 2026, and if he’s anything more, he can be flipped at the deadline.

The Hicks trade is a bit more of a creative move. The hard-throwing right-hander is entering his third year of living with the consequences of a bad career decision. After establishing himself as a pretty good reliever for the Cardinals and Blue Jays, Hicks signed with the Giants in January 2024, with the intention of becoming a starter.

That kind of reliever-to-rotation transition has been in vogue as reliable starting pitchers are being hunted to extinction. Sometimes (Clay Holmes, Reynaldo López) it works pretty well. But the Cardinals had already tried Hicks as a starter for eight games in his age-25 season, and it went quite poorly. The second time around, it went even worse.

By the time the Giants sent Hicks to Boston in the Rafael Devers trade last year, he had a 6.47 ERA. In 21 appearances for the Red Sox, all out of the bullpen, Hicks was even worse: an 8.20 ERA, 6.19 FIP, and three homers and 12 walks against just 15 strikeouts.

Hicks had been due to make $12.5 million in each of the final three seasons of his backloaded four-year contract. His inclusion in the deal was less about Boston believing in him as a pitcher than it was about adding ballast to a trade that sent almost $300 million worth of Devers the other way. If Hicks could return to form as a good setup guy, so much the better, but if not, well, we can always trade him to Chicago.

I suspect White Sox GM Chris Getz is no more sanguine about Hicks’ future than Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow was. But Boston is kicking in $8 million to grease the skids, lowering Chicago’s effective financial commitment to $17 million total over two years. That’s not a trivial expenditure for a team whose projected payroll is only $86 million as of this writing, but it’s workable.

Hicks is still only 29, and he was a good high-usage, contact-suppressing leverage reliever as recently as 2023. Maybe the White Sox can just resent the clock to where he was before the Giants started futzing with his repertoire to try to make him a starter. At the same time, Hicks was throwing 100 mph three years ago; his average fastball velo in 2025 was in the 97 mph range, even though he was mostly working out of the bullpen.

Hicks pitched through and/or around a shoulder injury in 2025, which probably explains some of the lost velocity. But if he doesn’t get it back, he could be in trouble; pitching at 97 is a different proposition from pitching at 100. Especially for a pitcher whose fastball shape had trouble missing bats even when he was the hardest-throwing righty in baseball. Anything Chicago gets from Hicks from here on out should be considered a bonus.

This trade is mostly about Chicago getting Sandlin for nothing but money. Sandlin has bounced around a ton in a short career. He went to junior college out of high school, and then was the one of two power arms who popped for Oklahoma during the Sooners’ run to Omaha in 2022. (The other being Cade Horton.) Sandlin wasn’t quite as impressive, but the Royals gave him an over-slot bonus in the 11th round, then traded him to the Red Sox for John Schreiber in the spring of 2024. I’ll let Eric Longenhagen take over from here:

Sandlin throws hard and, after dealing with oblique and forearm issues in 2023 and 2024, he was finally able to work 106 innings in a completely healthy 2025. He was still sitting 96 and touching 100 in September, partially solidifying the notion that he can be a big league starter. There are still other potential barriers to that, however. Sandlin’s fastball lacks explosive movement, he still doesn’t have a great offspeed pitch with which to attack lefties, and he’s a control-over-command type who throws strikes (his fastball, slider and cutter strike percentages are all around 66%), but mostly in the heart of the zone.

His breaking balls — a slider in the 82-87 mph range, and a cutter that averages about 90 and will bump 94 — are both nasty and fairly distinct from one another. Against lefties, Sandlin peppers the top of the zone with cutters and sliders before elevating his fastball with two strikes. Against righties, he throws a ton of sliders, almost as often as his fastball and cutter combined. He was able to strike out a batter per inning in this fashion in 2025 but had pronounced splits (.807 OPS vs. LHH, .637 vs. RHH), and he barely ever throws his changeup or curveball.

The White Sox have had recent success coaxing better changeups out of pitchers with naturally-good breaking balls, and perhaps they’ll be able to do that with Sandlin. He has the size, and now seemingly has demonstrated the durability, to justify development as a starter during his first couple of years on the 40-man roster. His ultimate upside is something like a good fourth starter, but his more likely long-term outcome is as a really nasty reliever.

Sandlin threw 106 innings across two minor league levels in 2025, pitching out of the rotation and the bullpen, and ending the season in Triple-A. If he’s not major-league ready at the start of the season, a team like the White Sox ought to have space to give him a big league audition at some point in 2026.

Headed the other way is 22-year-old Gage Ziehl, a short starter out of the University of Miami who has good command and secondaries — best among them a mid-80s slider — but a lack of bat-missing ability that limits his ceiling to that of a depth starter. He was 34th on the recent White Sox top prospects list, with a 35+ Future Value. Chicago is also sending a player to be named later to Boston in the trade.

These are the kinds of moves a team like the White Sox should be making. There was a time when conventional wisdom called on non-contending teams to tear everything down to clear payroll and open playing time for prospects, even long-shot prospects. Unfortunately, living that experience 162 games a year, often for several years in a row, sucks butt. Losing games for want of a below-average, or even replacement-level, player is not worth the chance of getting a marginally better draft pick.

At the same time, the White Sox picked up a good prospect (Sandlin isn’t the second coming of Paul Skenes or anything, but he’s interesting and near-major league-ready) for basically nothing but money. And as underwater as Hicks’ contract is, and as bearish as I am on the odds of him returning to previous form, the odds of that happening are definitely not zero.

The White Sox aren’t anywhere near being good again. At best, they’re within sight of a village where they can get directions to a place where they can find a map that’ll take them to the path toward being good again. But you have to start somewhere.