Welcome Erick Fedde

Jeff Passan made facebook official today what had been rumored last night, signing Erick Fedde to a major league deal. The deal is likely made possible by guaranteeing a spot in the starting rotation. This is something the White Sox can afford to do as we’re hard pressed to name 3 guys that can be penciled in as starters on the 40 man roster.

I previously wrote about Fedde in our Trades With Every Team blogs from last year. I identified him as a non-tender candidate that a team might be willing to move him for anything. You know, like what the White Sox got back in the Aaron Bummer trade.

The upside for the White Sox

As noted by friend of the 108 Jeff Passan:

Erick Fedde was a 1st rd pick for the Nationals in 2014. So there is some pedigree there. And he had some decent shorter years in 2019 and 2020. But if you’re looking at this from Chris Getz‘s point of view, this is a reasonably priced starter that can fill 130-150 innings for you. That’s pretty important when the rotation is in absolute shambles. Not to mention what the rotation will look like if they trade Dylan Cease. Starting Pitching innings are not cheap, so taking a chance like this is more than reasonable.

But if we look a little closer, Josh Barfield may see Fedde’s path as similar to that of Merrill Kelly. A pitcher who went to the KBO, figured out some stuff, and came back a very useful pitcher. Kelly spent more time there, so it is not an exact replica of the path, but it is at least familiar to someone from the D’Backs. In addition, Brian Bannister seems to be a fan of the changes Fedde has worked on over the past year. Here he is responding to our guy Mike:

What can we expect?

So yeah, that’s all great, the people that gave him $15M like him and he was the KBO MVP last year. One thing to keep in mind is that the competition is quite different, so success in the KBO won’t translate directly to the MLB. When he was last in the big leagues, he was bad enough to get DFAed from the Nats. So no need to get insanely excited about the signing. But at the same time, we can be cautiously optimistic. With the exception of 2022 where he had a career low 42% groundball rate, he had consistently lived in the high 40s low 50s. That’s valuable. If the sweeper and split-change have really brought new dimensions to his pitch mix and he can continue to throw grounders, he could be a solid mid-rotation arm. That’s not exciting, but it’s pretty damn good for a team that had a dreadful rotation last year.

This doesn’t fix the rotation and it’s not a sure thing. But when you are in the position that the White Sox are in, this is the type of move the team needs to make. Now they need to make like 10 more of these moves.

-Chorizy-E