Last week we pointed to a report stating the Sox were shopping Jermaine Dye to the Reds, looking for a young pitcher (and more) in return, and were looking to trim some payroll. Baseball essentially shut down over the Thanksgiving holiday, and there won't be any real news until teams make their arbitration offers official sometime Monday, so here's some stale news.

Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe says that Dye is a fit for a number of teams, but they seem put off by the price.

The White Sox right fielder fits so well with a few teams, including Philadelphia, Tampa Bay, and the Mets. The Rays are trying to deal the back of their starting rotation - Andy Sonnanstine or Edwin Jackson - for a power-hitting righthanded bat, but the White Sox would want more.

John Fay of the Cincinnati Enquirer gets Reds GM Walt Jockety to issue a non-denial about the Dye talks.

As for talk that the Reds could be interested in outfielder Jermaine Dye, whom the Chicago White Sox are reported to be shopping, Jocketty said:

"I'm not going to comment. But we have talked to the White Sox about some players. Nothing is close."

The way tampering rules work, Jocketty cannot say he's pursuing Dye. But in the case of San Diego shortstop Khalil Greene, Jocketty was comfortable shooting down the rumor.

And finally, Mark Gonzales acknowledges the reports adding a couple more names to the fray.

The teams appear to be a match because the Reds are looking for a right-handed hitter to go with young left-handed hitters Joey Votto and Jay Bruce, and the Reds have a wealth of talented pitchers, including Homer Bailey, Josh Roenicke and Matt Maloney.

Of course, here I am writing about it without much to add. I will add that if the Sox are going to trade Dye for the proposed packages, I see it as the first of a series of moves. They can't go into another season with one-and-a-half outfielders. And now Jerry Owens can go about dominating the third consecutive thread here. Paradoxically, it will be the first time he's ever dominated anything three consecutive times.

I was perusing the archives a moment ago and came across an entry I posted titled "The White Sox are a $100M Mid-Market Club." The post was essentially my reaction to the Sox losing out (read: being used as a pawn) in the Miguel Cabrera derby, which concluded with the scathing line "The Sox missed out on their 'big fish' because they refused to spend enough money on bait."

The gist of the post was that the Sox weren't use their resources to their fullest extent, specifically as it pertained to obtaining amateur talent.

The White Sox farm system seems destined to be named the 29th best (2nd worst) in all of baseball. And thanks to some dubious extensions and pretty terrible middle relief signing, the only thing about the White Sox which could be considered Big Market is their payroll.

• The White Sox are unwilling to pay over slot in the first-year player draft.
• The White Sox are (seemingly) afraid to offer arbitration to departing free agents. (Perhaps to help limit draft costs.) The last time they had multiple extra picks thanks to arbitration they got top prospects Josh Fields and Gio Gonzalez, who fell due to unfounded character concerns. The rest of the draft was filled with overdrafts who would sign below slot (Wes Whisler, Dony Lucy, Ray Liotta.)
• The White Sox have been unwilling to compete for high-dollar amateur international talent, with the SS Silveiro marking their only $300+K signing of the last 5+(?) years.
• The White Sox have been unwilling to feel the wrath of the Winner's Curse by shelling out top dollar to the top free agents. There hasn't been a singing of a true top-level free-agent since Albert Belle almost 10 years ago. And I haven't even brought up the name Scott Boras yet.

This is a team which has continued to act like a mid-market club with the exception of it's willingness to hand out contracts to it's soon-to-be free-agents. You could make a very convincing argument that the White Sox would be a better club today if they had practiced more fiscal responsibility with their contract extensions, forcing them to part with some of their impending free-agents through trades for prospects or by accepting the two extra draft picks which come from losing a type-A free-agent.

Less than a year later, amid talk of trimming payroll, the Sox don't fit so cleanly under the mid-market umbrella. They've added Alexei Ramirez and (hopefully) Dayan Viciedo from Cuba; the latter to a reportedly record contract for a player his age. They've spent considerably over slot for Gordon Beckham and Jordan Danks. And, fingers crossed, should offer arbitration to their lone departing desirable free agent (Orlando Cabrera) by Monday, netting them 2 extra '09 draft picks.

Juan Uribe is a type B free agent, and could possibly net the Sox 1 compensation pick. There is, however, a considerable chance that he would accept arbitration, where he would be guaranteed at least 80% of his '08 salary. So the Sox will probably pass on that opportunity, with good reason.

Anyway, the point of the post--aside from giving you a new thread to CAP LOX in over the holiday--on the whole, even with the disastrous Swisher trades, the Sox organization is in a much better position today than they were a year ago following the winter meetings. That's something we can be thankful for.

Kenny Williams likes to keep his cards close to his chest, so it's never easy to know what he's thinking, or in which direction he's looking to take the makeup of the club. Add the highly questionable Nick Swisher trade to Williams' unpredictability and it's easy to understand why we've been at a loss for words much of this early off-season. As Lincoln said, "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."

