The White Sox Should Sign Blake Snell

Two things I want to say before we get into this:

First, feel however you want about Scott Boras not being able to get Blake Snell a huge bag of cash. Personally, I understand why Snell would hold out for a lot of money when he’s a 31yo left handed pitcher with 2 Cy Youngs and he’s only made $51M in his career. It’s impossible for him to see the contracts that have been handed out to pitchers and not feel he deserves the same.

Second, I am not looking at this like President Camacho thinking Not Sure is gonna come in and fix everything in just one week. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should check out Idiocracy, it’s a good flick.

So why should the White Sox do this?

I don’t think there would be much debate that Snell would immediately be at the front of the White Sox rotation. You may debate whether he or Dylan Cease is the #1, though I would hand that to Snell. And you may debate who leaves the rotation, but these are inconsequential here. We can all agree that the White Sox become a much better team with him there.

But as noted above, it doesn’t fix everything, the team is still unlikely to make the playoffs even with Snell. In which case, you’d be looking to trade the guy you just signed at the deadline. Assuming this is a short contract, this would be a way to buy prospects. And for Snell, it would be a way to almost guarantee he is in the mix for the playoffs in the second half of the season. Either the Sox overshoot all their projections and are in the hunt or they trade Snell to a team that is.

The risk here is that Snell follows up his first 180 inning season since 2018 the same way he did then with 128 innings of 103 ERA+ pitching. It’s probably something like a $40-50M bet that you can load up on prospects and have greater control of the market holding both Cease and Snell. If you think the White Sox are allergic to this type of bet, it’s very similar to the money they spent to get Luis Robert. His $26M signing bonus in the international market plus the penalty was a $50M+ outlay. Jerry is asking taxpayers to make a $1 billion bet on him, so we should feel we can ask this of him.

There is, however, an additional reason I want them to do this. Chris Getz is a brand spanking new GM. As much as we hear about what a great guy he is and he’s putting in the work and so on and so forth, we know that he has not yet led a pursuit of a high end free agent. Can the crew he assembled identify the value of a player like this and come away with a signing? We don’t know. And we likely won’t find out until it’s extremely important to do so. I don’t want to drudge up Manny Machado memories, but I also do not want to see that type of misread of the market again.

Not only will he need to read the market correctly, he’ll need to negotiate away from a no-trade clause. And sell this to Boras and Snell as the opportunity I wrote about above. It would be an extremely difficult proposal to float. It would take a very soft market and a willingness to outspend teams like the Giants and Yankees. I know it’s a near impossible task, but why not try? Would Boras take offense to a team offering $35-40M for a one year deal? Even if he did, it’s not like he and the Sox have a tremendous relationship.

Figure these things out now. Missing horribly on this is not a big deal, but you should learn a ton from the process.

It’s Spring Training, everyone needs reps, even the GM.

-Chorizy-E

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