When Chris Getz gets a hunch, brother does he run it into the ground.
In the last calendar year, the White Sox have made 21 trades, purchases or sales with other teams, starting with the Garrett Crochet blockbuster with Boston, and 10 of those deals have been with the Rays and Red Sox. Since the end of May, the percentage increases to seven of 10. And if we stretch the list to include the waiver wire, that makes three more Rays in the house, buddy.
Moreover, all three trades this offseason, and the
last four overall, have been with Tampa (three) and Boston.
And on top of it all, the latest GM to join the motley crew responsible for an unprecedented three straight 100-loss seasons also comes via the Rays, in the guise of mastermind Carlos Rodriguez. Before you ask how many GMs does it take to screw in a lightbulb (yes, hiring Rodriguez makes a fourth GM on a payroll that projects to spend an MLB-low $73.6 million on, y’know, players), let us acknowledge what an embarrassingly perfect fit Rodriguez is for the White Sox.
He is a 15-year vet in Tampa, meaning his tenure encompasses eight postseason appearances and one AL pennant. For a team habitually hamstrung by tight purse strings, that is nothing short of a miracle. Rodriguez learned alongside two wunderkind Rays GMs, Chaim Bloom (now Cardinals GM via the Red Sox) and the current guy, Erik Neander (who Rodriguez regards as “a brother”).
Rodriguez’s specialties with the Rays overlap robust weaknesses with the White Sox, mainly in player development. Per the Rays, Rodriguez’s forays into performance science (particularly sports nutrition and individualized wellness programs) helped move Tampa’s overall organizational winning percentage to the top of all of baseball in the 2020s, including the best marks in baseball in 2021 and 2022.
Several of his initiatives, including the expansion of sports nutrition and individualized performance and wellness programs, are noted as contributing factors to the Rays’ farm system posting the best winning percentage in the minors in every season from 2019-22. In fact, the Rays were so dominant in that time, no single season by any organization over those three seasons was better than Tampa’s .597 winning percentage for that entire stretch. (Since 2022, the Rays have finished fourth, sixth and fourth among baseball orgs.)
Meanwhile, the White Sox have yet to post a winning organizational record in any season of the 2020s and have had an average finish of 25th among 30 systems this decade.
But beyond this recent raid of a Rays mastermind to further pad the executive suite, the White Sox have been busy mining Tampa for marginal-plus talent to take into the 2026 season — and this is where the numbskullery of Getz better shines. Yes, it is better to scrape the 41st-best player out of the Rays system than, say, the MiLB-worst Orioles’, but Getz is leaning comically hard on one org to supplement his sorry pipeline.
In addition to the No. 2 overall Rule 5 pick last week of Jedixson Paez (great Single-A arm, too young to expect to carry on the 26-man active roster through September), the transaction wire is rife with Rays this offseason.
Fresh off of the final deal of the trade deadline (sending ace starter Adrian Houser to Tampa for minor league arms Duncan Davitt and Ben Peoples along with Aussie utilityman Curtis Mead), the White Sox made another four-player trade with the Rays on November 18: Triple-A infielder Tanner Murray and fringe outfielder Everson Pereira came to Chicago for relief arms Yoendry Gómez and Steven Wilson.
While our underwear should not be bunched by losing those two relief arms to the Rays, the move most be flagged on both ends. First, the return is marginal: More DFA-level roster churn from Tampa, players that will find slight footing with the White Sox (as in the Houser deal) merely because the Rays org is so far superior to Chicago’s. Beyond that, the journeyman Wilson was aces in 2025, All-Star Game worthy, even. Yes, his peripherals revealed a bit of a glass house, but the White Sox are in DESPERATE need of controllable and reliable relief arms and shouldn’t be shedding them without significant reinforcements. Ditto to some degree Gómez, who was mediocre overall but when asked to assume a rotation spot at season’s end delivered at least five innings to the strapped Sox in seven of nine starts.
Just yesterday, the White Sox added outfielder Tristan Peters from Tampa in exchange for future considerations. It is hard to get down on such a deal given the return could ultimately be no more than an IOU, but Peters again falls into the category of a lottery ticket with a few losing spots already scratched off. Peters is 25 and seemingly fills no better than a Zach DeLoach-type role at Triple-A or on the South Side.
Getz is collecting guys like Mead, Murray, Pereira and Peters as if he can bottle-return 10 of them at the end of the season in trade for an actual major league hitter.
The next thing you know, Jerry Reinsdorf is going to OK the transfer of the tank of manta rays from the Trop, or import some of the tattered fabric roof panels as rain tarp patch once the team can drum up a new sponsor. At any rate, stay tuned right here for the next, and almost surely shortly upcoming, White Sox-Rays transaction news.
