White Sox officially announce new GM

The White Sox announced Thursday that assistant general manager Chris Getz has been promoted to the position of senior vice president and general manager. Chicago fired longtime baseball operations executives Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams last week.

Getz, who turned 40 yesterday, will join the likes of Rangers GM Chris Young, Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto, Phillies GM Sam Fuld and Dodgers GM Brandon Gomes among high-ranking baseball operations executives who also played at the Major League level. (Fuld and Gomes are second on their respective organizations’ baseball operations hierarchies. Young, Dipoto and now Getz are their teams’ top baseball operations decision-makers.)

A fourth-round pick of the White Sox back in 2005, Getz played in parts of seven Major League seasons between the White Sox, Royals and Blue Jays. In 459 big league games and 1574 plate appearances, he posted a .250/.309/.307 batting line and swiped 89 bases in 117 tries. Getz was the White Sox’ primary second baseman in 2009 before being traded to the Royals as part of a package to acquire infielder/outfielder Mark Teahen, and he served as Kansas City’s primary second baseman from 2010-11.

Getz announced his retirement as a player in May 2014, and spent the next two years as a baseball operations and player development assistant with the Royals. The White Sox hired him in October 2016 to take over as the team’s new director of player development — a role he held from 2017-20 before being promoted to his most recent title of assistant general manager. Throughout his time with the Sox, Getz has overseen day-to-day operation of the minor league system and the team’s academy in the Dominican Republic. He’s also contributed to player evaluation and contract negotiations.

“Chris brings a wealth of knowledge and experience within our organization to this role,” owner Jerry Reinsdorf said Thursday in a statement within the press release announcing Getz’s promotion. “Most importantly, he knows our players, both at the major league level and in our system, knows our staff and is familiar with all aspects of our baseball operations department. Chris has impressed me greatly over the past seven years. In our conversations together this season, I have become energized by his vision, approach and sense of what this organization needs to become competitive again. With his existing knowledge of the organization, top to bottom, I believe his leadership will provide us with the quickest path forward to our goal, a consistently successful baseball team that competes and plays the game the right way. He will re-energize this organization.”

Since the dismissal of Hahn and Williams, most reports out of Chicago have indicated that Reinsdorf was likely to go with an in-house hire — many tabbing Getz as the favorite. While Getz has clearly put in time with the organization and risen through the ranks since his playing days, it’s still a move that’s likely to be unpopular among Chicago fans, who were hoping for an outside hire to shake up what has been labeled by multiple former Sox players as a chaotic organizational culture. Reinsdorf, however, has a reputation as perhaps the most fiercely loyal owner in all of sports — which is what made the firing of Hahn and Williams so surprising. Even prior efforts to turn the organization around have included the return of old faces, such as the 2021 hiring of Tony La Russa as a second stint managing the team.

Getz now has nearly a decade of experience working in player development and baseball operations, and he’ll take the knowledge he’s accrued over that time and attempt to win over a fan base that has grown frustrated with the lack of results from the team’s lengthy rebuilding effort. The Sox tore things down back in 2016, trading names like Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, Adam Eaton, David Robertson and Todd Frazier and taking a hyper-aggressive approach to international free agency — which led to the signings of Jose Abreu and Luis Robert Jr.

The White Sox’ farm system was regarded as one of the best in the sport as prospects like Robert, Lucas Giolito, Michael Kopech, Eloy Jimenez, Yoan Moncada, Tim Anderson and others began to graduate to the Majors, and things looked to be on track when the Sox went 35-25 in the shortened 2020 season and then steamrolled the AL Central with a 93-69 showing in 2021 — winning the division by 13 games.

However, the Sox fell flat in 2022, and the 2023 season has been an unmitigated disaster. The Sox opened the season 7-19 with a -58 run differential through their first 26 games, and it looked as though their season was lost before the end of April. That’s proven to be the case, as the Sox never really recovered from that opening swoon and spent deadline season trading away the likes of Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez, Kendall Graveman, Lance Lynn, Jake Burger and Keynan Middleton in an attempt to restock the farm.

With Getz now at the helm, the broader questions will surround precisely what Reinsdorf meant when referencing the newly minted GM’s “vision, approach and sense of what this organization needs to become competitive again.” The Sox eschewed trades of controllable talents like Jimenez, Kopech, Robert, Dylan Cease and Andrew Vaughn. If the Sox opt for another aggressive rebuild, any combination of that group could be on the trade market this offseason. On the other hand, that’s a talented core to try to surround with talent, and Chicago has more than $100MM coming off the books this winter — in addition to some new players in the upper levels of the system following the deadline sell-off of shorter-term pieces.

Time will tell which direction the team chooses, but Getz faces an uphill battle both in restoring the White Sox to prominence and in winning over a fanbase that had been pining for broader-reaching changes.