A few leaks seem to be springing up surrounding the Sox, however, leading us to be able to draw some conclusions about their off-season intent. The Daily Herald's Barry Rozner gets Kenny to comment on his intent to trim payroll, which, if past quotes are to believed, wasn't maxed out in the past few seasons.

"First of all, it's a continuation of a plan to get younger that started two years ago," Williams said Monday from Arizona. "But secondly, this was going to be needed anyway as a result of the economy.

"We can't hide from it. At the end of the day, the bottom line is you can't spend a dollar if you only have 75 cents, and we're talking about millions here.

Leaving aside Williams' tried-and-true 50 cents statement--Now with 50% more quarters! Adjusted for inflation!--it seems clear that the Sox are looking at some belt-tightening moves this off-season. We've seen multiple headlines on ChiSox.com with the words "Youth" and "Movement" displayed in succession. At first, I thought it was just Merkin looking to fill space around some Chris Getz quotes at Halloween, but now he's also got some Ozzie Guillen quotes nearly a month later. Clearly, this story isn't going away. That means Jermaine Dye and/or Javier Vazquez are gone in addition to letting free agents Joe Crede, Juan Uribe and Orlando Cabrera walk.

Dye has already been connected to the Braves (among others), and Tuesday brought news that the White Sox have shopped him to the Reds as well. Their reported price of Homer Bailey plus something else meshes with Ken Rosenthal's statement that some teams (Mets, Phillies and Rays to be specific) are balking at the price.

I had to laugh at the off-the-record quote Rosenthal got from "one potentially interested executive."

[H]is team was concerned that Dye batted only .210 with runners in scoring position and two outs last season — 36 points below the American League average.

Which is about as relevant as complaining about Dye's shoe size--He needs big shoes!--and ignores a real issue; Dye might be the worst defensive RFer in baseball. It's OK though, with quotes like that, potentially interested executive might have well outed himself as the dumbest exec in baseball. His identity should be revealed when Juan Uribe is signed as a starting shortstop based on his .338 average w/RISP--92 points above league average!

Anyway, it appears the Sox plan is to use Dye, Vazquez, and maybe Bobby Jenks to acquire some more young pitching--hopefully better than Jeff Marquez--and, I assume, a true center fielder, where the word 'true' means fast.

Unfortunately for the Sox, Williams may have mistimed the market. The returns from the Swisher trade were, um, meager. Washignton got Josh Willingham and Scott Olson for a song. The Matt Holliday deal is the only one that seems like a proper return so far this off-season. Right now, it seems very much like a buyer's market, with teams overvaluing their own players and prospects, and choosing to wait out a cloudy free-agent picture.

The free agent market in particular has been unusually slow this year. Last year at this time we were getting daily updates on the Torii Hunter front, with the Angels swooping in as a surprise team and signing Hunter Thanksgiving weekend. They seem to be attempting to use that same attack on CC Sabathia this season, but otherwise no other big name free agents have drawn anything resembling a bidding war. I expect we'll see that at least until the winter meetings, and possibly as long as Christmas, a date by which many athletes (including Mark Teixeira) want to have their '09 plans solidified.

We may be in for a long, sometimes boring off-season, but for the first time since the Swisher trade we might be able to say we have an idea which direction the Sox are headed, even if we don't agree with it.

He's still not officially signed, but he's the only news we've got right now. So, we'll keep on talkin' 'bout him.

Jeff Passan points out that the White Sox weren't the highest bidder for Viciedo.

Chicago’s willingness to put Viciedo in an open competition pushed them past three other teams, Torres said, one of which was offering more than $11 million. Viciedo’s familiarity with Ramirez, as well as the presence of Cuban Jose Contreras, helped sway him toward the White Sox.

He also confirms my assertion that the contract was historically rich for a player of Viciedo's age.

I haven't been able to put together an easy-to-read collection of his Cuban stats in part because my DNS won't allow me to access the Cuban sites that Wiz first linked when we learned that Viciedo was a free agent, and the stats that we do have don't seem to add up to his career numbers. Chris DeLuca says he hit .294/.403/.503 last year in the Cuban League.

Somewhere on the internets, and don't remember where anymore, and I hope I'm not making this up, I read that Phil Rogers would have ranked Viciedo behind only Beckham among the Sox top prospects and is the equivalent of another high first-round pick.

Dayan Viciedo was supposed to be introduced as the newest member of the White Sox in a press conference on Friday, but apparently visa issues--there's always visa issues--may have derailed the event, though not the signing itself. The terms of the contract are as of yet unknown, but Phil Rogers put us in the $11M ballpark and you guys keep talking about 4-5 years (though I'm unsure where that info originated).

Until Viciedo is officially signed and plays a few spring training games all we'll be able to do is speculate on his ability. Personally, I think the notion that he'll compete for a job as the starting 3B this year is laughable, but I also thought that Alexei Ramirez should have gone to the minors out of camp last spring and thought he would probably end up in AA when the Sox signed him just before Christmas. So what do I know?

