November 7 brings a mix of White Sox footnotes, one brutal season, one brilliant front-office payoff and one long-delayed honor for a franchise icon.
Todd Ritchie, born in Portsmouth, Va. in 1971, is remembered here for all the wrong reasons. The right-hander arrived from Pittsburgh in a much-hyped deal that sent three pitchers the other way, but he never looked like anything more than a middle-rotation innings-eater.
In 2002, he was rough for Chicago: a 6.06 ERA, a 5-15 record and a 1.706 WHIP. His 4.84 FIP suggested there was some bad luck mixed in, but the overall line still landed at -1.7 WAR, tied for the 15th-worst pitching season in White Sox history.
Once he became eligible for free agency after that year, the White Sox moved on.
A few years earlier, the club had made a quieter transaction involving left-handed reliever Doug Creek, buying him from the San Francisco Giants in 1997. There’s a chance Chicago had him in mind as part of the return in the “White Flag Trade,” given how close the purchase came to that deal.
If that was the plan, it changed fast: Creek was sold a month later to the Hanshin Tigers of the Japanese Central League. He eventually returned to the United States and pitched in six more MLB seasons, just never for the White Sox.
The most jarring November 7 note comes from 2005, when Ken Williams somehow did not win Executive of the Year from The Sporting News despite steering Chicago to a wire-to-wire first-place finish and a World Series title. Instead, Cleveland GM Mark Shapiro got the award.
That choice looks even stranger when you stack up the facts: Cleveland finished second in the AL Central, six games behind the White Sox, and Chicago’s sweep on the final weekend knocked the rivals out of playoff contention altogether. Shapiro also wasn’t being honored simply for a huge leap in the standings, since Cleveland improved by 13 wins; the White Sox jumped ahead 16.
Williams, meanwhile, built a 99-win club that lost just one playoff game on the way to the championship, and seven players acquired by trade or free agency for their first full seasons in Chicago combined for 18.4 WAR.
November 7 also marks the White Sox connection of Blake Tekotte, acquired from the Padres in 2012 for minor league reliever Brandon Kloess. Kloess never reached the majors with San Diego, and Tekotte’s Chicago run was brief and unremarkable: a .226/.306/.355 line in 20 games, caught in three of four steal attempts, and worth -0.2 WAR.
After spending most of 2013 and all of 2014 in Triple-A Charlotte, the White Sox sold him to the Arizona Diamondbacks on Aug. 3, 2014.
He never played in the majors again.
And then there’s Minnie Miñoso, whose place in White Sox history is far bigger than any single date. In 2014, long after he had played his final game in Cuba, he was inducted into the Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame, eight years before his election to Cooperstown.
The timing wasn’t really a slight from Cuba, either, since after the communist revolution in 1959 there were no official inductions to that Hall of Fame. Miñoso had begun his pro career at 16 in Cuba’s Serie Nacional, came to the United States five years later with the New York Cubans of the Negro Leagues and won his only World Series there, then reached the majors four years after that with Cleveland.
His biggest legacy, though, came with the White Sox, where he still ranks No. 12 overall with 41.5 WAR and fifth among batters. He was one of 10 players inducted in 2014 and lived to see the honor, though Cooperstown came too late to do the same before his death in 2015.
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White Sox Offseason Plan Leaves One Huge Question Unanswered
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Even with those moves on the books, the biggest question still sits in the middle of the roster. Chicagos starting rotation remains unsettled, and the front office appears willing to wait and see how its young pitchers look before deciding whether more help is needed. For a team trying to build on what it already has, that uncertainty could end up shaping the rest of the offseason. [Read more 🡒]