Williams, Hahn and the White Sox: A front office mid-term grade for 2023

With team president Ken Williams and veteran general manager Rick Hahn at the controls, the Chicago White Sox completed the first half of their 2023 season Tuesday evening, and almost everybody considers it an unmitigated disaster. Favored by many to win the American League Central, the Sox are 34-47 and fourth in their division.

How much of the blame for that performance falls on Williams and Hahn? That pair has overseen the White Sox since GM Williams was promoted to team president and Hahn named GM to succeed him following the 2012 season. What follows is a mid-term assessment of the front office personnel decisions since the conclusion of the 2022 World Series with a particular focus on the extent to which those decisions have helped or hindered the White Sox’ performance.

Grading the Chicago White Sox at the midway point of the season

The standard of measurement in Wins Above Average (WAA), a variant of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). For this purpose, WAA is preferable because unlike WAR, it is zero-based. That means the sum of all the decisions made by the White Sox front office impacting the 2023 team gives at least a good estimate of the number of games those moves have improved (or worsened) the team’s status this season.

A team’s front office impacts that team’s standing in five ways. Those five are:

1.       By the impact of players it acquires from other teams via trade, purchase or waiver claim.

2.       By the impact of players it surrenders to other teams in those same transactions.

3.       By the impact of players not already under team control it signs at free agency or extends.

4.       By the impact of players it loses to free agency or releases.

5.       By the impact of players it promotes from its own farm system.

Here’s how the team of Williams and Hahn stack up by those five yardsticks.

Acquired or traded

The White Sox didn’t do much in team-to-team deals, but what they did do has proven to be at least modestly useful. Since the end of 2022, Williams and Hahn acquired four major leaguers from other teams to a gain of +1.1 WAA.

The best transaction was the December swap with San Francisco that landed reliever Gregory Santos. He has appeared in 34 games with a +0.9 WAA. The White Sox recently obtained journeyman Touki Toussaint in a waiver deal with Cleveland, and his first (and to date only) appearance went well.

They got Nick Padilla on a waiver pickup from the Cubs, but he has made only two appearances to no particular impact.

The outflow from Chicago’s South Side has been minimal. Jake Marisnick was sold to Detroit and Nick Solak waived to Atlanta, and neither will be missed.

Veteran reliever Jose Ruiz, a bullpen fixture since 2018, was sold in April to Arizona, for whom he has made 26 appearances. But his WAA contribution to the D-Backs’ growing hopes of contending in the NL West has to date been exactly 0.0.

For Williams and Hahn, the bottom line assessment of this aspect of their game is modestly successful. They haven’t done much, but that also means they haven’t screwed anything up. The return, while not overwhelming, is at least positive.

Free agency

As befits a team that wants to play with the big boys, this is where Williams and Hahn focused most of their offseason and early season efforts. Chicago signed, re-signed or extended 10 players, most of them established veterans of the stripe of Andrew Benintendi, Elvis Andrus and Mike Clevinger.

The problem is that for every productive move, Williams and Hahn made another bad one. Only three of the 10 free agent pickups have delivered a positive WAA for the Sox, while five have gone negative (two are neutral).

What does it add up to? Nothing, that’s what. The cumulative WAA production of the 10 White Sox free agent signees at the season’s halfway point is precisely 0.0.

There have been hits. As a fifth starter, Clevinger sits at +1.1 WAA. Pitchers Keynan Middleton and Jesse Scholtens, who came over from Arizona and the Padres system respectively, are both at +0.7.

But Benintendi (-0.3) and fellow veteran Clint Frazier (-0.4) have been minor busts, and Andrus (-1.5) has been a major letdown.

The assessment is more kind regarding Chicago’s departures to free agency.

Williams and Hahn allowed four players to get to the open market, the two notable ones being first baseman Jose Abreu and outfielder A.J. Pollock. Both losses were criticized over the winter, and both decisions have proven prescient. Abreu (-2.1) has been a costly train wreck in Houston, and Pollock (-0.9) not much better in Seattle.

Overall grade

Given Chicago’s record, you’d expect Williams and Hahn to rate badly for front office impact. The rating is actually uneven, with decent showings in a couple of categories. The total is a net of +2.0, a fact that is likely to come as a major surprise to Southsiders.

Full disclosure notice; The bulk of that grade is attributable to the decision to let Abreu walk to free agency, and the subsequently awful start he is off to in Houston. That may not have helped the White Sox much on the field, but technically it’s a decision-making plus.

Here’s the first half report card on the White Sox front office. Note that grades for players departing the organization are based on the reverse of those players’ WAAs with their new teams.

Mode                    WAA                  Grade

Acquired              +1.1                       B

Traded                  -0.3                       C

Signed                    0.0                       C

Lost                      -3.0                       B

Rookies               -2.4                       D

Overall                +2.0                      B

Overall, Williams and Hahn have made 25 personnel moves since the end of the 2022 season impacting the fortunes of the 2023 White Sox. Numerically, the results are mixed: Nine produced positive values to the team, 10 have to date been negative, and six were neutral.

Not reflected in this rating, but very much true, is that Chicago’s holdover core has also, as a group, performed poorly. We’re talking here about veterans like Tim Anderson (-1.8) and Lance Lynn (-1.6).

The returning core’s collective score of -4.4 WAA doesn’t count against an assessment of the moves made by Williams and Hahn since the end of the 2022 season, but it certainly hampers the team’s record.