What does Viciedo's contract tell us?

There aren't many comparables for Vicideo's contract or the situation which allowed him to become a 19-year old free agent. In the '96 draft, Scott Boras got a number of the draftees (including Sox first-rounder Bobby Seay) declared free agents after they were not tendered a contract offer within two weeks of the draft, which resulted in a number of ridiculous contracts, most notably Matt White's $10+M deal. More recently Boras tried to get Landon Powell declared a free agent when he completed his GED before he started his senior season of HS. But the best comparison has to be Kendry Morales, who like Viciedo defected Cuba and incited a bidding war as a free agent, ultimately settling for the following contract.

Kendry Morales

• 6 years/$4.5M (2005-10)
  • signed by Angels as a free agent from Cuba (via the Dominican Republic) 12/04
  • $3M signing bonus
  • 05:$0.316M, 06:$0.35M, 07:$0.4M, 08:$0.5M, 09:$0.6M, 10:$0.7M
  • minor-league salaries: o5:$0.1M, 06:$0.15M, 07:$0.2M, 08:$0.3M, 09:$0.35M, 10:$0.4M
  • with 3 years of Major League service, may void remaining years of deal and go to arbitration
  • total value may reach $10M with bonuses
• signed as a free agent from Cuba (via the Dominican Republic) 12/04
• agents: David Valdes, John Mano

I recalled the deal being reported as a $10M deal back then, but I now see that it's a well constructed split contract which is fair to both sides. (I hope the Sox are able to set up a similar mutually beneficial contract.) Morales is without question the best comp we have for Viciedo right now. Since being considered on the top prospects in all of baseball, his stock has fallen to that of a AAAA player; a guy who has crushed minor league pitching in favorable hitter's leagues who doesn't seem to possess either the plate discipline or power to merit an everyday spot in a major league lineup.

I'm interested to see the terms of the contract before I make any judgments, but I would think (without actually doing the proper research) that the reported $11M would be the most expensive major or minor league contract handed out to a player of Viciedo's age. It's a huge deal, but as was seen in '96, being a free agent inflates the value of the contracts offered. For some more timely perspective, it was speculated that Pedro Alvarez might receive a deal from $15M to upwards of $20M at free agency during the few days when it was speculated that might be declared a free agent.

When I say it's a huge deal, it's because $11M doesn't really represent any real cost savings over a first-rounder. Take the recently exported Nick Swisher, for example. He was drafted by Oakland in '02 at age 21 and signed for a $1.78M bonus. He spent all of '03 and most of '04 in the minors, drawing a small salary, before making the minor league minimum plus a small raise each of his first three seasons. He signed his current contract during the middle of his third pre-arbitration year, raising his salary to a pro-rated portion of $700K for the remainder of that season. Add in his $3.5M he made in the first full year of the contract, and Swisher has made something in the area of $6.7M in his 6+ years as a professional.

To use the most dynamic young third baseman in the league as an example, Evan Longoria got a $3M signing bonus out of college, spent a full season in the minors and played only 6 games in the majors before signing his current deal. That deal combined with his signing bonus has him making a conveniently comparable $11M in his first 5 years in the majors.

If the $11M figure is to be believed, along with it being a guaranteed major-league deal, the Sox won't really experience any savings from the deal unless Viciedo quickly makes the majors and quickly proves to be worth a huge deal like Longoria.

What does a major league deal mean?

More than anything, Viciedo signing a major league deal will effect his option status. Players on a major league contract are required to be on the 40-man roster, and as such have to optioned to the minor leagues once a year if they don't make the big league club. Thankfully, Viciedo should get the benefit of receiving a 4th option year, so it shouldn't affect the Sox too greatly. With all the hype some have heaped on Viciedo already, if he isn't contributing by the 4th year of his contract (when he'll be just 23 years old, mind you), he'll already have been labeled a Borchard-like bust.

So, is this a good signing?

The truth is, I don't know. The Sox didn't sign Viciedo looking to lock up some talent for a below market value. They signed him (or rather will sign him) to add more talent to their system. Period. The major league contract and the limitations that such a contract brings would seem to indicate their faith in Viciedo's talent, but the contract's overall value means Viciedo has to produce and produce relatively quickly to justify such a price. It's a substantially riskier signing than your average top prospect.

Note to Rogers, Merkin, Gonzo, and Cowley: If the deal is for the rumored less than 6 years, or even if it is, please ask if there is a free-agency-inducing clause at the end of the contract like Contreras and Iguchi had. For those that don't understand why such a question is important: If there's no such out clause, the Sox can take Viciedo to arbitration, if, after his contract has expired, he has not reached 6 years of major league serive.

Poll

Where does Viciedo start his US professional career?

• A Ball
• AA - B'ham
• AAA - Charlotte
• Majors -- White Sox

  687 votes | Results