Is Sean Newcomb the Latest Example of a Steve Stone EarWorm That Has Been Planted in Chris Getz’s Brain?

More spending from the White Sox: They signed left-handed reliever Sean Newcomb to a one-year, $4.5 million deal, per the team. That's two deals in the last couple days after the signing of Munetaka Murakami. Newcomb was arguably the best left-handed reliever left on the market.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 23, 2025

The big homey and friend of the show Jeff Passan with the deets on new White Sox hurler Sean Newcomb. ANNOUNCEMENT!!! Jeff will be back on the 108 podcast Thursday, January 15th to talk all sorts of White Sox baseball. Not to brag. As Jeff notes in the tweet, Newcomb was arguably the best left-handed reliever on the market. Something the White Sox can really use given they only have Brandon Eisert, who’s middling 2025 results and primary pitch is a change-up that makes him more effective against right handed hitters than a normal lefty, but also less effective against left handed hitters, and Tyler Gilbert who is a long-man.

Newcomb’s bounce back 2025 season was strong throwing 92 1/3 innings of a 2.73 ERA / 3.04 FIP. He’s throwing more groundballs these days and walking less hitters. If that don’t sound like a Banny Boy I don’t know what does. But then I saw this interesting tweet…

With the White Sox, lefty pitcher Sean Newcomb will at least get the chance to start, league sources said. Newcomb, who signed a one-year, $4.5 million deal, performed well out of the bullpen last season but holds a long history of starting, too.

— Will Sammon (@WillSammon) December 23, 2025

“at least a chance to start”…..huh. Wasn’t expecting that. Yes, he came up as a starter, but he hasn’t started more than 5 games in a season since 2018. I wonder why….and then it hit me….

Did Steve Stone Put an Earworm in Chris Getz‘ Skull?

Yes, that Steve Stone!! Over the years, Stoney has talked baseball to us in the Chicagoland area for all our lives. He spent a couple decades on the Northside. Now, he’s spent ALMOST the same amount of time here on the Southside. The Stone Pony has many, many baseball thoughts and theories and for that I am grateful as it keeps us entertained listening to him.

One that he’s been espousing for a long-time, is that instead of the current flow of teams leaning on 6 man starting pitching rotations, that teams would revert back to a different era and begin using 4 man starting pitching rotations again. The back bone of this theory falls on two relatively strong concepts.

1) Since pitchers no longer go as deep into games they should be able to pitch on shorter rest than before. Ie, your top starters would still rack up their 200 plus innings. Instead of doing it across 32 starts they’d do it across 40 or so. That theory seems less likely in the era of max effort pitching. The middle to back end of rotations where the pitchers don’t have the pitchability to face a lineup a 3rd time through would struggle to execute this strategy. So maybe that part is on pause.

2) Buying #5 starters in the market is expensive. It’s much cheaper to just deploy a long-man in the bullpen with that extra spot for league minimum. 5th starters generally get paid 5x to 10x that amount. This portion of the theory seems to hold up. I ran Fangraphs free agent tracker for 2025, sorted for just SP’s and just guys on 1 year contracts. I dumped out the few that could be cut / demoted without paying a full year salary. These aren’t necessarily all “5th Starters”, but this is a decent proxy so gfy.

I got a high water salary of $21.05M for both Nick Martinez and Walker Buehler. The low water mark was Roki Sasaki, at league minimum $760k. Maybe I should’ve thrown him out of this analysis but I left him in. The Average salary for these players was almost $6.3M and the median salary $4.25M. Those are very healthy 8x and 5x multiples of the 2026 league minimum projected at $780k. This portion holds up well.

So How Does This Effect Chris Getz, Brian Bannister and the White Sox??

Let’s take a quick peak at the White Sox pitching depth chart.

Now, let’s still include Newcomb in the relievers for this calculation (surprised Fangraphs already put the SP on him. I want you to count how many of the White Sox relievers are considered guys who can pitch multiple innings. Feel free to take your shoes off to count’em if necessary. I see Sean Newcomb, Grant Taylor (who was a starter less than a year ago), big balls Mike Vasil, Tyler Gilbert, Wikelman Gonzalez and Rule 5 pick Jedixson Paez. That’s 6!!! I left Eisert off this list. He had many outings over 1 inning, but very few that completed 2 innings.

It almost seems like the White Sox plan is to create a 5th starter in the aggregate. Sign, acquire, promote the multi-inning reliever guys that maybe currently aren’t so popular. Turn them into the innings that cover that 5th starter spot. The White Sox aren’t a playoff contender, so they have room to try stuff and deploying up to 6 guys to fill these roles gives them a lot of chances to find the ones this year that got it. The 2025 Mike Vasil, if you will. Those 6 players project to cost the White Sox $8.4M all-in. Very cost effective.

This will be more in the name of innings than in the guy that takes the ball every 5th day. I suspect you’ll still get a short leashed Duncan Davitt or Ky Bush in the mix when the rubber meets the road, but you won’t be expecting 5 innings from them. And truthfully if more than one of those guys does work out as your defacto 5th starter, then you have a defacto 6th / 7th inning guy as well. It’s an interesting strategy. I’m curious to see how it’s applied and if it works out. But it definitely looks like the type of play they are putting on.

I don’t know if the 2026 White Sox will be good, but they sure are interesting.

-BeefLoaf