For most fans, Chris Getz’s White Sox rebuild means turning the major-league roster into something a lot more respectable than the one that’s en route to owning the worst record in the American League for the second consecutive season.
But the general manager’s project is truly an organizational overhaul, and since he has been at the helm of the team’s baseball department, there has been a lot of talk of gains made behind the scenes, in areas most fans rarely think about.
Take, for example, the Sox’ international-scouting arm. It’s what turned Jose Abreu and Luis Robert Jr. into Sox stars but produced more recent whiffs on players such as Yoelqui Cespedes, Oscar Colas and others.
As part of Getz’s attempt at a turnaround, the department has been rebuilt from the ground up.
“It’s dramatically different, it is,” Getz said Wednesday. “It’s allowed us to make better decisions. And in the end, as these players mature and grow and work towards the major leagues and get to the major leagues, we’ll feel it.
“Unfortunately, you have to wait. But presently, I feel we’re going about it the right way.”
Sox fans are used to waiting.
But when it comes to international signees, the waiting game is a particularly long one. Abreu and even Robert, to a lesser extent, were exceptions. Often, international free agents from Latin America are school-aged teenagers, requiring more development time than the 18-and-older players drafted into the organization from the U.S.
It means Getz’s overhaul in this area won’t bear fruit for even longer than other parts of his rebuilding effort.
But hearing about the remade department is an interesting peek into just how significant the changes needed to be when Getz grabbed the reins of the Sox in the middle of the 2023 season.
“We’re just a little over a year from the date of my hiring,” Sox international-scouting chief David Keller said Tuesday. “In that time, we’ve turned over our entire international staff. We’ve implemented a brand-new system and process.
“What I encountered when I took the job, there were a lot of relationships with trainers and agents in Latin America that were broken, and we had to go about mending fences and building positive relationships and making sure that when they thought about talented players, and where they wanted to show them and sign them, that we were a team that they considered.
“It was evident, prior to taking the job, that there were some things that needed to be improved upon. And certainly, in baseball, in this industry, relationships matter. We wanted to make sure we addressed that as soon as possible.”
As the Sox move toward another 100-loss finish, fans are wondering when that sort of thing is going to change on the South Side. Getz’s rebuilding project is a slow-moving one, but it’s not that way without reason: There was a lot of work to do behind the scenes before winning could come to the big-league level.
Positive results of the overall process are showing already, with an exciting core of position players forming this summer. But descriptions like these of vital behind-the-scenes departments offer a look into just how big the project was from the start.
“Chris has talked about really fixing the foundation here,” Keller said. “I can’t think of anything more foundational than player acquisition and player development, and obviously international player development is a big part of that.
“The one thing the White Sox can sell, not only internationally in Latin America and abroad, is opportunity. And I think trainers, agents, players in [Japan and Korea], in Taiwan, they can look at our situation, they can see it improving, they can see the culture Will [Venable] has created with his staff. And I think that we can realistically sell them opportunity to be a part of what we’re building.”