Antioch’s Paul DeJong was traded Tuesday from the White Sox to the Royals.
AP
Analyzing baseball moves is pretty simple.
If it works, it was pure genius. If not, the decision was horrendous.
For example, Craig Counsell sending Patrick Wisdom to smack a pinch-hit grand slam Saturday in Kansas City was brilliant. Wisdom’s 14 previous pinch-hit outs were poor choices.
MLB trade deadline deals work the same way, it just takes several years to know the true answer. No one was predicting the worst trade in franchise history when the White Sox sent international signee Fernando Tatis Jr. to San Diego for James Shields in 2016.
Maybe the White Sox will strike gold with one of the three minor-leaguers acquired from the Dodgers for Erick Fedde and Michael Kopech. One of the three, Miguel Vargas, was in the Sox starting lineup Tuesday. The other two are younger, but keep in mind, Yordan Alvarez and Oneil Cruz both began their careers with the Dodgers and were traded as minor-leaguers. So Alexander Albertus and Jeral Perez have big shoes to fill with the Sox.
The biggest local news at the deadline might have been who wasn’t traded. Cubs pitcher Jameson Taillon, Sox starter Garrett Crochet and center fielder Luis Robert Jr. are all sticking around.
White Sox general manager Chris Getz complained about Crochet’s representatives asking for an extension from any potential new team. Maybe the delivery was a little awkward, but the mindset is understandable. Crochet doesn’t want to blow out his arm trying to pitch in the postseason after a stellar first year as a starter.
No doubt potential trade partners were already wary of Crochet’s durability this season. If the White Sox trade him over the winter or maybe sign him to an extension, those are perfectly reasonable outcomes. There’s no hurry to move on from their best player.
An ideal scenario for the Cubs would have been to combine Taillon with Mark Leiter Jr. and maybe get back a Top 100-caliber prospect. With no takers, Taillon stayed put and Leiter went to the Yankees for a couple of midrange prospects who are 24 years old — 6-foot-8 right-handed reliever Jack Neely and infielder Ben Cowles.
Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said Cowles recently broke his wrist and may not play again this season. Cowles is a former teammate of Cubs 2023 first-rounder Matt Shaw at Maryland.
Hoyer has done plenty of things right since taking over a team in need of a rebuild from Theo Epstein. For example, the Cubs made two of the best acquisitions of last off-season by landing Shota Imanaga and Michael Busch.
The place where Hoyer deserves some blame is the lack of flexibility to this Cubs roster. The highly paid nucleus of Dansby Swanson, Cody Bellinger, Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki isn’t working but can’t be fixed because Swanson, Happ and Suzuki all have full no-trade clauses, while Bellinger’s cumbersome contract contains two expensive player options after this year.
Hoyer is smart enough to know he had to do something, but he had few trade chips to utilize. In an ideal world, the Cubs would have given Christopher Morel another year to work things out at the plate and in the field. In the real word, Morel was the only position player with much trade value.
Bringing back Isaac Paredes, who originally signed with the Cubs out of Mexico in 2015, could be a good move. He’s essentially the same age as Morel, started to blossom last year in Tampa with 31 home runs and 98 RBI, then made the all-star team earlier this month.
But there’s no way of knowing if this was a smart move or not. The Cubs probably thought they did well by trading Paredes and Jeimer Candelario to Detroit in 2017 for Alex Avila and Justin Wilson, who did nothing special in Chicago.
Likewise, if Morel skyrockets in Tampa Bay, we’ll never know if the change of scenery was the best thing to happen to him. Of course, Morel homered in his first game with the Rays on Tuesday, giving him 19 on the season.
One concern with trading Morel is he brought a fresh breath of enthusiasm to a Cubs clubhouse that’s often mopey and morose when things don’t go well. Morel didn’t get much of a chance to assert his personality this year, since nothing was going well.
What’s sorely needed on both sides of town is a homegrown hitting star. Both the Cubs and Sox thought they had one in Eloy Jimenez, whose tenure in Chicago mercifully came to an end with a trade to Baltimore. Maybe Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson can share the secret of meeting high expectations.
Both the Cubs and White Sox have built up their minor-league systems, but are still waiting for major-league success from a hitter.
Two area players changed teams this week. Antioch’s Paul DeJong simply walked to the visitors clubhouse when the White Sox sent him to the Royals. Cary-Grove’s Quinn Priester, a first-round pick in 2019, was traded from the Pirates to Red Sox on Monday.
