Not surprisingly, the Chicago White Sox enter the trade deadline as sellers. Coming off a historically bad season in 2024, they began the year as the consensus worst team in the American League, with all 18 writers here at Pinstripe Alley slotting them in the basement of the AL Central during our preseason predictions, and a plurality expecting them to repeat as the worst team in baseball. Despite adding a pope at the 2025 papal conclave, they have been as bad as advertised.
Even the worst teams in baseball have something of value, so is there any way the Yankees may be able to swing a deal?
For years, the big name in trade rumors for the White Sox, at least in terms of position players, has been Luis Robert Jr. The time for that, however, would have been two years ago, when he was in the midst of an All-Star season in which he posted a .264/.315/.542 slash with 38 home runs. In the year and a half since then, he’s posted just a .209/.275/.354 slash with 22 homers in 173 games. His Statcast data isn’t exactly great either, and he’s striking out a whopping 30 percent of the time. While it’s fair to wonder if not playing on one of the worst teams in baseball will rejuvenate him, at this point, contenders can’t afford to value him as as anything more than a defense-first fourth outfielder.
Offensively, there’s really only one player on the White Sox who makes sense for the Yankees: old friend Mike Tauchman. While he’s played just 33 games due to injuries, he’s posted a .254/.360/.385 slash in the two and a half seasons since his 2022 campaign in Korea. While he’ll never be the elite bat Yankees fans remember fondly from the 2019 season, he’s a serviceable part-time player capable of playing all three outfield positions — and depending on Trent Grisham’s hamstring, that might be more of a need than originally expected.
Turning to the mound, there are more than a few players that the White Sox could look to move. For a team so far down in the standings, the White Sox actually have a pretty okay pitching staff, whose 102 ERA+ sits in the middle of the pack in the American League. Veteran arms Martín Pérez, Adrian Houser, and Aaron Civale are all impending free agents, and while all come with question marks — Pérez and Houser’s inconsistency, Civale’s refusal to work out of the bullpen — there is a reason the saying goes, “You can never have too much pitching.”
The Yankees, though, are more likely to look for bullpen arms than rotation depth at the deadline, and here, the options are a bit more lackluster. Steven Wilson has put up elite numbers in the middle innings, but his Statcast data suggests that he’s been drastically overperforming (1.67 ERA vs. a 4.32 xERA), not to mention the fact that he’s under team control through 2028 (which would certainly raise Chicago’s asking price). Tyler Alexander, an impending free agent, does not fit the Yankees’ big bullpen need, a pitcher with swing-and-miss stuff, as he generates whiffs just 21 percent of the time.
All in all, the Chicago White Sox have a few interesting pieces despite their record. At the end of the day, however, most of their players are just simply not the best fit for what the Yankees will likely be looking for.