Andrew Benintendi ended up as the one White Sox constant because he kept adapting while everything around him changed.
That’s the strange shape of this roster now. Six players on the 2026 White Sox were also members of the 2024 club that stumbled through a record-setting 121-loss season, but only four were around for the brutal finish.
Erick Fedde and Tommy Pham were dealt to the St. Louis Cardinals together at the deadline, which thinned that group even more.
Of the four who were still there at the end, three barely overlapped with the full disaster. Davis Martin was recalled from Triple-A Charlotte just before the deadline.
Miguel Vargas arrived in the three-team deal involving Fedde and Pham. Sean Burke didn’t show up until September, then pitched remarkably well.
If he was disappointed to see the season end, he probably couldn’t have said it out loud.
Benintendi was the one who lived the whole thing. He was in the lineup when the White Sox set the modern MLB single-season loss record, and he was still there when they became the first team to reach the postseason after three straight 100-loss seasons.
That wasn’t really about durability. It was more a byproduct of the five-year, $75 million contract that made him hard to move. No one was eager to take on that money for a limited player, and for a White Sox team that was already barely paying for the rest of the roster, there wasn’t much urgency to dump an average left-handed bat just to clear space.
What Benintendi did do was stay out of the way when the new regime wanted to try different things. He accepted a smaller defensive load.
He didn’t push back when he was platooned or used as a pinch-hitting DH. The contract stayed on the books, but his willingness gave the Sox room to keep searching for answers at two spots they expected to be problems.
He began the year in a left field platoon with Austin Hays, but when Hays suffered the first of two leg injuries that wrecked his stay, the White Sox shifted to Sam Antonacci. Once Antonacci proved capable of handling left field - even if his defense was basically a more frantic version of Benintendi’s - Benintendi moved to DH and played just one inning in the outfield after April 28.
Then Randal Grichuk arrived on May 4, three days after the Yankees cut him loose, and Benintendi no longer had a full-time DH job either. Grichuk produced enough for the Sox to turn it into a strict platoon. Benintendi made 106 starts at DH, but he was lifted for one reason or another in 48 of them, and he also logged 26 pinch-hitting appearances.
Individually, that’s a rough way to spend the biggest financial commitment in White Sox history. But in the larger team picture, those compromises helped Chicago turn ugly preseason expectations into real gains, at least by FanGraphs’ preseason power rankings compared with current value.
Left field went from a projected .247/.311/.403 line, 0.9 WAR and a 30th-place ranking to .266/.335/.439, 3.7 WAR and fifth. Designated hitter moved from .248/.317/.393, 0.4 WAR and 28th to .261/.310/.470, 1.7 WAR and 14th.
None of that happened without some luck, and the biggest break was Grichuk’s miserable April with the Yankees. Run the season back from Opening Day and maybe Grichuk stays in the Bronx, the White Sox settle for a mediocre Everson Pereira, and Benintendi is simply occupying space. But Chicago did create some of its own fortune, and Benintendi’s flexibility helped make that possible.
He contributed where he could. More than that, he accepted where he couldn’t and let the White Sox keep searching for answers. His name is about the only thing tying this version of the team to the group that opened 2024, and his role - along with the clubhouse he’s in - says plenty about how much has changed.
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